Unsurprisingly, Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin Guzman, alias El Chapo, was sentenced on Wednesday, July 17, in New York to life imprisonment. This sentence was accompanied by an additional 30 years in prison.

The lawyers of the most powerful drug trafficker since the end of the reign of Colombian Pablo Escobar, in 1993, have already announced that they will appeal this conviction.

Joaquin Guzman, now 62, has smuggled at least 1,200 tonnes of cocaine into the United States in the last twenty-five years.

"The overwhelming evidence presented at the trial showed that [Joaquin Guzman] was the ruthless and bloodthirsty leader of the Sinaloa cartel", which he co-directed between 1989 and 2014, Brooklyn Federal Prosecutor's Office Richard Donoghue wrote in a statement. his indictment before the sentencing.

During the trial, the prosecution showed that the Mexican had ordered the assassination or himself killed at least 26 people - sometimes after torturing them - who were informants, traffickers from rival organizations, police officers, collaborators even members of his own family.

Since his extradition on January 19, 2017, "El Chapo" - "Le Courtaud", a nickname due to his small size, about 1.60 m - lost his aura: isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, after two escapes in Mexico, he can only see his lawyers and his seven-year-old twins. Even his wife is forbidden to visit.

Seller of oranges

The downfall is tough for the one who led twenty-five years in one of the most powerful cartels on the planet, former hero of the culture narco and "narcocorridos", these Mexican ballads with guitars and trumpets that tell the cartel leaders .

His escapes fueled his legend and earned him international notoriety until his arrest in 2016, which ended decades of stalking by the authorities.

Joaquin Guzman is one of those narcotics traffickers born: April 4, 1957 in a poor family in a village in the mountains of Sinaloa, northwestern Mexico, he worked from childhood selling oranges, caramels and soft drinks.

As he will tell the actor Sean Penn during an interview in October 2015 - supposed to remain secret but that will contribute to his arrest - he starts to grow marijuana and poppy, teenager, for lack of alternatives.

In 1989, Guzman founded with three associates the Sinaloa cartel, which he will make in a few years an empire with European and Asian ramifications.

"I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anyone in the world, I have fleets of submarines, planes, trucks and boats," he boasted. in this controversial interview with Sean Penn, published in Rolling Stone magazine.

The fortune amassed by the cartel earned him a time on the list of Forbes magazine of the richest men in the world, before coming out in 2013 because of the expenses necessary for its protection.

Repeated escapes

El Chapo has waged an ultra-violent struggle against its rivals, a war between cartels that still ravage Mexico today.

In 1993, he was arrested in Guatemala. Detained in a Mexican high security prison, he bribes his guards and escapes in 2001, hidden in a dirty laundry bin.

The Mexican authorities will take thirteen years to catch up, in February 2014, in the seaside resort of Mazatlan, where he was hiding with his wife Emma Coronel, a beauty queen of thirty-two years his youngest, and their binoculars, born in the States -United.

In July 2015, rebelote: Guzman escapes by a tunnel of 1.5 kilometer opening in the shower of his cell and equipped with rails. This new run will be brief: he was arrested in January 2016 in Los Mochis, on the Pacific coast, in his stronghold of Sinaloa.

In addition to his twins, he has other children, including at least two sons whom the US authorities have accused of playing an "important" role in his cartel. Another son, Edgar, was shot in 2008.

With AFP