• The New York prosecutor's office is demanding the seizure of $ 12 billion from El Chapo
  • New York, El Chapo found guilty: life imprisonment coming
  • Use: "El Chapo" Guzman, to the United States. Mexico authorizes extradition
  • Every day "K9" tastes Chapo's meals: the king of narcos fears to die poisoned in prison
  • The escape through the sewers: the video of the last desperate attempt of the Chapo Guzman
  • After the interview with Sean Penn extradition to the USA for El Chapo Guzman: Mexico initiates procedures

Share

17 July 2019The former head of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was sentenced to life imprisonment today by the US federal court in the super-armored courtroom of the Brooklyn court, in New York, for ten counts. The American media report it.

Held in a maximum security prison in New York, Guzman, 62, is considered one of the biggest drug traffickers in the world. Arrested in Mexico, he was extradited to the United States, where he was accused of exporting tons of drugs and causing the death of so many people. In the extradition agreement between Mexico and the United States, in 2017, the possibility of a death sentence was excluded. The boss will have to serve his "Supermax" in Florence, Colorado, a maximum security prison that houses some of the worst criminals convicted in the US.

The complaints of "El Chapo"
During the trial, before the sentence, "El Chapo" intervened in the courtroom, with the help of a translator, to denounce the conditions of his detention which he called "a psychological, emotional and mental torture 24 hours a day". His lawyer added that "El Chapo" was denied due process. In his opinion the case would have been "stained" by the prejudices of the jurors who would have improperly read the coverage provided by the media and conditioned by this. Also present was the wife of the king of drug trafficking, Emma Coronel Aispuro, who regularly followed the entire trial.

The "account" of the court
The ten counts of charges range from criminal association in the area of ​​organized crime to drug trafficking, money laundering and firearms trafficking. The Brooklyn prosecutor had also presented the bill to the king of drug trafficking in recent days, asking him to return 12.6 billion dollars to the community, a sum that would be equivalent to the proceeds of drug trafficking in the US managed by his cartel before he was arrested in Mexico and tried in the United States.

Who is "El Chapo"
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Mexican drug lord who was guilty of running a criminal enterprise, had already been found guilty by a jury in February for introducing tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana and principal of several murders as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, long known as one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. Guzman, whose nickname means "Shorty", "the short" in Italian, was considered almost a Robin Hood among the inhabitants of his native mountain village in the State of Sinaloa.

Escape champion
Before being captured in 2016, Guzman had twice escaped from a maximum security prison in Mexico. He had made a name for himself as a smuggler in the 1980s when he was famous for digging tunnels under the US-Mexican border that allowed him to smuggle drugs faster than any of his rivals. He accumulated power during the 1990s and 2000s through often bloody wars, becoming the best-known leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. His 11-week trial saw more than a dozen former Guzman members who had entered into agreements with prosecutors at the witness stand. The course of the trial offered the public an unprecedented perspective on the internal mechanisms of the cartel. Witnesses, including some of Guzman's best men, a communications engineer and a longtime lover, described how he built a sophisticated organization that resembles a multinational.

A river of drugs
Guzman sent drugs northward with fleets of planes and boats, and meticulously kept accounts with account books and with an encrypted electronic communication system managed through computer servers secretly located in Canada, witnesses reported. US prosecutors claimed that Guzman sold more than $ 12 billion in drugs, and Forbes magazine once listed it as one of the richest men in the world. Although other high-level figures had been extradited to the United States before, Guzman was the first to be put on trial rather than pleading guilty.

Adventurous life
Guzman lived for a long time as a fugitive. Imprisoned in Mexico in 1993, he fled in 2001 hidden in a laundry trolley and spent the last few years moving from one hiding place to another in the mountains of Sinaloa, guarded by a private army. He was arrested again in 2014, but the following year he managed to escape via a one-mile tunnel dug into his cell, although he was locked up in a security prison. He was eventually stopped in January 2016. The Mexican government claims that "El Chapo" has "burned" its coverage through a series of errors, including an attempt to make a film about his life. Despite the fall of Guzman, the Sinaloa cartel was the one that was most present in the United States, followed by the rapidly growing Jalisco New Generation Cartel, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration.