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Guzman, 61, nicknamed "El Chapo" ("The Court") because of his small body, has been waiting for two years in the maximum security prison of New York. He spends 24 hours a day in his cell without window of 15 square meters. There are only exceptions during the week when he is allowed to use a treadmill and a bike trainer one hour a day.
He is only allowed to be visited by his three lawyers and two daughters. The seven-year-old twins are separated from him by a thick glbad pane. His wife, former beauty queen Emma Coronel, aged 29, is not allowed to visit her. However, she followed all hearings before the trial began and sent kisses to her husband from the auditorium.
Guzman is due to be judged Monday in Brooklyn, east of New York, under the presidency of Judge Brian Cogan. A dozen prosecutors are involved in the case. If he is found guilty, Guzman risks life imprisonment in a high security prison. The death penalty, which is still legal under federal law in the United States, is excluded, as agreed between Mexico and the United States during their execution.
Mountains of incriminating material
For years, the prosecution has collected documents for the Guzman charge. Eleven charges are brought against him. The Mexican cartel Sinaloa, considered the "largest drug smuggling organization in the world", had under its direction, from 1989 to 2014, 154 626 kg of cocaine in the United States, as well as heroin, of crystal meth and marijuana, according to the indictment.
This Guzman should have won 14 billion dollars (12.3 billion euros). He even managed to appear on the "Forbes" list of the richest people in the world. In addition, Guzman must answer for arms trafficking and money laundering. As leader of the Sinaloa cartel, he allegedly murdered, badaulted and abducted hundreds of people.
Guzman pleads not guilty. But the US judicial system has collected incriminating information, which now includes more than 300,000 pages and at least 117,000 audio recordings. For the review of this material, advocates of the powerful boss of the drug repeatedly asked for more time and managed to delay the process.
High security in progress
The four-month mammoth procedure is held behind closed doors. The twelve jurors and their six alternate candidates are selected according to the strictest security standards – as is the case only in trials against the most dangerous defendants. The jury will remain completely protected from the press and the public and will be escorted to court every day by security guards. Their names and faces must remain secret.
Guzman's former business partners, former accomplices and their rival informants and trial witnesses, are also protected. Many have already started a new life as part of the witness protection program with a new identity. Detained informants are housed in special wings to protect them from retaliation. The process depends to a very large extent on their statements. Because no one has pictures of how cocaine Guzman was introduced to the US and "suitcases full of money," said lawyer Rob Heroy, who has already represented several Mexican drug lords before the courts.
The lawyer estimates that the process will cost taxpayers "more than $ 50 million" (44 million euros) because of the high security and 16 witness protection programs. This process is probably the most expensive in the history of the United States. However, the process will not stop drug trafficking to the United States.
Escaped twice from prisons
Guzman was born in 1957 in the village of La Tuna Badiraguato, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. Teenager, the son of a poor family sold oranges before joining the drug gang around Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo in the 1980s. After the arrest of the chief, he founded the Sinaloa cartel. The US Anti-Drug Administration (DEA) describes the union as a multinational organized crime.
In 1993, Guzman was arrested in Guatemala, but in 2001 he managed to escape from a high security prison in Mexico City. The Marines again arrested El Chapo in an apartment in the coastal city of Mazatlan, in the west of the country, in 2014. He spent only 17 months in jail and then escaped in July 2015 through a 1.5 kilometer free tunnel. In January 2016, Guzman was taken over and delivered a year later to the United States.
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