"El Chapo", fallen prince of Mexican drug traffickers

The trial of the most famous Mexican drug trafficker, Joaquin Guzman, opens on November 5 in the United States. A kind of judicial epilogue for this specialist of the escape whose course is marked out of gray areas.

The sequence is worthy of a Hollywood movie. Mexican soldiers enter a house in Los Mochis, a city in the north of the country. One of them carries an infrared camera on his helmet, and films the scene. Bales are firing in the darkness. Big caliber. The shooting killed five dead but none of the dead is that of the wanted man: Joaquin Guzman Loera, alias El Chapo ("the Little"), 168 centimeters under the roof and a global reputation of narco-trafficker. On January 8, 2016, he manages to escape through the sewers with an accomplice, but will be stopped, in stride, in a stolen car.

Nearly three years have pbaded since the arrest of this badagenarian to the ego and excessively heavy. Extradited to the United States in 2017, he is now awaiting trial, Monday, November 5, in New York. The prosecutor's case is so heavy – more than 320,000 pages, thousands of records, dozens of witnesses – that he faces life imprisonment. The eleven counts are in agreement: "Drug trafficking", "money laundering", "badbadination orders"… He pleads not guilty.

Robin Hood for some, predator for others, this escape specialist fascinates. His life inspired a series, hundreds of songs and books. Difficult, under these conditions, to disentangle the true from the false … Even his date of birth makes debate. According to some sources, El Chapo was born on December 25, 1954; according to others, April 4, 1957. The place, it does not change: the Tuna, a hamlet lost in the mountains of the state of Sinaloa (north). "This strategic zone of poppy and marijuana production is the cradle of Mexican narcotrafic", says journalist Alejandro Almazan, scriptwriter of the series El Chapo, co-produced and broadcast by Netflix.

"Narcotunnels", its trademark