The trial 'El Chapo & # 39; Guzman begins


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The man, who was once considered the world's largest drug trafficker, is accused of leading a criminal enterprise spanning several continents and unleashing waves of bloodshed in his native Mexico. .

Government prosecutors used their half-hour remarks to paint a picture of Guzman as an active leader who sometimes killed others personally. The defense, who was not able to stick to all his remarks, retorted that Guzman was a "leader of nothing" and that the arrival of drugs in the United States had never slowed down during his stay in a Mexican prison.

The defense will finish its statement on Wednesday morning.

Torture on YouTube, drugs in cans

Even before the start of a four-month trial, heavily armed federal marshals and agents with bomb-sniffing dogs stood guard in front of the courthouse. Metal detectors greeted visitors at the entrance to the courtroom. The Brooklyn Bridge closed every time a motorcade of police, including an ambulance and a SWAT team, shuttled between Guzman and the Manhattan Federal Detention Center.

Before starting her statements on Tuesday, a juror – in a letter to the judge who was read aloud in court – asked to be removed from the case because she was suffering from anxiety since the selection of the jury. The prosecution and the defense agreed to excuse the jury.

"El Chapo, despite his defense of being a minor player, was reputed to be the pioneering spirit of the Sinaloa cartel," said Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug cartels in Mexico at the time. University of Miami. "He is, in many ways, a survivor."

His capture fueled an alarming rise in violence

Guzman, 61, pleaded not guilty. If he is convicted of international drug trafficking, having conspired to murder his rivals, firearms and money laundering, he faces a life sentence.

Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for Guzman, told the court that Guzman's escapes after his imprisonment in Mexico had fueled a myth about him.

"They claim that he is the biggest drug dealer in the world.It's wrong," he said.

It would have earned nearly $ 14 billion as a pillar of Sinaloa's drug cartel, which used planes, boats and submarines to haul hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine into Mexico before it broke out. ship to US distribution centers.

An almost mythical figure in Mexican ballads, Guzman has supervised the smuggling of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana to wholesalers in Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, New York, Arizona and Los Angeles, according to federal prosecutors.

& # 39; El Chapo & # 39; Guzman's trial gets a jury. He is waiting for permission to kiss his wife

He is also accused of having participated in at least 30 murders while he ruled one of the oldest and most influential cartels in Mexico.

US Attorney Adam Fels said Tuesday in court that the government would prove Guzman's guilt with audio and video evidence, text messages, and testimony from law enforcement officials and former associates. from Guzman.

Fels said the government had access to its communications, despite its concerted efforts to keep private communications.

"For a short time, the government has listened, it has recorded," said Fels.

The cartel fights against Mexico

"No individual has been more decisive than Guzman in the waves of violence that Mexico has known over the past decade," said David Shirk, director of the Justice in Mexico program at the University of California. University of San Diego.

Guzman reportedly initiated deadly clashes with other big cartels, which would have sparked a surge in violent crime from 2008 to 2012, according to Shirk.

His capture and extradition to the United States at the beginning of last year created a power vacuum that fueled an alarming rise in bloodletting.

"Among all the symbols involved in the supreme pillar's strategy (targeting known criminal leaders to weaken their organization), El Chapo was by far the most important as he grew up like a rocket, because he became so rich and so powerful. "said Bagley.

& # 39; A Corrector of Equal Opportunity & # 39;

In twenty years, Guzman has turned the Sinaloa cartel into one of the world's largest organized crime groups, Bagley said. His dominance of the international cocaine trade began with Guzman setting up a more horizontal leadership structure, his propensity for violence and his generosity to corrupt officials.

"He distributed money in industrial quantities, as they say in Mexican Spanish," Bagley said. "He was willing to pay bribes of a million dollars or more, ranging from the municipality to the state up to the federal government." He was a corrupter of equality chances. "

Joaquín

The case against Guzman will rely in part on the testimony of more than a dozen witnesses, including former cartel associates already incarcerated or to whom new identities have been attributed and who the US government resettled.

Guzman's lawyers ignored their names until the day before the trial. Prosecutors claimed that witnesses had already died in previous cases.

Among the people who could testify against Guzman are twin brothers from Chicago's West Side, Margarito and Pedro Flores. They operated a wholesale cocaine and heroin distribution organization for Guzman prior to their arrest in 2008, according to a federal indictment.

The twins became informants for the federal government and were placed in pre-trial detention, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Flores brothers pleaded guilty to a narcotics distribution plot after recording phone conversations in which Guzman was heard, agreeing to reduce the price of a heroin shipment.

Their father was "kidnapped and presumed dead because of their cooperation with the federal authorities," said a defense lawyer when the Flores brothers were sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2015.

The cartel of Sinaloa remains the main player in the cocaine trade

Guzman is also known for his dramatic prison breakouts. In 2001, while he was serving a twenty-year prison sentence for criminal conspiracy and corruption in Mexico, he allegedly broke out by hiding in a laundry trolley. It was taken over in 2014 in a hotel in the seaside town of Mazatlan, in the Pacific. But the following year, he escaped again through a hole in his cell that led to an underground tunnel of several kilometers.

To go after El Chapo: Prison breaks, hiding places and life on the street

In January 2016, authorities arrested Guzman at a shelter in the coastal town of Los Mochis. The following year, a day before the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, he was extradited aboard a Juarez flight (Mexico) bound for New York.

He was detained in solitary confinement in a small cell in the federal prison in Manhattan.

Nearly two years after his extradition, the Sinaloa cartel remains the main player in the cocaine trade, according to Bagley.

"Despite the apparent disappearance of El Chapo and his extradition to the United States – and I consider that it is a definite death – and the inability of his children to take back the # 39, organization, Sinaloa has kept some consistency because of its business model "he said.

"Even though it was important for drug trafficking in Mexico, Guzman will eventually be supplanted by other traffickers as long as the war on drugs is reinstated," said Shirk.

Sonia Moghe from CNN contributed to this report.

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