Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán sentenced to life in prison
NEW YORK-A U.S judge has sentenced notorious Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to life in prison plus 30 years. His 30-year criminal career reached its final chapter on Wednesday.
He is a former head of the Sinaloa cartel, which officials say was the colossal supplier of drugs to the US.
Guzmán was one of the most infamous of the last century, a vicious Mexican cartel leader, a wily drug trafficker who smuggled more than $12 billion worth of drugs and plunged Mexico into a sheer tragedy of bloodshed and corruption
Guzmán was found guilty of 10 charges, including drug trafficking and money laundering, by a New York federal court in February.
He escaped a Mexican jail through a tunnel in 2015 but was later arrested. He was extradited to the US in 2017.
Looking unkempt and slightly out of sorts, Guzmán walked into the eighth-floor courtroom under guard briefly before 9:30 a.m. He was clad in a loose-fitting gray suit, with his tie raffish askew and a new-growth mustache darkening his upper lip.
His wife Emma Coronel also attended the sentencing at Brooklyn federal court.
Reading from a prepared statement, he said he had not received a fair trial and complained about his solitary confinement in Manhattan’s federal jail, calling it “psychological, emotional and mental torture 24 hours a day.”
“Since the government of the United States is going to send me to a prison where my name will never be heard again, I take advantage of this opportunity to say there was no justice here,” he said as reported by the New York Times.
Albeit Judge Cogan did not state where Guzmán would serve his life sentence, he is likely to be sent to the country’s most harsh and unfriendly federal prison, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, or ADX, in Florence, Colorado.
But the prosecutors said Guzmán would be serving his sentence behind “ tonnes of steel”, referring to a high-security prison in Colorado.
The life sentence was the minimum Guzmán faced, the additional 30-years were for illegal uses of firearms. He was ordered to pay $12,6 (£10bn) billion in forfeiture.
In 2009, Guzmán entered Forbes’ list of the world’s richest men at number 701, with an estimated worth of $1 billion.
He was accused of assisting smuggle hundreds of tonnes of cocaine into the US and of conniving to make and distribute heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana.
He was also said to have used hitmen gangs to commit innumerable murders, assaults, kidnappings, and acts of torture.
Main associates, including one former lieutenant, testified against Guzmán.
According to BBC News, during his trial, shocking revelations about his life were unraveled.
Court papers accused him of having girls as young as 13 drugged before raping them.
Another witness described seeing Guzmán murder three men.
Former bodyguard Isaias Valdez Rios said Guzmán beat two people who had joined an opponent cartel until they were “completely like rag dolls”.After he then shot them in the head and ordered their bodies to be thrown on a fire.
Guzmán is also alleged to have had his cousin murdered for lying about being out of town, and ordered a hit on the brother of another cartel kingpin because he did not shake his hand.
At one point Guzmán complained that he could hear the digging from his cell. He escaped by riding a specially adapted small motorcycle through the tunnel.
In another incident, he had a member of the rival Arellano Felix cartel burned and imprisoned before taking him to a graveyard, shooting him and having him buried alive.
The court heard details of his 2015 escape from Mexico’s maximum-security Altiplano prison. His sons purchased a property close to the prison and a GPS watch smuggled into the prison gave diggers his exact location.
He also used the software on his phone to spy on his wife and mistress, which allowed the FBI to present his text messages in court.
In one set of texts, he recounted to his wife how he had fled a villa during a raid by US and Mexican officials, before asking her to bring him new clothes, shoes and black mustache dye.
El Chapo is the loftiest profile Mexican drug cartel boss so far to stand trial in the US.
The drug war in Mexico, Mexican and US authorities against cartels smuggling drugs into the US and the cartels warring against each other has killed about 100, 000 people over more than a decade.
Guzmán achieved infamy for twice escaping custody in Mexico as well as avoiding arrest on many other occasions
His lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman announced a proposal to appeal against the adjudication. He argued that the trial had not conducted fairly and claimed that jurors were influenced by media coverage.
“It was a show trial,” he said.
The American authorities commenced their hunt for the kingpin as far back as the early 1990s, when he was charged on separate federal charges in Tucson and San Diego.
The two indictments were filed just before and somewhat after he was arrested while on the run in Guatemala and then reverted to Mexico, where he was tried and imprisoned for the 1993 murder of Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, a darling Roman Catholic cardinal.
In 2001, nonetheless, Mr. Guzmán broke out of prison by numerous accounts, in the bottom of a laundry cart and spent the next 13 years playing cat-and-mouse with the long arm of the law.
He eluded both arrest and the five following indictments filed against him in the United States, largely by shuttling among a series of hide-outs in the Sierra Madre mountains in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
Then in February 2012, the Mexican and American authorities came within inches of nabbing him in an ocean-view mansion in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
In 2016, he gave an interview to Hollywood actor Sean Penn in a Mexican jungle following his escape the previous year and boasted that he was the world’s paramount supplier of heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana.
He was later recaptured in the north-western town of Los Mochis. During the raid, he fled through a drain but was later caught by troops in a shootout.
The trial jurors were incognito and were escorted to and from the courthouse in Brooklyn by armed marshals after prosecutors argued that Guzmán had a history of menacing witnesses and even ordering their murders.
Another woman who escaped El Chapo hit spoke at the drug lord’s sentencing according to New York post.
Andrea Velez, a former associate of El Chapo revealed in court, “Today, I come here, I am a miracle of God because Mr. Guzman tried to kill me,” Velez said through a translator in court.
“I still have nightmares from when Mr. Guzman used me as bait,” she said about a kidnap mission in Ecuador that she took part in. “Mr. Guzman offered $1 million to the Hells Angels to end my life.”
“Perhaps I lived in my skin, what they call Stockholm Syndrome. I was seeing a distorted image of my captors,” she said.
“Mr. Guzman, I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me,” she said.
“You have two beautiful daughters, and you would not like to have happened to them what happened to me,” she added, referring to his young twins.
Andrea was the only person to speak at Guzman’s sentencing before he was given life in prison plus 30-years in Brooklyn federal court.
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