‘I supply more drugs than anybody else’ - El Chapo’ Guzman’s own words come back to haunt him

Ultimately, it may be Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman’s own words that come back to haunt him as he stands trial in the US accused of drug trafficking, write NJ Burkett and David Alire Garcia.

Opening statements concluded and testimony began this week in the high-security trial of infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Tonnes of cocaine from Colombia arrived in Cancun aboard speedboats and was then smuggled over the United States border in tanker trucks, according to a witness who detailed a strict hierarchy that routinely bribed Mexican police commanders, highway patrol officers and government officials.

The testimony offered the jury a first fascinating inside look into the alleged operations of the Sinaloa drug cartel through the eyes of one of its former top lieutenants.

Jesus Zambada is one of the government’s key witnesses in their sensational case against Joaquin Guzman, the alleged drug trafficking kingpin better known as El Chapo. Zambada is the brother of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, Guzman’s alleged partner in the Sinaloa cartel and its de-facto leader who remains at large in Mexico.

In the prosecution’s opening statement, Assistant US Attorney Adam Fels told jurors how the man who got his start in a modest marijuana-selling business in Mexico ruthlessly turned it into a blood-drenched smuggling operation that funnelled cocaine and other drugs as far north as New York.

Fels said Guzman “sent killers to wipe out competitors” and “waged wars against longtime partners...including his own cousins.”

The evidence likely to be presented at the New York trial of Guzman will paint a picture of a Robin Hood figure, albeit a brutal one, who amassed a $14 billion fortune by bribery, murdering rivals and smuggling huge amounts of drugs.

Colourful claims have been made against Guzman made by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in pre-trial documents.

They say Guzman started as a teenager cultivating marijuana and growing poppies for heroin production, going on to become the main leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, “the world’s largest and most prolific drug trafficking organisation”.

While he was guarded by a virtual army of enforcers and cartel assassins, Guzman was also known to carry a gold-plated AK-47 assault rifle and a diamond-encrusted pistol for his own personal protection.

In 2001, Guzman famously escaped from prison, purportedly in a laundry cart with the assistance of prison officials whom he had corrupted. He escaped again in 2015, from a maximum security prison via a tunnel of more than a mile long that emerged in the bathroom in his cell. The complexity and cost of the plan is part of the DoJ’s case that he was a very powerful figure in Mexico.

Guzman’s enforcers were tasked with a wide-range of murder, assault, kidnappings, torture and targeted assassinations designed to “promote and enhance his prestige, reputation and position within the Sinaloa Cartel and to protect the cartel against challenges from rivals.”

During one specially violent turf battle over the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, one of Guzman’s assassins oversaw a house specially designed for murder with plastic sheets covering the walls to minimise messes as well as a drain in the middle of the floor to quickly clean up blood.

El Chapo’s wrath against rivals could be hyper-violent, prosecutors said. Allegedly on his orders, trafficker Julio Beltran was gunned down on the streets of the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan “using so many rounds of ammunition that Beltran’s head was almost completely separated from his body.”

By some, he was viewed as a modern-day Robin Hood, popular with the down-trodden and extolled in popular songs.

There were protests in the streets of Sinaloa after his arrest. While the DoJ documents does not explain why he enjoyed that status, for years stories have emerged in Mexico of Guzman helping poor communities by paying for roads and other infrastructure projects, including contracting helicopters to install posts for the electricity system of his mountainous home town of Badiraguato, Sinaloa.

The geographical reach of Guzman’s drug empire was vast as his Sinaloa Cartel moved into lucrative methamphetamine trafficking starting around 2000, driving him to establish suppliers for precursor chemicals in Africa, China and India.

Among his many Spanish-language nicknames was “El Rapido,” or “Speedy,” due to his uncanny ability to move massive drug shipments originating from South America across the US-Mexico border using land, air and sea routes while returning laundered drug proceeds to mostly Colombian partners in record time.

During his opening statement, Assistant US Attorney Adam Fels, left, gestures to Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, second from right, sitting next to his attorney Eduardo Balazero, at Brooklyn Federal Court, as Guzman’s high-security trial got underway in the Brooklyn borough of New York, on Tuesday. Picture: Elizabeth Williams via AP.

Massive bribes to corrupt politicians and security officials were largely responsible for the success of his business model, including a $1 million cash bribe for just one drug deal.

The bribes often secured armed police escorts for shipments headed to the United States.

Mr Fels said Guzman used some of his wealth to pay off the Mexican military and police and to finance assault rifles, grenade launchers and explosives to engage in “war after bloody war”.

He accused the defendant of personally shooting two men and having their bodies burned.

Guzman’s lawyers told jurors it would have been impossible for him to be in charge of the cartel since he was either in jail or hiding out in the Mexican countryside during the entire time US prosecutors claim he was the leader.

Some of the co-operators will “tell you he has no money,” Mr Lichtman said.

But it is Guzman’s own words which may come back to haunt him. While on the run in 2015, he granted Hollywood actor Sean Penn an interview from his mountain hideaway.

In the interview, later published by Rolling Stone, Guzman told of how he grew up in a “very humble family, very poor” in Mexico and at age 15 decided to make money selling marijuana.

“The only way to have money to buy food, to survive, is to grow poppy, marijuana, and at that age, I began to grow it, to cultivate it and to sell it,” he said.

He later told Penn he was the kingpin of the drug cartel.

He told Penn in words that may hurt him in court: “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, aeroplanes, trucks and boats.” But he denied he was a killer.

“Look, all I do is defend myself, nothing more.

“But do I start trouble? Never,” he said.