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Horrible killings, political swaps, cocaine in pepper pots, jewel-encrusted guns, and naked maid escaping through tunnels are all Hollywood-esque scenes that once took place in Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Mexican drug king. ) in real life, but in the future only the iron fence and three white walls of the prison await him. On Tuesday (February 12) local time, Guzman, the leader of Mexico's largest drug cartel, Sinaloa, was finally found guilty of 10 counts of drug trafficking, money laundering and illegal possession of weapons after a three-month trial in the United States, or will face life imprisonment.
Prosecutors said the Sinaloa cartel was "the largest and most prolific drug trafficking organization in the world." Next, Guzman, 61, could be sent to the highest-security prison in the United States. Before being extradited to the United States, Guzman escaped from a Mexican prison twice and staged a real-life "prison break", which also made Guzman a folk legend in Mexico.
In 2001, Guzmán was arrested for the first time, bribing guards in prison and escaping by hiding in laundry baskets. In 2014, with the assistance of the United States, Guzman was arrested again in Mexico. But just two years after he was in prison, he managed to escape again through an underground tunnel precisely connected to his prison bathroom. According to the BBC, Guzman's son dug a 1.5-kilometer tunnel from outside the prison, and after the tunnel was completed, Guzman rode a specially modified motorcycle away.
As the judge read out the verdict, Guzman kept his eyes on the jury while his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, watched the scene, the Associated Press reported. The two gave each other a thumbs up when Guzmán got up to leave the courtroom.
For the past three months, Ospro, 29, has been sitting quietly in the hearing, listening to the judge's trial of her husband of 11 years. In her eyes, Guzmán is not the notorious drug lord, but a "good father, friend, brother, son and partner". Opslow has previously been charged with assisting Guzman to escape from prison, which she denies.
Opslow appeared in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. Image source: Visual China
And the story of Guzman and Opsrow is like a movie plot. A 17-year-old beautiful girl named Opuslo meets the mysterious drug lord Guzman at a dance. A few months later, Opsrow entered and won a beauty pageant in Mexico. According to local media reports, Guzman led hundreds of people with guns to the event and announced that he was going to marry Opslo. On Opsrow's 18th birthday, they married, Guzmán's third marriage.
In Opslow's description, Guzman is a heroic being. On January 30, 2017, as Guzman was about to be extradited to the United States, Opslow tweeted: "We all know that for us to be (together) we will have to pay a huge price. : Distance, time, challenge and sacrifice. But it was worth it.”
Drug dealers, huge fortunes, and the young wife of a beauty queen, Guzmán, nicknamed "Short", is a notorious legend in his own right. The US media called Guzman's conviction the most prominent victory for US law since the start of the drug war in the 1970s. Mike Vigil, the former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's international law enforcement division, also called it "a moral victory."
Mexican President López announced at a daily press conference on January 30 that the "war on drugs" was officially over, and the military no longer prioritized arresting the leaders of drug cartels, because reducing violence was more urgent than catching drug lords. But after the arrest of legendary drug lord Guzman, can Mexico really be free from drugs and violence?
According to the "New York Times", on January 31, the same day that Guzman's trial ended, Arizona border officials announced that they had successfully seized the largest amount of fentanyl in history. The fentanyl was hidden in a cucumber truck and entered the United States via the port of Nogales on the U.S.-Mexico border. This is also the regular route for the Sinaloa group to deliver drugs.
Fentanyl is a powerful pain reliever. This opioid pain reliever is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. If abused, it can be addictive and even life-threatening, and just 2 mg of fentanyl is enough to kill a person. The amount of fentanyl seized was enough to kill 100 million people.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said that even if it lost its former leader, the Sinaloa Group remains an important threat to the United States in the drug trade, and it has the widest reach in the United States. The Sinaloa Group is currently run by Guzman's sons and his long-time partner Ismael Zambada García.
The British "Guardian" summarized some of the new scenes in the drug world three years after Guzman's arrest. Coca leaf production, the raw material for cocaine production, has risen sharply, with 171,000 hectares devoted to coca leaf cultivation in Colombia in 2017, an increase of 25,000 hectares from the previous year, and a further increase in 2018. Most of the cocaine produced in Colombia is shipped to the United States and Europe by Mexican drug cartels and their partners.
In Europe and the United States, the cocaine market is still in short supply. The price of cocaine in the UK is now the highest since 1990, and the purity of the drug is unprecedented in a decade. In addition, the availability of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs has risen sharply.
In Mexico, the number of murders is also at an all-time high. According to data from the Mexican Interior Ministry, there were 25,394 murders in the first nine months of 2018, up 18 percent year-on-year and reaching the highest number since 1997.
All the facts further confirm that the drug war without Guzman will not languish. The U.S. government says that Sinaloa's biggest competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which spun off from the group. A few years ago, the independent Jalisco New Generation group began reaching out to criminal activities such as extortion, kidnapping, migrant smuggling and oil theft. Among them, according to Mexican government officials, oil theft can cost Mexico up to $3 billion a year in economic losses.
The leaders of large drug groups such as Guzman have been arrested one after another, which has also spawned some small criminal gangs in Mexico. In his last national report, former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto publicly accused local police of inaction in cracking down on these small criminal gangs.
The Guardian pointed out that before Guzman was arrested, some people suspected that the successor of the Mexican government colluded with the Sinaloa group, in order to contain some more uncontrolled criminal groups and maintain the so-called "peace under the rule of the gang" ( Pax Mafiosa).
The huge economic benefits brought by the drug trade have also made many people flock to this ill-gotten wealth. Garcia, one of the current leaders of the Sinaloa Group, once revealed that successfully transporting the drugs to New York would bring in a net income of $390 million, which would be divided among the five investors of the group. And they deliver drugs to America hundreds of times a year.
To this day, Mexican society is still shrouded in the shadow of drugs and violence.
But at the very least, Guzmán's trial brought the Sinaloa syndicate's monstrous crime to light, giving the public a glimpse into how such a drug cartel operates. "Before the trial, people heard the saga of Guzman, but now they see the reality: violence, manipulation of power and drug dealing, which we have known all too well in the years of enforcing the law," he said. Ray Donovan, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's New York office, said.
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