NEW YORK: As a child living in poverty in Mexico, he peddled fruit just to eat. A lifetime later, as the world’s most wanted drug lord, his empire was so vast he commanded a fleet of submarines to move his wares.
Now, it is reckoning time for Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who will go on trial on Monday in New York and faces life in prison if convicted of charges that for 25 years he flooded the United States with tonnes of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine.
While in prison for nearly two years Guzman, 61, has lost much of the aura of the feared and, for many in Mexico, beloved, drug kingpin he once enjoyed. He lost weight and says he has health problems. Guzman’s head is shaved and he wears humble blue prison garb. His trademark moustache is gone. In the hearings he has attended in US federal court, the judge has not even allowed him to speak.
“I have headaches every day. I vomit almost every day. I need work done on two molars and they hurt a lot,” Guzman said in his only direct communication with Judge Brian Cogan in a letter sent in February.
He complained that his jail cell is always either too cold or too hot. “It is torture, 24 hours a day,” wrote Guzman, whose nickname El Chapo translates as shorty, due to his five-foot, two-inch (1.57 metre) frame.
In his heyday, the man towered over his rivals, casting a long shadow over Mexico’s criminal underworld.
During Guzman’s reign, his Sinaloa drug cartel’s empire expanded across the globe, its tentacles stretching from the Americas to Europe and Asia.
After two legendary prison breaks, Guzman was finally captured by Mexican marines in January 2016 and extradited to the United States in January 2017, ending his decades-long cat-and-mouse game with the authorities.
While his cartel is synonymous with violence and drug addiction, Guzman became a hero of Mexico’s underworld, with musicians singing his praises in folk ballads known as “narcocorridos” — tributes to drug capos. He fooled the government with his cartel’s engineering feats, building tunnels to ship drugs under the US-Mexico border and help him escape the authorities. While he nurtured a Robin Hood image back home, his cartel fought bloody turf wars with rivals, contributing to the drug conflicts plaguing Mexico.
Guzman grew so rich that he was on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, but he dropped out in 2013 after spending much of his wealth on protection.
“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats,” Guzman boasted to Sean Penn in a clandestine meeting that they had and that the US actor wrote about for Rolling Stone magazine in 2016.
Guzman said in a separate video message to Penn that his family was “very humble, very poor” and that his mum made bread in the village of La Tuna. — Reuters
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