Joaqu\u00edn \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzm\u00e1n, infamous kingpin of Mexico\u2019s Sinaloa Cartel, was unanimously found guilty on all 10 counts against him by a federal jury in Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 12. He was convicted of overseeing an international criminal conspiracy to import tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States over a 20-year period and laundering the billions of dollars in proceeds.<\/p>\n
The jury was anonymous even to the judge, for fear of reprisals in a trial that became something of a media spectacle. Among those showing up to observe the proceedings was\u00a0Alejandro Edda, the actor who plays El Chapo in the Netflix series\u00a0\u201cNarcos: Mexico<\/a>.\u201d The kingpin flashed the actor what the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0called\u00a0an \u201cecstatic smile.\u201d<\/p>\n The shine may now come off his Robin Hood image with\u00a0witness testimony<\/a>\u00a0about his vicious predilection for raping underage girls. The case against him featured 200 hours of testimony from 56 witnesses. Fourteen of those, his admitted former henchmen and traffickers, cooperated with the prosecution in hopes of reducing their own prison terms.<\/p>\n El Chapo faces a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole \u2014 actually, multiple life sentences, though after one the rest become a mere formality. Having serially escaped from prison in Mexico, he is now\u00a0probably headed<\/a>\u00a0for the federal government\u2019s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, also known as ADX, for \u201cadministrative maximum,\u201d and more colloquially the \u201cAlcatraz of the Rockies.\u201d<\/p>\n In the aftermath of his trial, it\u2019s worth examining how the drug policing policies\u00a0\u2014 including around cannabis \u2014 of Mexico and the United States fueled El Chapo\u2019s rise, and about whether or not anything will change now that El Chapo has been found guilty.<\/p>\n Narco-violence has not abated in Mexico since Chapo\u2019s most recent capture in 2016, and his Sinaloa Cartel remains intact, now run by his heir apparent, Ismael \u201cEl Mayo\u201d Zambada. Witnesses at the trial said that El Mayo is now protected by co-opted officials at the highest levels of Mexican state power, just as El Chapo had been. El Chapo\u2019s lawyers, in turn, claimed that El Mayo had bribed Mexican officials to detain and frame their client so that he could inherit the cartel.<\/p>\n \u201cEl Mayo Zambada and Sinaloa have continued and thrived and flourished,\u201d Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami expert on Mexico\u2019s cartels, told\u00a0CNN<\/a>. \u201cThe fact that you knock off a kingpin like El Chapo \u2014 which he clearly was \u2014 does not mean that you end the organization or in any way severely debilitate it.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cWith or without El Chapo, these lines of bribery, these lines of corruption, extend into every political party at every level of the Mexican government.\u201d<\/p>\n And upstart rivals like the Jalisco New Generation cartel are rising to challenge the Sinaloa Cartel on its turf of Mexico\u2019s Pacific coast. Its leader, Rub\u00e9n \u201cEl Mencho\u201d Oseguera Cervantes, is another aspirant to fill El Chapo\u2019s bloody shoes.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s going to be more bloodshed,\u201d Bagley predicted. \u201cEvery time there are these transitions\u2026there is a period of adjustment. It\u2019s often quite bloody, but they sort things out because they have every incentive to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n This cycle has been playing itself out for a long time in Mexico. El Chapo got his start in the 1980s, overseeing ranches that grew cannabis for the Guadalajara Cartel, Mexico\u2019s reigning crime machine at the time. This was just as Mexico\u2019s old marijuana syndicates of the \u201970s were morphing into the sinister cocaine cartels. This transition was at least partially a result of the aggressive crackdown on cannabis \u2014 itself the bitter fruit of pressure from\u00a0Washington, D.C.<\/a><\/p>\n This began in 1969, when President Richard Nixon virtually shut down the border, slowing traffic to a crawl with aggressive searches of every vehicle to root out smuggled cannabis, in what was called\u00a0Operation Intercept<\/a>. By the end of the \u201970s, Mexico capitulated to the pressure, launching\u00a0Operation Condor<\/a>, the first big militarized crackdown on cannabis. Mexican federal police helicopters sprayed paraquat on the marijuana plantations. This helped incentivize the cartels\u2019 switch to ferrying cocaine coming up from Colombia \u2014 although cannabis would remain an important sideline.<\/p>\n The Guadalajara Cartel fractured when its leaders were finally\u00a0arrested and convicted in 1985<\/a>. This was occasioned by the cartel going too far, abducting and torturing to death a DEA agent in retaliation for the bust of a giant marijuana plantation\u00a0in Chihuahua state. As the new regional syndicates emerged from the fractured Guadalajara machine, El Chapo seized control of the Sinaloa branch.<\/p>\n After a long and bloody struggle with the rival Tijuana Cartel, it emerged some 20 years later as the uncontested suzerain of Mexico\u2019s west. It then went to war with the competition in the east, the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. In 2006, the Mexican government\u00a0sent in the army<\/a>\u00a0to fight the warring cartels, and violence escalated exponentially. It was at this point that Mexico\u2019s \u201cdrug war\u201d arguably became a\u00a0real<\/i>\u00a0internal war.<\/p>\n El Chapo\u00a0was arrested in 1993<\/a>\u00a0for, among various drug crimes, the killing that year of the Archbishop of Guadalajara, Juan Jes\u00fas Posadas Ocampo. But he escaped from prison in 2001, apparently using bribes to slip out in a laundry cart. He spent the next decade and change as the country\u2019s most-wanted fugitive as his Sinaloa machine rose to hegemony. In February 2014,\u00a0he was detained in Mazatl\u00e1n, Sinaloa\u2019s coastal resort city, and sent to Mexico\u2019s top-security federal prison, at Altiplano, M\u00e9xico state. But in July 2015,\u00a0he escaped<\/a>\u00a0a second time through an elaborate tunnel that had been built from his shower block at Altiplano to a nearby apartment.<\/p>\n Chapo\u00a0taunted the world<\/a>\u00a0on social media as the second manhunt was carried out. In January 2016, he was apprehended at an upscale condo in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. A Mexican government that appeared eager to be rid of him had El Chapo\u00a0extradited to the United States on\u00a0Barack Obama\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0last day in office in January 2017.<\/p>\n There are\u00a0some encouraging signs<\/a>\u00a0that Mexico\u2019s new President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador will roll back the \u201cdrug war\u201d militarization and lift the prohibitionist pressure on cannabis, at least. But there is a lot of damage to undo if El Chapo getting sent up the river is to translate into any degree of peace on the ground on long-suffering Mexico.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, do you think Mexico\u2019s new drug policy will ease the country\u2019s crackdown against cannabis?<\/p>\n The post El Chapo Found Guilty, But Prohibition-Fueled Violence Rages On<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Joaqu\u00edn \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzm\u00e1n, infamous kingpin of Mexico\u2019s Sinaloa Cartel, was unanimously found guilty on all 10 counts against him by a federal jury in Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 12. He was convicted of overseeing an international criminal conspiracy to import tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana intoContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,689,4928,7586,7518,265,81,7587,7588,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32852"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32853,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32852\/revisions\/32853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Will Anything Change in Mexico\u2019s Drug War?<\/h4>\n
How Cannabis Prohibition Fueled El Chapo\u2019s Ascent<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: El Chapo Found Guilty, But Prohibition-Fueled Violence Rages On<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"