The Most Surprising Moments Of El Chapo's Trial

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

The almost three months that the trial of Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán lasted, who was found guilty of all the charges this Tuesday, has given to accumulate a long list of dramatic, surprising and even funny moments that could easily be part of the script of any narcoseries.

That is why we have collected several of those moments that have been lived in the room of federal judge Brian Cogan, who has presided over the macroprocess against the media boss of the Sinaloa cartel.

The leak to the naked

One of the testimonies that generated the most drama was that of Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, the so-called Chapodiputada and who had a long relationship with Guzmán. A relationship that didn't seem to end quite well, judging by her response when asked the nature of her romance with the boss. "To this day I am confused because I thought it was a couple relationship," said Sánchez, who suffered a nervous breakdown and burst into tears in the middle of the courtroom during an intermission.

Among the many things López revealed from the witness stand is that he was in bed with El Chapo in a house in Culiacán when Mexican marines led by a DEA agent entered at dawn to arrest him in February 2014. Immediately, the capo and López, along with a henchman and a house servant, escaped through a tunnel hidden under the bathtub in the main bathroom of the residence.

The group fled in such a hurry that Chapo did not have time to get dressed and had to run naked through the tunnel, which connected to the city sewers, to escape the Marines. Although on that occasion he managed to outwit them, a few days later he was arrested in a nearby town.

Bribery and corruption

Among the many revelations that the process has generated is the verification of the deep corruption at all levels of the state that drug money has inflicted, which has bought the collaboration and collusion of politicians, police and military personnel in several countries with millions of dollars..

The most serious accusation was made by Alex Cifuentes, who for a time acted as Guzmán's secretary, in his hiding place high in the mountains. The Colombian assured that his boss sent representatives of the now ex-president in cash and in a suitcase in October 2012 a bribe to destroy the will of the authorities.

Jesús el Rey Zambada García, who was the man of the cartel in Mexico City, said that only in the capital region did they spend a few rados for a military unit to transport cargoes that entered the Colombian border in their own trucks and that then they were sent to Mexico in fishing boats.

For his part, the former head of the Colombian cartel in the North of the Valley, Juan Carlos Chupeta Ramírez Abadía, assured that in the 1990s he paid at least ró journalists to avoid appearing in the media.

Intimate conversations

One of the probably most embarrassing moments for the accused was the disclosure of intimate conversations with his wife Emma Coronel, his lovers, and the fact that the jealous drug lord spied on them electronically. The US authorities had managed to decipher El Chapo's communications thanks to the collaboration of the Colombian engineer who had created the network for the Mexican kingpin.

Coronel had to listen to how the loving messages of her husband were read to one of her lovers, Agustina Cabanillas Acosta, whom El Chapo called La Fiera. "You are the most important person in the world to me," Guzmán told Cabanillas in one of the texts.

The lawyer scandal

El Chapo was not the only one who went through the trouble that private messages were made public. His attorney Jeffrey Lichtman saw the New York Post airing his extramarital affair with another client, businesswoman Sarma Melngailis, whom he had defended in a media fraud case.

The newspaper revealed messages of high sexual content that were exchanged between the 46-year-old defendant and the 53-year-old lawyer, who is married and has children. "Do you want to be mine? Would it be okay if some days I only use your body to have an [orgasm]?" Lichtman asks Melngailis in a message he sent him a few days after getting him a benefit agreement with the prosecution, that he has changed from pleading guilty, he asked only four months in prison.

The nicknames of the drug traffickers

One of the many narco world skills seems to be the ability to nickname its members. Not only the accused is El Chapo, but his great partner Ismael Zamabada is El Mayo and his personal secretary Miguel Hoo Ramírez is El Cóndor.

One of the bloodthirsty gunmen of the Ciudad Juárez cartel was the Jaguar, while Colombian drug lord Jorge Cifuentes said he met Guzmán when he traveled to Mexico to find out what had happened to his partner Humberto Robachivas Ojeda.

Although one of the nicknames that most attracted attention was that of Nariz, El Chapo's henchman who ended up taking the DEA and the Mexican Marines to the house in Culiacán where they almost captured him in February 2014.

What the wife knows

In her few interviews with the press, Coronel claims to have been completely oblivious to the alleged criminal activities to which her husband was engaged and blames the media for the fame of a bloodthirsty drug lord who persecutes Guzmán.

"It is not fair," he assured in a recent with Telemundo in December. "They don't want to take him off that pedestal to put him more like a normal, ordinary person."

However, the recordings and text messages intercepted by the authorities that appeared in the trial break the image of innocence that the former beauty queen has adopted. In them, Guzmán tells her about one of his last minute escapes from the authorities that were persecuting him and in another she expressed her fear that the police are monitoring her.

At another time, the boss jokes with his wife that he will buy an AK-47 assault rifle from one of his daughters so that he can accompany him.

Those messages were found by the authorities, an FBI agent said, in files of a monitoring and espionage program that El Chapo had installed on the phone of his wife and one of his lovers, with the evident intention of being aware of everything they did.

At another point in the trial, former cartel member Dámaso López Núñez explained that Coronel was the link between El Chapo and his children during the planning stage of his famous escape in 2015 from the Altiplano maximum security prison through a tunnel that reached his cell.

The face of the witness

One of the testimonies that made the most impression was the Chupeta, not only for the murders, the tons of coca and the bribes that he detailed in his passage through Judge Cogan's chamber. The appearance of the former head of the Norte del Valle cartel revealed the effects of the numerous surgeries that had been carried out during the time he was on the run.

As the photos below demonstrate, Abadía looked like someone else after the transformation of her face, which was even reflected in much redder skin. He acknowledged that in his stage of flight in Brazil, he had surgery on his jaw, cheekbones, eyes, mouth, ears and nose.

Anyway, the new face and the millions he spent to hide could not prevent him from finally being captured in Brazil in 2007 and finally extradited to the United States.

Mortal Arepas

Pistols, rifles, knives, explosives … all kinds of weapons have been used by drug traffickers to commit murder. To this we must add the poisoning, as Jorge Cifuentes acknowledged in his testimony. When asked by the prosecution about his participation in settling accounts, he recalled that during his time in prison in his native Colombia in 1984, he was commissioned to kill José Gonzalo the Mexican Rodríguez Gacha, one of the members of the Medellín cartel who was also incarcerated. in that prison.

To execute the crime, they handed him a revolver, a razor, a grenade and arsenic. One morning, he said, while the Mexican was being heated for breakfast, he sprinkled arsenic on one of the arepas. But, unfortunately for Cifuentes, the drug dealer did not eat it. Faced with this failure, he decided to go to the grenade. One day he threw it into the cell, but the cement bed in which Rodríguez Gacha was resting protected him from the explosion.

Pablo Escobar's partner managed to survive these attacks, ending up dying with his 17-year-old son in a shooting with Colombian security forces on the Colombian Caribbean coast five years later.

Fiction meets reality

Chapo's trial has been so similar to a chapter in Narcos: Mexico that the famous Netflix series ended up paying him a visit to Judge Cogan's court in Brooklyn in the role of actor Alejandro Edda, who plays the boss. The Mexican traveled to New York during a break from work to attend the trial as a public and have the opportunity to see who he plays in the flesh.

According to the media present, Edda spoke with Chapo's lawyers, who upon entering the courtroom and learning of his presence, greeted him with a nod. After the success of the first season of Narcos: Mexico, in which the beginnings of cocaine trafficking in the eighties are recounted, Edda is filming the new chapters of the narco-drama in which the character of Guzmán acquires greater prominence.