They Reveal In The Trial That El Chapo Smoked Marijuana

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

In his famous interview with Sean Penn, Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán claimed that he had tried drugs, but had not used for more than 20 years. That is false, at least according to what one of the witnesses of the trial that is being held to the head of the Sinaloa cartel in Brooklyn federal court told this Wednesday.

The convicted Colombian drug trafficker Jorge Cifuentes, among the many things he recounted in his two days of testimony, recalled that on one of the visits to El Chapo's hideout in the summits of the Sierra in Sinaloa they tried the marijuana that the Mexican kingpin cultivated in the fields. from around.

According to his testimony, Cifuentes had traveled to Mexico in 2009, to speak with his Mexican partner about the failure of a 6-ton shipment of cocaine that had been intercepted by the US authorities in the holds of a Peruvian fishing vessel in the Pacific.

To questions from the prosecution, the witness said that in the fields of the summits of the mountains where El Chapo was hidden, you could see extensive poppy fields, from which heroin is produced, and marijuana, the drug with which Guzmán began his narco career in his teens.

So he decided to try it and El Chapo joined him. "I smoked it and she said: 'it doesn't do anything to me,'" said the witness, who admitted that in his case he used marijuana at least every eight days. "It calms me down."

Cifuentes' account contradicts Guzmán's response to Penn when, in his famous meeting in that same hideout with Kate del Castillo, the Sinaloa cartel boss assured him that he had not tried the drug for two decades.

"No sir. Many years ago, yes, I tried them. But, an addict? No,”El Chapo replied in the interview published by Rolling Stone magazine. "I have not used drugs in the last 20 years."

El Chapo was not the only drug trafficker with whom Cifuentes used drugs during his visits to Mexico to arrange the shipment of cocaine shipments, first on planes and then on fishing boats. He said that it was normal in that world to pass a cocaine from time to time.

On one occasion, El Chapo's partner, Ismael el Mayo Zambada, invited him in 2008 to test a sample of the shipment of 6 tons of coca that he had just delivered to Mexico hidden in a Peruvian shark ship. "This is the one you sent," said the Mexican while giving the stripes, who gave his approval to the merchandise.

"He said it was good, it was not the best, but it was commercial quality," said Cifuentes. Despite the success of the operation, for which the cartel entered millions of dollars, the Colombian had to settle for that little taste as all remuneration, since they did not pay his 25% commission. "They never paid me."