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It took a jury six days of deliberations to methodically sift reams of evidence and reach a verdict. Prosecutorspresented56 witnesses — 13 of whom cooperated in exchange for leniency — and hundreds of exhibits over the course of some three months of proceedings. “But this point about $100 eco sober house ma million is far to vague to be believed. How was the money handed over? Where? And why? Lichtman didn’t ask, because he didn’t want his own witness to discredit himself.” “The defence strategy is to generate doubt in the jury as to whether Joaquin is a leader in the cartel,” he said.
- The country’s congress also approved laws limiting the actions of the DEA in Mexico – a move US officials warned would cripple cross-border cooperation on security issues.
- According to Colombian law enforcement, she was part of a cocaine trafficking group.
- Other witnesses at the trial have also made accusations of high-level corruption.
- Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman once paid a $100 million bribe to former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, a witness has claimed in court.
Former engineer, 42, appears in court accused of killing model, 28, who was run over in hit-and-run outside… Jesus Zambada detailed the eye-watering costs of protecting cocaine shipments that originated in Colombia and traveled to the US via Mexico – with payments amounting to $300,000 per month in Mexico City alone. What we do have is a radical agenda that disrupts power and amplifies marginalised communities. Because for many decades, the superpower has left a trail of blood and destruction across Latin America.
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But the current attorney general – Oscar Chinchilla, who has been named in New York courts as working with drug traffickers, and is close to both Hernández and top US officials – could refuse to extradite him. In another case, a Colombian woman, Patricia Rodríguez Monsalve, a 28-year-old widow of Francisco Cifuentes, a Colombian drug lord murdered in 2007, was arrested with 21 accomplices in February 2010 as a result of a cross-border operation in Colombia. After the death of her husband, Monsalve inherited his drug trafficking business including a network of his contacts in the criminal world such as the before mentionedEl Chapo(Aguirre, 2010; CNN Mexico, 2010). According to Colombian law enforcement, she was part of a cocaine trafficking group.
They remain loyal to Hernández, who has spent eight years promoting his cronies into top positions. The current Minister of Security, Julian Pacheco Tinoco, has four times been named in the SDNY for his involvement in drug trafficking, while the two most senior police officials have protected narcos. Evidence in the New York trials revealed that drug traffickers allied with the president have utilized government military bases, planes and helicopters, and deployed dozens of soldiers to oversee border shipments. These security forces have a long history of repressing peaceful protests in the streets and killing activists.
Cifuentes first spoke with prosecutors about the bribery allegation when he began co-operating with US authorities in 2016. A spokesman for Mr Nieto called the bribery claim “false and defamatory” when it first came up earlier in the trial. He said the money was delivered by a woman named Maria in Mexico City. “The US government knows full well that nothing has changed and nothing will change with El Chapo’s conviction,” one of his lawyers, Eduardo Balarezo, said in atweet.
But the National Party, which controlled the election machinery, handed the presidency to a rising thug, Juan Orlando Hernández, whose victory was quickly rubber-stamped by the United States. As president, he militarized the police, oversaw near-complete repression of protests and quickly asserted dictatorial control over the military, police, congress, judiciary and most of the media. With the support of the US-controlled multilateral development banks, he used neoliberal privatization as a front to eviscerate state employment and services, while he and his cronies siphoned off billions. In 2013 Hernández and his party stole as much $300 million from the national health service to pay for their electoral campaigns, bankrupting it. As the economy collapsed and terror metastasized, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans began to flee.
Allied right-wing paramilitaries, meanwhile, have frequently committed massacres and pushed people off their land. This has left Colombia with one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world. The ‘parapolitics‘ scandal led to the conviction of five governors and 32 congress members, including Uribe’s cousin, for collusion. And according to Prof John Barry, these right-wing paramilitaries have historically been the biggest players in drug trafficking in Colombia. Yet the US hasn’t issued sanctions or any punitive measure against Mexico. The vast majority of the millions of dollars in aid, formalized by the Mérida Initiative, goes to funding Mexican military and state security forces.
Mexican drug lord El Chapo sentenced to life in US prison
For many women bosses earning money rather than having power or prestige seems to be more important. At first, she thought I was arrested, but I explained to her that I needed to interview women who were had been accused of drug trafficking for eco sober house boston my research. I explained to her that I needed life stories and that neither names nor photos would be used. She replied that she would try to contact a friend of hers but asked me to be patient because it would take her some time to reach her.
Throughout the trial, Coronel attended court every day, even when evidence included text messages between her husband and one of his mistresses. “After Guzmán was re-arrested in Mexico in January 2016, Coronel Aispuro is alleged to have engaged in planning yet another prison escape with others prior to Guzmán’s extradition to the US in January https://sober-house.org/ 2017,” the statement said. She has also been charged with allegedly conspiring to help arrange Guzmán’s spectacular escape through a mile-long tunnel from the high-security Altiplano prison in Mexico in July 2015. The conviction of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who evaded justice in Mexico, is a win for US officials.
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Mr Regino, who denied collaboration with the cartel at the end of last year, told The Telegraph that he did not take seriously the accusations against Mr Pena Nieto, dismissing it as being without sufficient detail and impossible to believe. He also said testified that Guzman once told him that he had received a message from Mr Pena Nieto saying that he did not have to live in hiding anymore. Enrique Pena Nieto, who was president from 2012 until December, has always vehemently denied being in cahoots with the cartels. The former Mexican president could not immediately be reached for comment.
This is in spite of the fact that they have allegedly been responsible for countless human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings. The evidence showed that under Guzman’s orders, the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the US during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in court papers recapping the trial. Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been sentenced to life behind bars in a US prison, a humbling end for a crime lord once notorious for his ability to kill, bribe or tunnel his way out of trouble. Guzman, 61, was extradited to the United States in 2017 to face charges of trafficking cocaine, heroin and other drugs into the country as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.
- The case implicates a number of senior military, police, political and business figures in money laundering and bribery.
- In 2002, she was implicated in a seized shipment of US Dollars 1,500,000 in Mexico City Airport.
- In a video interview, it surfaced that five members of the jury had actively disobeyed Judge Cogan’s explicit instructions to refrain from following media coverage of the trial.
She will also have to contend with whatever further machinations President Hernández might employ to protect himself. In October 2019, his brother Tony was convicted in the Southern District of New York and sentenced to life for money laundering, arms sales, drug trafficking and other crimes. It is widely assumed that the New York prosecutors will charge Juan Orlando once he has left office.
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Among Paty’s clients were several Sinaloan drug traffickers’ mistresses, but, most importantly, Paty was one of the Queen’s principal hair stylist. The violence was so severe that security forces say they were forced to release Guzman and retreat after heavily armed cartel fighters surrounded them. The rich don’t like us, and they don’t advertise with us, so we rely on you, our readers and friends. With a regular donation to our monthly Fighting Fund, we can continue to thumb our noses at the fat cats and tell truth to power. Prosecutors claim that Mr Ramirez was having “hundreds of kilograms” of cocaine produced every month and had partnered with CC-4 and high-ranking officials in the Honduran military by the end of 2013.
The newly filed papers contain claims that Mr Hernandez used the country’s armed forces to protect a cocaine laboratory and drug shipments to the US. Papers filed in New York quote him as wanting to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos” by flooding the US with cocaine. López Obrador described the kingpin’s mother as “a pensioner who deserves my full respect – whoever her son might be” and confirmed that she had petitioned him for help to obtain a US visa so she could visit her son at the “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado. She launched a line of clothing – with some of the items emblazoned with El Chapo’s familiar moustachioed face – and attempted to establish herself up as a social media influencer with a carefully curated Instagram feed. Guzmán was sentenced to life plus 30 years at his trial in New York in 2019. According to court documents, Coronel is charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for importation into the US.
While the US uses the drug issue as a cynical ruse in its propaganda war against unfriendly governments, it arms brutal narco-states to the teeth. As long as a country is loyal to Washington’s interests, it seems there’s nothing it won’t overlook. But they add to a growing sense that Mexico has degenerated into a narco-state. Investigative journalist Anabel Hernández, for example, has long argued that state-cartel collusion and bribery goes all the way to the top.
But Gabriel Regino, a former subsecretary of public security in Mexico City who is now a criminal law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, wrote on Twitter that an accusation of bribery had emerged against him in the trial but was false. He also said he paid millions of dollars in bribes to former Mexican government official Genaro Garcia Luna on behalf of his brother, drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who remains at large. A witness at the trial of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman told the court how he paid millions of dollars in bribes to top Mexican officials. In fact, just like in Mexico, the US has long fundedits ‘counter-insurgency’ campaigns.