A naked escape and bribed presidents: El Chapo trial’s shocking testimony
A New York court has heard how the Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán eluded capture with his mistress while paying millions to politicians and police
Ed Vulliamy in New York
Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, girlfriend of accused Mexican drug lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, second right, testifies as Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel, right, looks on. Photograph: Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
That Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán – on trial in New York for heading the world’s biggest drug cartel – escaped a raid through a tunnel beneath his bath is legend; what is not known is that he did so stark naked with the mistress with whom he was abed when the Mexican marines arrived.
That Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel bribed politicians and senior military officers is presumed by most Mexicans; that he bribed presidents would surprise few – what we had not heard is that he allegedly haggled down a presidential demand for $250m protection money to $100m.
But this is what emerges as Guzmán’s prosecutors home in on the closing stages of their case at the US federal court in Brooklyn.
When Guzmán’s former mistress Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López took the stand on Thursday, El Chapo knew it was coming: journalists had been tipped off by defence counsel last week that she might testify.
Guzmán’s wife Emma Coronel – loyally present almost every day of the trial – probably braced herself too; the couple had been married for seven years – since 2007 – when the bathroom incident occurred, and their twin daughters were two years old.
Sánchez told the court she was Guzmán’s lover and “housewife” for three years from 2011. And rather more: she was a scout for, and dispatcher of, marijuana from the Mexican states of Durango and Sinaloa. Guzmán “would ask me for the three Bs”, she explained, “Buena, bonita y barata” – good, pretty and cheap.
The relationship was complex, with suggestions of intimidation: “I had my reasons,” she said. “First of all, so he didn’t think I would rat him out. I didn’t want him to mistrust me so he wouldn’t hurt me. Second, I didn’t want to have my siblings involved” – as Guzmán had apparently urged. She sent Guzmán a text about her business role, saying: “I like it. At least I feel useful.”
That night in early 2014, the couple were in bed when a squad of marines and US DEA agents surrounded the Miramar Hotel in Mazatlán. They were spotted by Guzmán’s most trusted gatekeeper, codenamed “El Condor”, who ran into the bedroom to warn his boss.
Guzmán bounded naked into the bathroom, followed by Sánchez, El Condor and another member of the inner circle, and flipped the bathtub to reveal the tunnel.
“He said, ‘love, love, come in here,’” recalled Sánchez. “There was like a lid on the bathtub that came up. I was scared. I was like, ‘Do I have to go in there?’ It was very dark.”
It is not clear whether voters in Sinaloa knew the story when, later that year, they elected Sánchez as a deputy to the state assembly. She served two years before being arrested in 2017 while entering the US, for drug trafficking and money laundering. Awaiting sentence, she joined the now long line of trusted confidants who have turned state’s witness against the cartel chief.
But as well as unveiling such personal betrayals, the trial has also exposed shocking allegations of relations between narco-trafficking and political power in Mexico and beyond.
For years journalists have charted the entwinement between cartels, police, military and politics – and many Mexican reporters have paid with their lives for doing so. Yet even so, the detail of testimony in the trial is astonishing.
El Chapo paid $100m bribe to former Mexican president Peña Nieto, witness says
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This week the major Colombian narco Alex Cifuentes Villa took the stand for a second time to implicate the apex of power in Mexico.
Under cross-examination, Cifuentes said that Enrique Peño Nieto, president from 2012 until last year, approached Guzmán (rather than the other way round) to propose that a payment of $250m would call off the manhunt against him. Cifuentes said the two men eventually compromised on the sum of $100m, duly paid.
Cifuentes said his PA, Andrea Vélez Fernández, had once sent him photographs of suitcases full of cash. When Guzmán’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman asked if they were “destined for Mr Peña Nieto”, prosecutors successfully objected on grounds of relevance.
But Vélez turned out to have two jobs, the other for the Venezuelan political consultant JJ Rendón, who Peña Nieto had hired for his presidential campaign.
In the trial’s early stages, the brother of the cartel’s co-founder with Guzmán, Jesús Zambada García, had been due to testify on bribes to Mexican presidents including Felipe Calderón – who governed from 2006 to 2012 – leading Lichtman to say in his opening statements that “current and former presidents of Mexico received hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes”. The prosecution had successfully argued that further information should be inadmissible.
But on Wednesday, prosecutors failed to prevent the unsealing of one of their own motions which mentions bribes paid to a senior adviser to the current president, Ándres Manuel López Obrador during his unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign. Previous court papers mention bribes also paid to an official in his administration as mayor of Mexico City.
The officials have been named in Mexican media reports, but not in privileged court proceedings.
All three presidents have strongly denied the allegations. Calderón and Peño Nieto dismissed Lichtman’s comments at the start of the trial, and Peña Nieto issued a fresh statement this week calling Cifuentes’s claim “false, defamatory and absurd”. López Obrador’s office told Vice News he would not comment on remarks by a protected witness in a trial outside Mexico.
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Mexican reporters have for years investigated the convergence of interests between Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel and the Mexican army, often in pursuit of hegemony over other, rival cartels.
But never before has an insider described the army acting as a hit squad for the cartel.
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This week, however, Cifuentes said that Guzmán authorized payments of between $10m and $12m to military units to “either kill or capture” operatives of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, founded by brothers initially loyal to Guzmán, but who broke away – incurring his special wrath.
Zambada had testified that federal and highway police escorted consignments of cocaine, and there has been testimony on Guzmán paying police commanders, but not on police trafficking drugs themselves.
Cifuentes coolly testified about the time he sent federal police photographs of baggage full of cocaine being sent from Argentina to Mexico, so that they would be allowed through airport customs. But the police, he said, impounded the consignments and sold the drugs themselves.
All told, Cifuentes said with a shrug of his 40-year career in the drug trade, he had led “a good life”.