El Chapo's defense: "Mayo Zambada is the real leader of Sinaloa Cartel"

Chivis Martinez Borderland Beat

Emma enters Brooklyn Courthouse

After two jurors were dismissed today and their replacements selected, opening statements began in the afternoon in the trial of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.

The U.S. prosecutors went first with their opening statement.  They gave an overview of the charges that brought El Chapo to trial including his global drug trafficking operation, and multiple murder conspiracies. 

Missing were murder charges that the government quietly dropped over the summer.

When it was the turn of the defense, we were able to get a peek into the defense plan of El Chapo and their reply to the charges of the U.S. and it is one we’ve heard before…..that it is El Mayo Zambada that is the real leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, and El Chapo was a figurehead. 

A few months ago, in July, I wrote an article,  [link here for article]   About a document that was supposed to be redacted, but with a couple of moves one could see under the black out. 

The document, which is a letter of reply, essentially named 9 pieces of evidence of 41 in the hands of the government.  The government disclosed as having this evidence, without producing additional context, with respect to the potential exculpatory evidence, indicating El Chapo was not the top leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, and never had been. This is one of the charges against him.   Only a couple of months before trial, the defense were made aware that such evidence existed.

It appears this, at least in part, is what El Chapo is planning to use as a defense.

On a side note, not long after this happened, I was doing research on CJNG when I stumbled across a 2007 article in Proceso. The article was about Los Cuinis and CJNG, but within the article was this paragraph:

[It is about the Valencias and the Milenio cartel out of Michoacán. They had an alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel.]

Guzman Loera was only an emblematic figure whose function, aside from still taking part in drug trafficking, is the distraction of authorities. According to data from the PGR and some journalistic articles, El Chapo Guzman has decided to leave his hiding spots and has started to frequent restaurants and public places: a little over a year ago the Assistant Attorney General for Special Investigations and Organized Crime (SIEDO) detected him downtown in a city in the state of Durango.

It will be very interesting to see what information the government had regarding this.  Speculation is that it may have come from one or more cooperative witnesses.

The government added 4 cooperative witnesses a couple of weeks ago, which should be a total between 12 and 14. 

After cutting his deal with the government last week, El Mayo’s son is expected to be one of those witnesses, which could be confusing to the jury, after hearing it is Vincente Zambada, son of “the real leader” who is testifying against the man who is accused of being the leader.

The defense hit on the cooperative witnesses during opening statements.  They assured the jury that these witnesses could not be trusted, as they were all criminals who made deals in exchange for testimony.

That could work in the case of most witnesses; an exception may be the Flores twins, Margarito and Pedro.  The twins provided the government a mountain of evidence, videos, and documents, recorded phone conversations of them and four dozen narcos, with El Chapo taking center stage. 

And we can’t forget the Sean Penn El Chapo video.  In the video El Chapo discusses and admits his drug trafficking. However, previously, the prosecution said they had no plans of using it as evidence and no plans on calling Penn as a witness.

If convicted on most any of the 17 charges, the sentence would amount to a life sentence.  For example, the Kingpin Statute, which means operating a continuing organized criminal enterprise, would be a mandatory life sentence.