One United States Court of Appeals confirmed this Tuesday conviction of life imprisonment imposed on Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Loera. The US Court rejected several arguments with which the Mexican drug trafficker He was seeking revocation of his sentence.
‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who will spend the rest of his life in a super-maximum security prison in the US, was found guilty of 10 counts for 26 drug law violations and a murder conspiracy.
Here we present a timeline of main events related to the drug baron, who after escaping for the second time from the maximum security prison of the Altiplano in Mexico, led to a national and international hunt for authorities to find his whereabouts, arrest, extradition and conviction.
‘El Chapo’: Chronology in 12 points
1. Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera born April 4, 1957 in the town of Badiraguato, in Sinaloa (Mexico) according to information from Interpol. Some other security agencies point out that he was born in 1954.
2. Joaquin Guzman got involved in drug dealing as a child, dealing in cocaine, heroin, marijuana and amphetamines. He later became the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful criminal organization in Mexico in the 1990s.
3. in June 1993, the capo already recognized as ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, it was captured in Guatemala to then be extradited to Mexico where he was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in a maximum security prison in Jalisco in 1995. While incarcerated, he continued to lead his criminal organization having bribed a large part of the prison staff.
4. In January 2001, when a Mexican court ruling increased the probability that it was extradited to the United States, Guzmán escaped by hiding in a laundry cart.; more than 70 people, including the prison director, were implicated in his escape.
5. In 2007, Guzmán Loera marries the beauty queen Emma Colonel in Sinaloa, and numerous people attend the wedding. In 2009, the specialized magazine Forbes includes ‘El Chapo’ in the list of “The most powerful people in the world”.
6. ‘El Chapo’ Guzman remained a fugitive for more than a decade, leading the Sinaloa Cartel through a series of vicious conflicts with the government and rival cartels. One of the central conflicts revolved around Guzmán’s bloody and ultimately successful bid for control of the routes from Ciudad Juárez that transported drugs to the United States.
7. The empire of ‘El Chapo’ falters in February 2014, when he was recaptured by the Mexican Navy, who raided a hotel by the sea where he had been visiting his family in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, after a manhunt of 13 years.
8. The Sinaloa capo was taken to the maximum security prison of the Altiplano, in the State of Mexico, where from escaped in July 2015 for mile tunnel (one mile) long, whose construction is estimated to have taken more than a year and a million dollars. His escape was a great embarrassment for the government of then President Enrique Peña Nieto, and his recapture became a priority.
9. Finally, almost six months later, an operation in January 2016 that involved all law enforcement in Mexico resulted in a raid on a house in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Joaquín Guzmán escaped from the house – again through a tunnel – and stole a car, but was captured near the town of Juan José Ríos.
10. In a tacit acknowledgment of his previous missteps, The Mexican government extradited Joaquín Guzmán Loera to the United States in January 2017 and confined in a federal prison in New York.
11. In November 2018, the trial against ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán begins. A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, sentenced the drug lord in 2019 to life in prison without the possibility of parole to more than 30 years for his role in leading the Sinaloa Cartel.
12. It is Tuesday, January 25, 2022, a US appeals court upheld the conviction for drug trafficking that had been imposed on Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who had asked for it to be canceled. The New York Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision concluding that Guzmán’s trial was conducted with “diligence and fairness” and therefore his conviction was affirmed.
With information from AP.
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