Notorious Mexican drug cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was found guilty on Tuesday of all 10 counts in a drug-trafficking trial in the US, which could put him behind bars for the rest of his life in a high-security prison, Euronews reports.
The drug lord, 61, faced charges of running a large-scale drug operation as the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel.
New York jurors, whose identities were kept secret, deliberated for six days, sorting through piles of evidence gathered since the 1980s that Guzman’s drug cartel smuggled tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the US.
A Sinaloa insider who testified in the trial described how Mexican workers would pack cocaine into jalapeno cans and send shipments that totalled 25 to 30 tonnes of cocaine worth $500 million (€442 million) each year.
Guzman’s lawyers did not deny the defendant’s charges but argued that he was the victim of government witnesses who were worse than he was.
The drug boss escaped from prison twice — once in 2001 by hiding in a laundry bin, and again in 2014 when he escaped through tunnels on a specially adapted small motorcycle.