One of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was convicted Tuesday of running an industrial-scale smuggling operation after a three-month trial.
Guzman faced a laundry list of drug-trafficking and conspiracy convictions that could put the 61-year former drug lord behind bars for decades in a maximum-security U.S. prison. New York jurors whose identities were kept secret reached a verdict after deliberating six days in the expansive case, sorting through what authorities called an “avalanche” of evidence gathered since the late 1980s that Guzman and his murderous Sinaloa drug cartel made billions in profits by smuggling various illegal drugs into the U.S.
With files from the Associated Press
Guest:
Sam Quinones, author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury Press, 2015); reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2014; he tweets