glow of the firelight, Guzmán ordered the Zetas to be placed beside the flames and then approached them with a rifle.

A cartel killer provides a bloody end to the case against El Chapo
A cartel killer provides a bloody end to the case against El Chapo
NEW YORK — A huge bonfire was burning at Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s mountain hideout one night when the crime lord’s bodyguards brought him two enemy soldiers slumped across the backs of two ATVs. The men — members of the Zetas, a rival cartel — had been tortured for hours, and many of their bones had already been broken. The soldiers, as listless as “rag dolls,” according to a gunman who was there, could barely move.



In the glow of the firelight, Guzmán ordered the Zetas to be placed beside the flames and then approached them with a rifle. Pressing its barrel to the first man’s head, the kingpin cursed the soldier’s mother and abruptly pulled the trigger. After he had done the same to the second, he ordered his assassins to dispose of the bodies.

“Put them in the bonfire,” the gunman recalled Guzmán saying. “I don’t want any bones to remain.”

This morbid story was recounted Thursday by Isaias Valdez Rios, a former cartel killer, at Guzmán’s drug trial in New York. Though dozens of murders have been described in court since the trial began 10 weeks ago, Judge Brian M. Cogan has sought to keep a tight leash on the gore. But Valdez’s testimony was exceptionally gruesome and marked the first time that jurors heard explicitly graphic examples of the bloodshed that Mexican cartels have long been known for. It was also the first time that evidence was shown that depicted the violence personally committed by the defendant, known to the world as El Chapo.

In three grueling hours on the witness stand, Valdez spellbound the jury in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn with wrenching accounts from the front lines of Mexico’s bloody drug wars. He spoke about running someone down in his truck during a frantic highway gunfight. He spoke about killing an informant in the earshot of women and children. He spoke about burying a bound and blindfolded man, who was still alive, on Guzmán’s orders.

As the prosecution’s last cooperating witness, Valdez’s appearance on the stand suggested that the government’s case was coming to an end. He seemed to have been called to deliver a gut punch to jurors. His testimony — brutal, relentless and unquestionably damaging to Guzmán — was a kind of emotional punctuation mark.

Valdez started his account with a vivid description of his first day working in what he described as Guzmán’s “security circle.” On that day in 2004, he recalled, a man he knew as Fantasma — one of the kingpin’s bodyguards whose nickname translates to “ghost” — picked him up in Culiacán and took him to an airstrip where he boarded a plane for a short flight into the Sierra Madre. When Valdez landed at Guzmán’s hideout, someone walked up to him, he said, and placed a bulletproof vest, an AK-47 and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in his hands.

The rules of his new workplace were eventually explained to him.

He would be on duty for a month, he was told, then off for a month.

He would sleep in the dirt outside the kingpin’s cabin.

He would be paid 2,000 pesos a month (or a little more than $175).

He was never to approach the boss. If the boss wanted to speak with him, he would be summoned.

That happened, Valdez said, 10 or 15 days after he arrived at the encampment known as The Sky. As he approached Guzmán, he recalled, the crime lord jocularly asked, “Dude, how you doing?” Guzmán wanted to know about his new recruit’s service in the Mexican special forces. He also warned the novice gunman that he had to be especially vigilant in the mountains.

“Here,” Valdez recalled the drug lord saying, “you really have to be on the lookout.”

Shortly after, Valdez, in his first assignment as one of Guzmán’s sicarios, or assassins, was ordered to accompany the kingpin’s chief of security, Alejandro Aponte, known as El Negro, to hunt down and execute an informant. Valdez told jurors that three other killers accompanied him. One was known as El Ocho. The other was nicknamed Mojo Jojo.

After the hit team arrived at the informant’s house, Valdez said, they “subdued” the women and children then found their target hiding in a bedroom. The man was taken to an indoor patio where, apparently desperate, he wrapped his arms around one of its support columns. Valdez said that Aponte shot the man first with a burst of automatic gunfire. After he fell to the ground, Valdez said, another sicario shot him in the head.

Then the hit team simply returned to their pickup truck. “We headed toward the mountains,” Valdez said.

A few years later, he recalled, he watched Guzmán interrogate — then kill — an ally of his bitter enemies, the Arellano Félix brothers. Speaking softly in the silent courtroom, Valdez recounted how the kingpin had the man brought, bound and blindfolded, to a graveyard in one of his mountain camps. The man had already been tortured so viciously with an iron, he said, that his T-shirt had been soldered into his skin. He also reeked, Valdez added, from having been locked inside a hen house for days.

Although the victim couldn’t see it, he had been placed in front of his own freshly dug grave. Valdez said Guzmán asked the man several questions, and in the middle of an answer, pulled out a .25-caliber pistol and shot him.

“Remove his handcuffs and bury him,” he recalled the crime lord saying.

But as Valdez and another gunman bent to fetch the body, they realized the small caliber bullet hadn’t killed the man.

He was still gasping for air.

“And that’s how we dumped him in the hole and buried him,” Valdez said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

El Chapo is done... Make I go watch d series sef

Nbote:
El Chapo is done... Make I go watch d series sef

yes bro....but have you watched narcos

bada007:
yes bro....but have you watched narcos

Yea... 1, 2 and 3..

How do men become this devilish?

It beats my imagination how one life will comfortable taking another without remorse.

But this El chapo guy, he really suffered, did you know before escaping the first time, he was put in solitary confinement for years? Imagine that, being locked in a dark room with no TV, no entertainment or communication with the outside world of any kind for years.

I would rather die than be put in that condition.

Why is no one shouting " only in Africa" " black man with black heart "?
Colonised minds.