Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, reportedly looked shocked on Tuesday, when a federal jury in Brooklyn returned a guilty verdict on all ten of the charges against him. Nobody else could muster much surprise: after a three-month trial in which prosecutors unleashed a tsunami of evidence against him, there was never any doubt that he would be convicted and, after his sentencing this summer, shipped off to a supermax prison. But during the trial, which I dropped in on periodically over the past few months, Guzmán had often seemed strangely detached from the gravity of the justice that he was facing. He grinned and waved and blew kisses to family members and supporters in the spectators’ gallery, and he often wore a look of benign surprise, with the raised eyebrows and fixed smile of a cartoon character. In the fluorescent light of the courtroom, El Chapo looked like a harmless geezer, a guy who should be playing shuffleboard. He looked, a friend of mine remarked, like an old man lost in a grocery store.
Yet, as one former adjutant after another took the stand, the jury was treated to a detailed anatomy of the drug cartel that El Chapo operated—and the terror that he exerted. This “Wizard of Oz” contrast between the bloodthirsty narco-oligarch who stood accused of running what is probably the most successful drug cartel in history and the little dude who sat at the defense table, dwarfed by his own lawyers, was jarring. But, then, that has always been the rub with El Chapo, the distinction between the figure of folklore and the brutal, banal, and very real evil of the man himself. The prosecution called fifty-six witnesses and the defense just one. To the degree that El Chapo’s defense team had any case at all, it was that the prosecution was ascribing an outsized power to Guzmán that he did not in fact possess. The defense argued, persuasively, that El Chapo was never the sole leader of the Sinaloa cartel, that other figures—chief among them Ismael Zambada García, who is known as El Mayo and is still at large—held great sway. They also pointed out, persuasively, that the corrupt Mexican state itself bore a great deal of culpability for the tons of drugs that the Sinaloa cartel shipped into the United States and the impunity with which the cartel operated. All of this was true. The problem for El Chapo was that it was also beside the point: the caricature of a mythical icon of the Mexican drug trade may have been reductive, but that doesn’t change the baseline truth of the specific allegations against him.
I first wrote about Guzmán in 2012, at a time when, on this side of the border, he was less of a household name. In that piece, which was a sort of business-school case study of the Sinaloa cartel, I wrestled with this challenge of untangling the myth and the man. In 2014, after Guzmán was captured by Mexican authorities (with a decisive assist from their American counterparts), I wrote a piece for this magazine about the effort to track him down. The tonal challenge persisted: How do you capture the telenovela outlandishness of this story without glossing over the rampant ugliness or minimizing the appalling cost? I emphasized that Guzmán was responsible for thousands of murders. This conundrum took on a surreal dimension for me when, after that piece ran in the magazine, I was approached by an attorney for the Guzmán family who inquired about whether I might be interested in ghostwriting the kingpin’s memoir. (I passed.)
In the aftermath of his conviction, it is worth dwelling on what we talk about when we talk about El Chapo. In a press conference following the verdict, one of the prosecutors heralded the conviction as a victory in the war on drugs. That seems like the wrong frame; taking El Chapo out of the game will not make the slightest dent in the flow of drugs across the border. Some craven observers, like Ted Cruz, have tried to use El Chapo’s case as an argument for a border wall, though anyone who followed the trial would recognize it as a tutorial in the pointlessness of such a measure. Take it from the federal agents and former high-ranking Sinaloa smugglers who testified: most illegal drugs coming into the United States from Mexico do so through official ports of entry.
But there is a deeper sense in which the rhetoric we use when we talk about the border and the war on drugs is misguided and always has been. The real engine for the cross-border trade in marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and fentanyl is not the clever salesmanship of Mexican crooks—it’s the rampant demand of American addicts and recreational users. This is a point that seldom impinges on our national dialogue about the border with Mexico: the drug trade is dynamic. What makes it unstoppable is not weak border protections or wily Mexicans but the insatiable American appetite for drugs. Where there is money and demand, trade will flourish, borders be damned. Years ago, I interviewed a former D.E.A. official who told me about a high-tech fence that was put up along the border in Arizona. “They erect this fence,” he said, “only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they’re flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side.”
Under, over, through: as long as there is an American demand for drugs, drugs will find their way into America.
And, from a Mexican perspective, part of what is so galling about this debate is that the drug war there, which has claimed a hundred thousand or more lives in recent decades, is fuelled by that demand. Drugs move north across the border to be sold, and then money—American money—moves south, across the same border, to pay the cartels. We sneer at corruption and state failure in Mexico, at the ease with which El Chapo and his associates could buy off officials at every level of government. But missing in this analysis is the fact that it is American money—our money—that underwrites those bribes. And all those deaths in Mexico—it’s telling that we don’t even know the aggregate number, which makes it easier to forget that each individual murder marks a specific, heartrending tragedy for some family somewhere—are attributable in part to the murderousness of the cartels and the weakness and corruption of the Mexican state, of course, but also to the guns which are routinely smuggled from our country, where it’s laughably easy to buy guns, into Mexico, where it’s harder to do so. We look at those deaths as if they were so foreign, as if they were an act of nature. But if you know anything about cross-border commodities markets, licit or illicit, you must recognize that we can’t blame Mexicans for drug overdoses in our country and not acknowledge that we bear some corresponding responsibility for drug murders in theirs.
If I sound bottomlessly cynical about all of this, I suppose writing about the drug war will do that to you. But I don’t agree with one prevalent strain of commentary on the El Chapo trial, which is that the whole spectacle was just a charade put on by the authorities, the show trial of a designated fall guy rather than a landmark moment for criminal justice. Any trial can serve as theatre, and the El Chapo proceedings took this tendency to its logical extreme. But a big criminal trial also serves a more sober empirical function: in the methodical accumulation of carefully corroborated evidence, prosecutors create a detailed record of events that might otherwise have remained shrouded in a fog of intrigue. By placing the man in a room from which he could not escape and making him listen to witness after witness who described his greed and cruelty, the trial reconciled, once and for all, the myth of El Chapo with the little man himself. And in doing so, it dismantled the most enduring and pernicious element of that myth, which was the notion of impunity—the idea that systems fail, anyone can be bought, crime pays, and the villain gets away with it in the end. The conviction of El Chapo won’t end the drug war, or even the Sinaloa cartel. Far from it. But, by bringing an infamously uncatchable mass murderer to justice and making him answer, finally, for his many crimes, the verdict represents an important symbolic victory for our beleaguered notions of the rule of law.
