Thu, Jan 12, 2012 page7

• Mexico’s El Chapo touted as No. 1 trafficker

  • AP, MEXICO CITY
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  The US Department of the Treasury called Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker” on Tuesday.

  The fugitive Sinaloa cartel leader also got a boost from Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who said she believed in Guzman more than in the government.

  It was the latest in an odd series of encomiums for Guzman, who was included this year on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, with an estimated fortune of US$1 billion.

  

  Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman poses in Almoloya, Mexico’s high security jail, on June 10, 2000. Guzman slipped out of the prison and into Mexican folklore on Jan. 19, 2001.

  Photo: Reuters

  The US embassy in Mexico City issued a statement saying three of Guzman’s alleged associates had been hit with sanctions under the drug Kingpin Act, which prohibits people in the US from conducting businesses with them and freezes their US assets. The two Mexican men and a Colombian allegedly aided Guzman’s trafficking operations.

  The statement quoted Adam Szubin, director of the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as saying the move “marks the fourth time in the past year that OFAC has targeted and exposed the support structures of the organization led by Chapo Guzman, the world’s most powerful drug trafficker.”

  Guzman, who escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 in a laundry truck and has a US$7 million bounty on his head, has long been recognized as Mexico’s most powerful drug capo. Authorities say his Sinaloa cartel has recently been expanding abroad, building international operations in Central and South America and the Pacific region.

  Del Castillo, who played a female drug trafficker in the TV series La Reina del Sur (Queen of the South), offered grudging praise for Guzman in a posting on Tuesday on the social media site Twextra, linked to her Twitter account.

  “Today, I believe more in El Chapo Guzman than in the governments who hide truths from me,” she wrote.

  The actress did not specify whether she was referring to the Mexican government or what she meant when she accused “governments” of “hiding the cures for cancer, AIDS, etc, for their own benefit and enrichment.”

  Del Castillo’s publicist, Marianne Sauvage, confirmed in an e-mail that the actress wrote the posting and that the account belonged to Del Castillo.

  The 800-word posting ended with an impassioned plea to Guzman.

  “Mr Chapo, wouldn’t it be great if you started trafficking with positive things? With cures for diseases, with food for street children, with alcohol for old people’s homes so they spend their final days doing whatever they like, trafficking with corrupt politicians and not with women and children who wind up as slaves?” it said. “Go ahead, dare to, sir, you would be the hero of heroes, let’s traffic with love, you know how.”

  Also on Tuesday, Mexican authorities said they had seized 32.6 tonnes of a precursor chemical used to make methamphetamines at the Pacific Ocean port of Manzanillo.

  Mexico’s navy said the chemical methylamine came in a shipment from China, but did not say whether Manzanillo was the final destination of the shipment. Mexico seized almost 675 tonnes of the chemical at sea ports in December alone, all of which was destined for Guatemala.

  Experts say that when another chemical is added, methylamine can yield its weight in uncut meth.

  Also on Tuesday, Mexican federal police reported they had defused a car bomb left outside the state detectives’ agency offices in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of the northern border state of Tamaulipas.
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