Cartel nexus of 'Chapo' Guzmán bribed military in Ecuador, said witness in court

[el-barto]

A Colombian drug trafficker, the nexus of Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán in his incursion with the drug business in Latin America, told the US court on Tuesday that the Sinaloa cartel bribed members of the Ecuadorian army to transport drugs from the border. with Colombia to Quito and Guayaquil.

Jorge Milton Cifuentes, alias el Jota, who is the sixth witness of the Prosecutor's Office in the historic trial against Guzmán, said in his testimony that the shipping fee was $ 100 per kilo. It was a good deal. "The army trucks do not register, so there is no danger of losing cocaine," he said.

Cifuentes, also known as Simón, was in the 90s a link between the Mexican cartel of Sinaloa and the Colombian cartel of Norte del Valle, led by Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, aka Chupeta.

Alleged Ecuadorean nexus of the Sinaloa cartel was imprisoned for 14 months
The job of El Jota was to supervise the transportation of cocaine in airplanes from Colombia to Mexico and then its arrival in the United States. He was arrested on November 8, 2012 in Venezuela and then extradited to the United States.

Ecuador included in the drug trafficking route
In another part of his statement, Cifuentes explained that in 2007 Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán met with executives of Pemex, Mexico's state oil company, to suggest using oil tankers and loading cocaine from Ecuador. This plan did not materialize.

After canceling the Pemex plan, he said that with Guzman they planned to smuggle cocaine from Ecuador to Mexico using shark fishing boats. Jorge explains that he bought drugs from the guerrillas of the FARC; 'El Chapo' knew it and "he thought it was fine".

In January of 2017, Ecuador is mentioned twice in a 56-page document, in which the US Attorney's Office argues the reasons why the leader of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán must be in custody, after being extradited to EE .US. from a prison in Mexico.

The memorandum details the criminal activity of the capo, which expanded to Ecuador, as evidenced by the seizure of 373 kilograms of cocaine in a small airplane at an Ecuadorian airport, made around January 15, 2014.

In operations to combat drug trafficking, the Ecuadorian authorities succeeded in arresting Army Captain Telmo Castro Donoso, who served 14 months in prison. Castro was identified as the alleged leader of a drug trafficking gang with links to the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.

Interview with Sean Penn
The voice of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was heard for the first time on Tuesday in the courtroom where his trial is being held.

US prosecutors showed a YouTube video of the Mexican drug trafficker wearing a cap talking to the camera. This is the video that "El Chapo" recorded for the American actor Sean Penn and the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo and, according to what was said in the court, was posted on the internet in 2015.

"El Chapo," one of the best-known drug traffickers, has pleaded not guilty to the accusation of accumulating a multimillion-dollar fortune through the trafficking of tons of cocaine and other drugs from Mexico to the United States. If convicted, he would face a possible life sentence. This is the fifth week of trial in federal court in Brooklyn. (I)