A US federal appeals court upholds the conviction of Mexican drug trafficker ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán

MADRID, Jan. 25 (Royals Blue) –

A federal court in the United States has ratified this Tuesday the conviction of the Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, and has rejected the appeals filed, among which he denounced having received unfair treatment.

Regarding this, the court has defended that Guzmán “was able to collaborate in his own defense and receive a fair trial, despite the conditions of imprisonment prior to the trial”, collects the US network CNN.

“The conditions of confinement prior to Guzmán’s trial, no matter how harsh they were, do not provide a basis to disturb his sentence,” added the judicial entity, who, therefore, has ratified his life sentence for the Mexican drug trafficker.

Guzmán was convicted in 2019 of carrying out a continuous criminal enterprise, including a series of large-scale violations related to the possession and trafficking of narcotics, as well as conspiracy to murder, illegal use of a firearm and conspire to launder money.

For its part, the defense of ‘El Chapo’ has announced that, after the rejection by the New York court, it is considering the possibility of raising its appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

‘El Chapo’ was extradited to the United States in January 2017, after escaping twice from maximum security prisons in Mexico, the first in 2001 and the second in 2015. A year later he was definitively arrested.

The 64-year-old Mexican ‘narco’, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel – one of the main drug distributors in the United States – rose to the position of most wanted criminal by US authorities after the death of the former leader of Al Qaeda Osama bin Laden in 2011.