7 Tons of Cocaine in Jalapeño Cans: The Evidence Against El Chapo

NEW YORK — At 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 8, 1992, a band of armed assassins burst into a crowded discothèque in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, looking for revenge. Drawing weapons from their coats, contemporaneous news reports said, the gunmen shot out the nightclub’s lights and then trained their fire on the reveling members of a drug gang called the Arellano Félix organization.

Six people died in the shootout that ensued, and chroniclers of Mexico’s brutal drug wars have long attributed the massacre to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a young kingpin known as El Chapo, who was settling a score with the leaders of the gang — the brothers Francisco Javier and Ramón Arellano Félix. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn claimed that Guzmán was indeed involved and said that they planned to tell the tale of the decades-old slaughter at his trial.

The gunfight — which took place, prosecutors said, as Guzmán was consolidating his control of smuggling routes as a rising power in the Sinaloa drug cartel — was mentioned in a 90-page government memo filed in the case Tuesday. With the sprawling conspiracy trial set to begin in September, the memo was designed to list the crimes that Guzmán was believed to have committed, but were not specifically laid out in his indictment. Those were legion, the memo said, and included murders, acts of torture, kidnappings, prison breaks and an attempt to smuggle 7 tons of cocaine in cans of jalapeños.

In the 15 months since Guzmán was sent from Mexico to New York, his prosecution has been bogged down in legal technicalities related to his extradition and in arguments about the harsh conditions of his confinement in the high-security wing of Manhattan’s federal jail. The government’s new filing was the first detailed account of the often gruesome evidence that prosecutors plan to present to the jury.

In 2001, the government said, as Guzmán was making war on two rival gangs — the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas — he ordered his pistoleros to capture and torture any members of the groups they could find. Some of the men were brought to him “bound and helpless,” the memo said, for personal interrogations. “In at least one instance,” prosecutors wrote, “the defendant himself shot the rivals at point-blank range and ordered his lackeys to dispose of the bodies.”

Nine years later, while Guzmán was fighting another competitor, the Beltrán Leyva organization, he received word that one of its top lieutenants, Israel Rincón Martínez, had been kidnapped by his henchmen, the government said. According to the memo, Rincón was shuttled between a series of Guzmán’s properties, where he was tortured and questioned by Guzmán’s cousin, Juan Guzmán Rocha. Even though Guzmán ordered the interrogators not to kill Rincón until he got there, the memo claimed that by the time he arrived, Rincón was dead.

The memo clearly sought to portray Guzmán, 58, as a calculating and violent man. In 2006, for instance, after relaxing over lunch, he had two members of the Zetas beaten, the government said, then shot them both in the head “with a long gun.” According to the memo, Guzmán then “ordered his workers to dig a hole in the ground, throw the bodies in the hole and light the bodies on fire.”

Guzmán’s lawyer, A. Eduardo Balarezo, said Tuesday that he was reviewing the memo and would “respond in due course.”

For several months, Balarezo has been arguing — mostly to no avail — that Guzmán cannot get a fair trial with the severe restrictions placed on him in custody and the sensational publicity surrounding the prosecution. On Monday, he filed his own court papers asking the government to provide him with the criminal histories of the various drug lords, couriers, enforcers and accountants that prosecutors may put on the stand — as many as 40 witnesses, some of whom may be allowed to testify under aliases.

Those witnesses will likely be the ones who describe the brutalities the government included in its memo, but their accounts will not be the only evidence presented. Prosecutors wrote that they also had satellite photos of Guzmán and his operation, seized drug ledgers, dozens of videos, thousands of intercepted phone calls and emails, and more than 300,000 pages of documents. They said they might even offer evidence about payments Guzmán made to his lawyers as “proof of the defendant’s unexplained wealth and substantial income.”

And yet there remain certain things that the government does not want the jury to hear. The memo said that included any suggestion of the charitable works that Guzmán performed in Mexico or his recent announcement through a lawyer that he was planning to run — from his jail cell in New York — for the Mexican Senate.

The government has also asked the presiding judge, Brian M. Cogan, to exclude any mention of the interview that actor Sean Penn conducted with Guzmán for Rolling Stone magazine in 2015 while Guzmán was hiding at a safe house in the hills of Mexico. The government took issue with the interview because in it, Penn referred to Guzmán as “a Robin Hood-like figure” and alleged that the American drug-buying public was complicit in his crimes.