Drug lord El Chapo’s smuggling tunnel which ‘he used to traffick a TON of cocaine into the US’ is shown in court
The tunnel, hidden under a pool tale in Agua Prieta, Mexico, was almost tall enough for the drug lord to stand up in
THE tunnel that drug lord Joaquín Guzman allegedly used to smuggle a ton of cocaine into the US has been shown at his trial.
Jurors saw video of the 50ft underpass from Mexico — which ended two streets from a US customs site in Arizona.
The tunnel, hidden under a pool table in Agua Prieta, Mexico, was 5ft 4in high.
That was nearly tall enough for the 5ft 6in cartel kingpin, 61 — whose El Chapo nickname means “Shorty” — to stand upright.
His henchmen used pushcarts to ferry 95 per cent pure coke wrapped up as 1kg bricks.
Former agent Carlos Salazar told the court he learned of it in May 1990 thanks to a tip from an informant paid just £390.
Lawmen found packages of cocaine stamped with labels such as “MR”, “OSOP” and “Yahama”, whose meaning is so far unclear.
Mr Salazar told the New York trial: “Those are the actual bricks or the kilo wrappings of coke that we discovered.”
Chemist Robert Arnold, who tested them, said they were “nearly pure cocaine — I found the cocaine was 95 per cent”.
Police smashed open the tunnel on the US side by jack-hammering through a concrete floor.
A year earlier, in 1989, El Chapo is said to have been picked to lead the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel’s Pacific Coast operations with right-hand man Ismael Zambada.
Zambada’s brother Jesus Reynaldo Zambada was due to testify for prosecutors yesterday.
El Chapo has twice fled maximum-security Mexican prisons.
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He was recaptured in January 2016 after five months on the run.
He faces 17 criminal raps and a life jail term if convicted.
His lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman claimed he is a scapegoat and that Ismael Zambada is the real cartel supremo. The trial continues.
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