NEW YORK—Once one of the world’s most powerful and notorious criminals, Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday—the mandatory punishment for a host of crimes spanning a quarter-century. Cogan also ordered the drug lord to pay $12.6 billion in forfeiture—a sum based on a conservative estimate of revenues from his cartel’s sales in the United States. He will likely spend his remaining years at the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”—the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. The sentencing was met with mixed reactions on Guzman’s home turf, where some credit the drug lord with building beneficial public infrastructure like roads and schools. “The Sinaloa cartel is not ‘El Chapo,’” he told AFP.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer July 18, 2019 20:15 UTC