El Chapo’s Conviction: Another Empty Drug War Victory

Ted Galen Carpenter

Security, Americas

The defeat of El Chapo is not a win for a war waged with impractical prohibition practices.

A trial jury in New York has convicted Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the former kingpin of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, of multiple felonies. That outcome was even less surprising than Tom Brady playing in another Super Bowl earlier this month. Nevertheless, U.S. officials declared the convictions a victory for the people of the United States and Mexico. “There are those who say the war on drugs is not worth fighting,” said Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “Those people are wrong.”

Guzman’s fate was sealed when Mexican authorities extradited him to the United States. El Chapo had engineered escapes from prisons in Mexico, but his chances of replicating that feat in America were virtually nonexistent. In reality, Guzman had increasingly become an irrelevant factor in Mexico’s drug trade since his capture in January 2016.