Thread by @alanfeuer

News from the Chapo trial:
In late 2007, Chapo met w/ executives from Pemex, the Mexico's national petroleum company, to use their oil tankers to ship cocaine from Ecuador.

Present at the meeting, up in the mountains at Chapo's secret hideout, was a Pemex executive named Alfonso Acosta (sp?). Also there: Damaso Lopez, one of Chapo's men, and Jorge Cifuentes, a Colombia trafficker.

As recounted by Cifuentes, the plan was to move the coke up from Ecuador inside the Pemex tankers to a Mexican refinery. We'll learn more about it shortly...

While the plan didn't work out in the end, Cifuentes said, there were several meetings to discuss it. The idea was proposed by Vincente Zambada Niebla, the son of Mayo Zambada, Chapo's chief partner. Vincente was the one, Cifuentes said, who had "the connections" to Pemex.

Jorge Cifuentes had all kinds of corrupt connections. After testifying about the aborted coke deal w/ Pemex, he talked about buying drugs from FARC guerrillas in Colombia. Chapo knew the drugs were coming the FARC.
"He thought it was fine," Cifuentes said.

Cifuentes also said he bribed the Ecuadorian army to move his coke in military trucks from the Ecuador-Colombia border to his warehouses in Quito and Guayaquil.
He said he paid Captain Telmo Castro, an Ecuadorian army officer, $100 per kilo to ship the coke south.

In the afternoon session, Cifuentes admitted bribing the Ecuadorian navy too. The payments were information on the location of American naval forces.

The scope of the corruption he has testified to is astonishing. Chapo once introduced him, he said, to a guy who ran a catering company at the Bogota airport. The caterer was able to sneak cocaine aboard planes owned by the Mexican airline Aeropostal, run by one of Chapo's men.

Meanwhile, the Mexico Airport was also under also Chapo's control, other witnesses have said. And it wasn't just planes, of course. Cifuentes mentioned this afternoon that Chapo once tried to buy a cruise ship for smuggling. (He didn't in the end.)

Cifuentes has an engaging anecdotal style. Once, he said, while chatting w/Chapo at his mountain hideout, there was a huge explosion. Turns out, it was one of Chapo's meth labs blowing up.

While staying w/Chapo, Cifuentes would sometimes roll himself joints from his host's marijuana fields. Once, he said, he offered Chapo a hit. Chapo took the hit.
"This does nothing for me," Chapo said.

Cifuentes' most brazen scam involved--amazingly--a foundation he created to protect "indigenous people" in the Amazon. It was meant to preserve 7 million hectares of unprotected jungle but in reality was a no-bid deal for his own companies to get up to $1.5 billion in contracts.

As in often the case w/those in Chapo's orbit, talk of greed was closely followed by talk of violence.
Cifuentes confessed to a bizarre botched murder plot he was involved in when he was in prison at age 18.
It revolved around a cyanide-laced arepa.

Long story short, Cifuentes volunteered to kill a fellow inmate the Colombian cartels wanted dead. They gave him a gun, a blade, a grenade and some cyanide, allowing him to choose of which weapon he wanted to use.
He said he chose "the simplest one"--the poison.

So one day, as the prison cooks were warming up breakfast, he noticed the grill guy had stepped away and made his move. He sprinkled the cyanide one of the arepas just before his victim took it.
But the guy ended up taking two and only ate one--the one w/o the cyanide.

Undeterred, Cifuentes moved on to his 2nd choice of weapon--the grenade.
One night, he threw the grenade in his victim's cell. But Colombian prison's had cement-framed beds at the time. The grenade rolled under the bed and the guy survived w/only a little shrapnel in his leg.

But it was hard to blame poor Cifuentes for his crimes seeing as he grew up in a family of criminals. There were even phone calls introduced in court today of Jorge discussing the travails of his drug-dealing life with...his mom.

In one, he complained to mom about how the Ecuadorian authorities seized 8 tons of his and Chapo's coke in 2009. "It was a total loss," his mom said, commiserating with him.

In a 2nd call (w/his sister, also a trafficker) he groused that their nephew had stolen 225 kilos of Chapo's cocaine.
Jorge, worried, wanted to find it but, according to the sister, their mom said don't bother:
"Why look for the 225 kilos, if we're going to lose them anyway?"