A Colombian drug trafficker has elaborated on one of the most explosive claims made by the defence in the trial of Mexican cartel leader Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.
Alex Cifuentes told a court on Wednesday that Guzman had boasted about paying a $100million bribe to the former president of Mexico to call off a manhunt for the notorious kingpin.
The witness, who has described himself as Guzman’s right-hand man, discussed the alleged bribe under cross-examination by Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Guzman’s lawyers, in Brooklyn federal court.
Asked if he told authorities in 2016 that Guzman arranged the bribe, he answered, “That’s right.”
The former president – Enrique Peña Nieto – has previously denied taking bribes. His former chief of staff rejected the accusation on social media.
“The declarations of the Colombian drug trafficker in New York are false, defamatory and absurd,” wrote Francisco Guzman in a post on Twitter, adding the Pena Nieto government “located, detained and extradited” the Mexican kingpin.
The allegations are among the most explosive to emerge from Guzman’s trial, which began in November and has so far featured testimony of lower-level corruption.
Guzman, 61, was extradited to the United States in 2017 to face charges of trafficking cocaine, heroin and other drugs into the country as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Cifuentes testified he had told US prosecutors that Nieto initially reached out to Guzman, asking for $250m. Cifuentes told the prosecutors the bribe was paid in October 2012, when Pena Nieto was president-elect, he testified.
Cifuentes also said testified that Guzman once told him he had received a message from the Mexican president saying he did not have to live in hiding anymore.
Lichtman had promised jurors in his opening statement last November they would hear how Mexican drug kingpin Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada bribed Pena Nieto and another former president as part of a scheme to frame Guzman. He said Zambada was the real boss of the cartel.
Pena Nieto at the time called the claim “completely false and defamatory.”
US District Judge Brian Cogan, however, refused to allow Guzman’s lawyers to question Zambada’s brother about the alleged bribes last year.
It was unclear how Cifuentes’ testimony, which appeared to implicate Guzman, could be used to defend him, though Lichtman honed in on inconsistencies in Cifuentes’ memory. Cifuentes admitted that at a meeting last year, he told prosecutors he was no longer sure of the exact amounts of the bribes, but did not elaborate.
Pena Nieto was president of Mexico from December 2012 until November 2018. He was once a rising star in Mexico’s long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and was the former governor of the state of Mexico, the country’s most populous.
But the president ended his term a much diminished figure, pummelled by conflict-of-interest scandals, rampant crime and a lacklustre economy.
While Pena Nieto himself was barred by law from running for second term in 2018, his centrist party suffered a historic defeat at the polls as leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won in a landslide, relegating the PRI to the role of a marginal player in the new Congress.
Colombian-born Cifuentes is one of about a dozen witnesses who have so far testified against Guzman after striking deals with US prosecutors, in a trial that has provided a window into the secretive world of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the world’s most powerful drug trafficking organisations.
Cifuentes earlier on Tuesday had also testified that Guzman asked an associate to pay a $10 million bribe to a general. The witness said the bribe was never paid and Guzman subsequently ordered the associate killed, though the hit was never carried out.