El Chapo Trial Suggests Trump’s Wall Would Do Little to Stop Drug Smuggling


Some of the drugs were hidden in passenger cars, concealed in trucks in cans of jalapeños or stashed in tanker trains with ordinary loads of cooking oil. Others were sent beneath the border in sophisticated tunnels.

The 10 weeks of testimony at the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, have revealed that his innovative smuggling network typically went through legal checkpoints — not isolated stretches of the border where a wall might be an obstacle.

President Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southwestern border has not been mentioned at the trial, but it has lurked in the background of Mr. Guzmán’s prosecution, a watershed moment in America’s war on drugs.

The trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, is the first time that American federal prosecutors have publicly revealed the inner workings of Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa drug cartel, offering the most extensive details yet on the organization’s structure, financing and distribution methods. In doing so, prosecutors have relied on firsthand experts: a long list of Mr. Guzmán’s own former underlings and allies.

Though Mr. Trump has primarily pitched his border wall as a way to stop illegal immigration, he has recently suggested that it would also help allay the cross-border drug trade.

“If we build a powerful and fully designed see-through steel barrier on our southern border, the crime rate and drug problem in our country would be quickly and greatly reduced,” he said on Saturday. “Some say it could be cut in half.”

But the Guzmán trial has indicated that stopping the flow of drugs into the United States might be more complicated than that. Through the testimony of people who worked with Mr. Guzmán, prosecutors have shown that his cartel for decades was endlessly creative, constantly inventing new methods to circumvent detection.

“What you’re hearing in this trial is what front-line border workers observe throughout,” said Doris Meissner, who served as the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000 and now works at the Migration Policy Institute, an advocacy group.

Ms. Meissner added, “The idea that people are walking drugs across the border as though they are illegal immigrants who would then be stopped by a wall across the border, that is not the pattern.”