Drug lord El Chapo ‘paid $100m bribe to former president of Mexico’

Former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto was once paid a $100 million (£78 million) bribe by drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, a court heard.

The claim was made in testimony by Alex Cifuentes, a Colombian narcotics trafficker who was El Chapo’s right-hand man and lived with the fugitive cartel boss in the Mexican mountains while he was on the run.

Giving evidence at Brooklyn federal court in New York, Cifuentes testified that he had told US prosecutors Mr Peña Nieto initially asked El Chapo for $250 million (£195 million).

Cifuentes said the bribe was paid in October 2012 by a friend of El Chapo when Mr Peña Nieto was president-elect. He also claimed El Chapo had told him that Mr Peña Nieto said he did not have to live in hiding any more if he paid the money.

The ex-president, in office between 2012 and 2018, was not available for comment. But he has previously denied taking bribes. His former chief-of-staff Francisco Guzman called the bribery claims “false, defamatory and absurd”.

He added that it was the Peña Nieto government that “located, detained and extradited” the Mexican drug king.

El Chapo, 61, said to have headed the world’s biggest drugs cartel, has been on trial in the US since November after he was extradited from Mexico to face charges of ­trafficking cocaine, heroin and other drugs. He faces a possible life sentence if ­convicted.

He broke out of prison after first being arrested in 2014, escaping through a mile-long tunnel dug from his cell. He was recaptured in Mexico in January 2016.

During his opening statements at the trial, El Chapo’s defence lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman had alleged that Mr Peña Nieto and other former Mexican presidents had “received hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes” from El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel.

While previous testimony at the trial had implicated police and army officials as well as lower-level politicians, Cifuentes’s testimony was the first to extend the corruption allegations to Mexico’s top politicians.

Cifuentes was extradited to the US on drug trafficking charges following his arrest in Mexico in 2013, and agreed to co-operate with American authorities after pleading guilty. El Chapo’s lawyer has also alleged that Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president between 2006 and 2012, was bribed by the Sinaloa cartel.

Calderón has called the claim “absolutely false”.

The trial, attended every day by El Chapo’s wife Emma Coronel Aispuro, 29, continues.