The trial of drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera did not reveal much that Mexicans did not know, but it did remind many of their government’s failings.
MEXICO CITY — He was once the most wanted man in Mexico, but many Mexicans barely skipped a beat after hearing the news on Tuesday that a jury in New York City delivered a guilty verdict against the drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera.
The country appears to have moved on since Mr. Guzmán, who is known as El Chapo, was captured three years ago and later extradited to the United States. The days when he transfixed public imagination now seem very distant.
Violence has soared, putting to rest any hope that the capture of drug capos like Mr. Guzmán would limit the bloodshed.
And corruption — not the drug war — is at the center of public debate these days. Mexicans have a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is disrupting traditional politics and dominating the news cycle.
“The reaction, of rather lack of it, is just a clear reflection of who we are as a country,” said Jacobo Dayan, who studies crimes against humanity at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. He added, “Where we have more capacity for outrage is when it comes to corruption, but not so much left for violence.”
Mexican media covered the three-month trial as it peeled back the inner workings of Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, the sophisticated reach of his smuggling enterprise and the violence that he unleashed against his rivals.
There were some surprises, like Mr. Guzmán’s obsession with spying on his wife and mistresses, and the disturbing revelation that he drugged and raped girls as young as 13. But much of the trial offered details that Mexicans already knew or had suspected.
“What was proven in El Chapo’s case is what is universally known in Mexico,” said Esteban Illades, an editor at Nexos magazine, which put the trial on its cover this month.
