The chubby Colombian computer geek would not strike you as someone to challenge a cartel. His eyes shifting nervously, evidently uncomfortable, the baby-faced technician was ill at ease in the New York courtroom last week.
Yet Christian Rodriguez played perhaps the most important role in bringing down the all-powerful head of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The security that surrounded him gave testimony to that.
And as he told his story to an enrapt courtroom – “narcotourists” in the public seating, hanging off his every word – a picture emerged of a sophisticated and complex $14 billion web of criminality, and of a man who was, ultimately, brought…