Last year, the BBC documented a much less sensational story: how more than 100 Ugandan women wound up in Iraq in the first place, attracted to the war zone by unscrupulous human traffickers posing as legitimate businessmen.
In 2011, the coastguard shed light on the sheer scale of the underground trade when it announced that a year-long investigation in Sardinia had identified a network of 70 suspected traffickers working in outwardly legitimate fish wholesale and distribution companies.
Immigration documents, whether legitimate or fraudulent, are seized by the traffickers.
Locals say traffickers co-existed peacefully with legitimate businesses when Guzman's gang dominated here.
But he points to the fall in medicinal marijuana prices to near that of illegal street dealers as a sign that momentum has swung decisively away from the cartels and traffickers and in favour of a legitimate industry that will only grow over time.
However, environmentalists say such loopholes allow poachers and traffickers to pass off new ivory as legitimate.
Experts say any legal big cat bone trade gives the opportunity for traffickers to pass off illegal wild bones as legitimate.
Like the legitimate businessmen energized by the loosening of North American trade, the traffickers have sought new economies of scale, taken advantage of the freer movement of Mexican trucking into the United States and even shifted some production closer to consumers.
He rejected the word "trafficker," and insisted that his business was entirely legitimate.
Although he owned an import-export company that conducted legitimate business, he had also developed a reputation as a trafficker willing to funnel munitions to rogue states and armed groups in defiance of international sanctions and embargoes.
