The tectonic plates beneath a big mafia trial shift out of sight from the proceedings, but occasionally there is a glimpse of the bigger picture. The trial of the alleged Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán – which resumes on Thursday – has been no exception.

The proceedings have offered extraordinary detail of the workings of a Mexican cartel, but have been hallmarked by what is unseen – and kept that way by Judge Brian Cogan.

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Day-to-day testimony has been like a Netflix thriller, yet it has obscured the nexus of top-level corruption the world’s biggest criminal organisation operated north and south of the US border.

The detail from cartel “snitches” testifying for the prosecution against their old boss or partner has been riveting. Guzmán’s first employee, pilot Miguel Ángel Martínez, described a trip with Guzmán to Japan, Thailand and Macau, and a visit they made to Los Angeles to spend $6m on planes before a gambling spree in Las Vegas. Guzmán went to Switzerland, he said, for cellular anti-ageing treatment.

Guzmán ran a private zoo, and distributed bonus diamond-studded Rolexes and fancy cars to favourite underlings. Cocaine was smuggled to the US in what looked like cans of jalapeño peppers. Even Guzmán – usually pensive – laughed when his lawyer William Purpura, picked up one of the cans entered in evidence, and told the court: “I’ve been dying to hold this one.”

The former chief of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía – alias La Chupeta, the Lollipop – gave enthralling evidence about one of the most important partnerships in narco-trafficking history, after Guzmán impressed the Colombian with his insistence on only the best-quality product, speed of delivery – and his demand for an extra percentage.

Ramírez, his face disfigured by plastic surgery, boasted about the 400,000 kilos of cocaine he had moved, and 150 executions he had ordered – including a family in New Jersey. His testimony also traced Guzmán’s takeover of Colombian distribution networks in the US while Ramírez did a short stretch in jail.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jorge Cifuentes is cross-examined during the trial of ‘El Chapo’ in Brooklyn federal court in New York. Photograph: Jane Rosenberg/Reuters

Another Colombian narco, Jorge Cifuentes, testified to having furnished rightwing Colombian paramilitaries with 5,000 AK-47 assault rifles with which to fight leftwing Farc guerrillas, but then arranging a cocaine deal between Guzmán and the Farc. The first we heard of Guzmán’s voice was on a wiretap, expertly haggling with the comrades.

The narco witnesses have offered detailed, sometimes darkly funny testimony; they are proud of what they did. Asked at one point about the killing of two female Colombian police agents, Chupeta gave a thumbs-up. His only apparent remorse was at the loss of two loads to US authorities.

The star turn was the Sinaloa cartel accountant Jesús Zambada García (brother of the drug lord who probably betrayed Guzmán and now leads the cartel, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada), who testified with cool aplomb about his “investors”, “costs” and “returns”.

In his coverage of the trial, David Brooks of the Mexican daily La Jornada wrote: “Chapo Guzmán was one of the successful impresarios of a Mexican neoliberal model, heading a transnational commercial and financial operation dedicated to satisfying an insatiable demand in the US, generating hundreds of millions of dollars monthly for Mexico.”

But Guzmán must go down as a big-catch criminal, and that is where the riptides beneath the surface matter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jesús Zambada García: Sinaloa cartel accountant. Photograph: Alberto Vera/AFP/Getty Images

Italian mafia parlance calls it “dietrologia” – “behindology”, the science of what lies behind appearances. And what lies behind the Chapo trial comprises the corruption of the Mexican state, what became of Guzmán’s money, the role of the turncoat witnesses – and that of the US government in running and recruiting them.

Zambada García admitted bribing airport authorities, federal police and even Interpol, and said the cartel’s man in government, Genaro García Luna, was paid one instalment of $3m while head of the federal investigation agency, then another after being appointed minister for public security. Similar allegations against García Luna had previously been made in Mexico, including in two books by the journalist Anabel Hernández. In a statement to Mexican media, García Luna denied the allegation, which he described as “a lie, defamation and perjury”.

But Zambada García also alleged that García Luna was paid $56m by Guzmán’s affiliates the Beltrán Leyva brothers, one of whom, Héctor, was responsible for paying off politicians. Héctor Beltrán Leyva died in a Mexican jail the night before Zambada García’s testimony.

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According to discussion during a sidebar between counsel and the judge, Zambada planned to go one better and elaborate on a $6m payment to an “incumbent” Mexican president. He was stopped from doing so by a prosecutors’ motion, upheld by Judge Cogan, “protecting individuals and entities who are not parties to this case and who would face embarrassment”, he said.

The trial chamber – and the Mexican people – cannot, then, know which president was allegedly paid by Guzmán, and for what. A subsequent sidebar discussed the contents of a prosecution memorandum submitted under seal; the transcript of the sidebar was then itself sealed.

When John Gotti – head of the Gambino mafia clan – went on trial in this same New York courthouse in 1992, it took just one “cooperating witness” to convict him.

In Guzmán’s trial, Mexican narcos are lining up to testify: six so far, and as many as 10 more to follow.

Guzmán’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman calls them “degenerates” who will say anything to get sentences commuted.

During the first week of the Guzmán trial, on 9 November, Vicente Zambada Nieblo – “El Vicentillo” – pleaded guilty in Chicago to overseeing logistics for the Sinaloa cartel and trafficking vast quantities of cocaine and heroin through that city. Vicentillo is El Mayo’s son, and the accountant’s nephew.

His 19-page plea was entered suddenly, a year after Vicentillo had agreed with US authorities to cooperate “in any matter” – making him conveniently available to testify against Guzmán in New York. Vicentillo does not contest a staggering $1.3bn forfeiture.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is escorted in Ciudad Juárez by Mexican police as he is extradited to the United States in January 2017. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

But Zambada Nieblo is more than just a turncoat: a year-long investigation by the Mexican newspaper El Universal, published in October 2017, established definitively that Vicentillo had worked for the DEA while conducting his duties for the cartel.

Guzmán’s lawyers may not get to pursue these relationships, which complicate the usual narrative of good, honest DEA detective work, even though an addendum to a Department of Justice audit of the agency, published in March 2017, voiced “specific concerns about how the DEA used and paid confidential sources”, with “potential implications for national security”.

Also excluded was an attempt by the defence to ask prosecution witnesses about “Operation Fast and Furious”, a project run by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow weapons to enter Mexico illegally, through cooperating straw-buyers, in hopes of catching their final recipients.

Of the 2,000 guns allowed to “walk” between 2007 and 2011, only 665 were recovered, one of them in Guzmán’s’s lair in 2014 – but none of this can feature at trial.

The evidence about money has been detailed when it is “back in Mexico”, but coy when it moves beyond there. Martínez flew planes loaded with cash – between $8m and $10m from Tijuana three times a month – and hauled a Samsonite case filled with $10m to “a Mexico City bank” monthly. Cash deposits are described hidden beneath beds and even underwater.

But there the money-trail ends, though the US Senate’s and Department of Justice’s own investigations have established that hundreds of millions proceeded through the Wachovia and HSBC banks north of the border – these play no part in evidence hitherto.

So the Guzmán trial, as the US government and Judge Cogan conduct it, follows the focused “kingpin” strategy, which supposes that once a cartel leader is taken down, the war on drugs is being won. Yet more cocaine is leaving Colombia than ever, and last year was Mexico’s most violent since this phase of the drug wars began.

As his trial resumes next week, Guzmán is old news back in Mexico: initiative is with the rising Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación and its leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho”. One day, El Chapo himself might testify against El Mencho – if he ever gets caught; that may be Guzmán’s only chance of seeing his seven-year-old twin daughters as a free man.