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Anyone convicted of trafficking a fraction as much cocaine and heroin could normally expect a life sentence. But the twins can enter their sentencing hearing Tuesday confident of receiving far less.
That's because they spilled secrets that led to the indictments of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, a half-dozen of his lieutenants and around 40 lower-level traffickers, prosecutors are asking for a remarkably lenient term - around 10 years.
If credited for six years in protective custody, the 33-year-old siblings could go free within a few years.
Guzman "ran the one of the biggest trafficking organizations in the last 100 years, and these brothers were crucial in helping to bring him and his people to justice," said Jack Riley, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Chicago and now the agency's No. 3 in Washington. "I don't think you can get bigger than that."
Details of the twins' story have been kept under seal for years, but recently opened federal government files, and an Associated Press review of documents in related cases, have lifted some of the secrecy surrounding the two, offering a fuller narrative of their journey from flamboyant teen traffickers to associates of Guzman, who was captured last year by Mexican authorities.
American authorities portray the twins as among the most valuable drug traffickers who ever became informants. Chicago criminal lawyer Joe Lopez, who represented several clients indicted on evidence from the twins, put it more starkly: "They're some of the most significant rats in U.S. history."
Drug-world figures weighed in on their importance, too, in their own way. After word spread in mid-2009 that the twins had turned informants, their father was kidnapped, according to government documents. A note left for the twins on the windshield of his abandoned car read, "Shut up or we are going to send you his head." He is presumed dead.
Prosecutors cited his death and the fact that the twins - as well as their mother, wives and children - will live in fear for the rest of their lives as one reason for leniency. They also want to use the lighter sentence as an enticement to urge other cartel associates to cooperate.
The threat of retaliation by cartel members looms over the case. Since becoming informants, the twins have never appeared in public. Because of the constant danger, the name of their defense attorney has also been kept secret. And it's unclear how the brothers will be protected in prison or after their release.
The speed with which twins ascended the drug-world hierarchy had something to do with location. Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, where they grew up, is surrounded by major rail lines and highways. It's an aspiring trafficker's dream - a transportation hub within a city that's a transportation hub to the nation.

As dealers in their teens, they had reputations for being flashy but savvy, said Lopez, who had some clients from the same neighborhood. The twins' fondness for bling was illustrated by a list of items agents said they would forfeit. It included $406,137 in jewelry.
Only after the brothers fled Chicago around 2004 for Mexico, apparently fearing arrest following their indictment in Milwaukee, did their trafficking careers soar.
It's not clear how they first made contact with the Sinaloa cartel, but by mid-2005 they were summoned by Guzman himself, according to government filings. Flown to an airstrip in Sinaloa, they were taken to a secret mountain compound to hammer out drug deals with the kingpin.
From 2004 on, prosecutors say, the brothers ran their entire U.S. operation from a Mexican ranch, issuing orders by phone. Their network stretched to from New York, Detroit and Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and Vancouver, Canada.
Strict rules governed the drug shipments. Guzman's people got the drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border - sometimes via tunnels - and were responsible until the packages were transferred to Flores associates in the U.S. If the drugs were lost somewhere between that point and Chicago, the brothers would be on the hook for the full cost.
Court documents say the twins approached U.S. authorities on their own in the summer of 2008, offering to cooperate. The papers do not explain why, though it happened during bloody conflicts between cartels, and the twins may have feared they would soon fall victim.
Still, they continued to do business with the cartel, now with the aim of gathering evidence.
According to court documents, they met Guzman again in his mountain compound in October 2008, when he made an ominous request of Margarito Flores: Could he obtain rocket and grenade launchers? They would use them, he was told, to attack a U.S. or Mexican government office to send the message that cartel suspects were not to be extradited.
The pressure on the twins was building.
Then something triggered U.S. agents' concern. On Nov. 30, 2008, they gave the brothers two hours' notice to get out of Mexico. They flew to Chicago with little but the clothing they wore.

Identical Twins Who Spilled Mexican Cartel Secrets To Be Sentenced

On November 3, 1969, president Richard Nixon <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2303" target="_blank">addressed</a> the nation, at one point laying out "what has been described as the Nixon Doctrine," a three-point foreign policy "to prevent future Vietnams."
The third of these has cast a long shadow over the US's foreign affairs. Nixon called for the US to "furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments."&#xa0;Instead of losing blood and treasure in tomorrow's wars, Nixon suggested, the US could simply arm its preferred side.
The problem, underscored by the Obama Administration's longstanding&#xa0;<a href="http://time.com/68336/syria-obama-anti-aircraft-missiles/" target="_blank">hesitance</a> to give guns to secular militants fighting the Assad regime in Syria, is that weapons can fall into the wrong hands, tipping the scales of a conflict in unintended and unforeseen ways.
"Smart guns" - weapons that, through various technical means, become inoperable over time or only fire when in the hands of their intended user - could change that.
Particularly dangerous weapons could be engineered in order to have a short shelf life. An unnamed former national security official in the Bush administration&#xa0;<a href="http://time.com/68336/syria-obama-anti-aircraft-missiles/" target="_blank">told</a> TIME that "You can build obsolescence into MANPADS," the highly portable, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile launchers built to shoot down aircraft.
Speaking with The Economist, Patrick McCarthy, head of the UN's office on <keyword id="6356001" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="international">International</keyword> Small Arms Control Standards, spoke of one mechanism for such a design feature: special <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590764-arms-control-new-technologies-make-it-easier-track-small-arms-and-stop-them">chemical propellants</a> in missile-launchers and mortars that break down and become inert over time.
In an article exploring possible solutions to the war in Syria, <keyword id="6354810" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="Defense">defense</keyword> policy expert Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies <a href="https://csis.org/publication/syria-us-power-projection-and-search-equalizer" target="_blank">speculated</a> that weapons could be shut off "in the presence of US and allied forces or civil aircraft" or remain locked behind periodically changing passwords that only the weapons' intended recipients would know.
"These are ideas that I know were raised in DDR&amp;E [design, development, research and engineering] more than 20 years ago," Cordesman, who worked at the Defense Department for much of his career, told Business Insider. "The issue is always how urgent is the need. And it's obvious that while the need may be urgent, it isn't one that anyone is prepared to act upon," he said in reference to the situation surrounding ISIS, the extremist group that has killed <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/01/world/meast/iraq-civilian-deaths/">thousands</a> in Iraq and Syria.
Given the chaos gripping both countries, the US may have an interest in sending arms to Iraq and Syria that ISIS militants wouldn't be able to use if those weapons were ever captured. During the group's seizure of Mosul in June of 2014, ISIS got its hands on weapons and vehicles that the US had once given to the Iraqi military. If those weapons had been password-protected or otherwise blocked from improper end-use the impact of the Iraqi military's defeat would have been somewhat lessened.
But as Cordesman notes, it's unclear just how much practical interest there is at the moment in making smart guns a part of American foreign policy - assuming this is even desirable.
In a world saturated by GPS-friendly smartphones that can be unlocked with the read of a fingerprint, it's easy to envision smart guns' eventual proliferation. But in reality they're only just beginning to appear and haven't yet proven commercially viable in the US.
Blaine Konow, whose company works to keep a tab on guns' locations thanks to installed chips, thinks that market forces will favor a military and police application for smart guns first. "I'm trying to work with military because civilians, they don't want their guns chipped," Konow said. "Nobody wants that. But as far as military and police, law enforcement, FBI and all that - it'd be beneficial to them."
Smart guns have potential uses for domestic law enforcement. Guns could be locked when they aren't being used, or password protected in case they're stolen or lost. But foreign policy is a far different matter, and not everyone's convinced that the weapons should be introduced into the US's strategies abroad.
A blogger at <a href="http://arabist.net/blog/2012/10/11/cordesman-give-syrian-rebels-weapons-with-off-switch.html" target="_blank">The Arabist</a>&#xa0;called Cordesman's speculation a "Dr. Strangelove-of-insurgency moment" and argued that smart guns weren't necessarily the route towards more responsible US engagement abroad.
Smart guns might skew policymakers' views of the consequences of their decisions, creating a superficial safety-net that causes problems of its own: "Handy to see Bashar al-Assad go because it hurts Iran?," the Arabist writes. "Give al-Qaeda fighters MANPADs (which are not a hygiene product for men) that can be turned off when they're done wrecking the kind of havoc you don't have too much of a problem with."
Jonathan Mossberg, the CEO of iGun Technology Corporation,&#xa0;points to different problems. His company is working on a smart shotgun which, according to a <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/242500.pdf#page=7">report</a> by the National Institute of Justice, "could be considered the first personalized firearm to go beyond a prototype to an actual commercializable or production-ready product."
The gun is keyed to a low-frequency chip embedded in a ring using magnetic technology. If you're not wearing it, you can't fire the gun.&#xa0;This could save lives in the US by rendering a stolen firearm - like the one used in the Sandy Hook massacre - inoperable. But that doesn't mean the technology is ideally suited to an arms shipment to a US proxy or ally.
"A lot of guys that talk about this technology and write about it and stuff, they don't know that guns need to be taken apart to be maintained to be reliable," said Mossberg. "Every time you do something to make it more difficult for the bad guy to access it, you make it more difficult for the good guy to make it reliable."
Mossberg isn't skeptical of remote shutdown technology but of the feasibility of scaling that function without the costs being prohibitive.
He also warns that disabled smart guns could be hacked back into functionality, although that's a problem more expensive and higher-quality models could all but eliminate.
Robert McNamara, founder of the Ireland-based company TriggerSmart, agrees. "A gun like that could be dismantled, of course. Any gun can be dismantled ... it's like someone stealing a car, you know. They can take the wheels when they get it to some secret lockup."
But McNamara said it would be possible to build a gun that breaks down if anyone tampers with it.
"If you had the technology built right into the chassis of the gun, into the frame of the gun, you can have what they call acid spills and things like that to destroy them," he told Business Insider. RFID tags are already used in a similar fashion to discourage shoplifting - walk out the store with an item that hasn't had its tag removed, and it will break a small container of ink, ruining the item and marking it as stolen.

Some guns could also be programmed to work only in certain areas. In a military setting, this might reduce the chance of an accident outside a shooting range - or the damage done when a rogue shooter picks up a weapon at the armory.
But these applications are modest compared to limiting a gun's use to a particular city, country, or war zone. Though the smart gun concept might get its trial run with domestic US police, the day in which they're used to selectively arm foreign fighters is probably far off.
The seemingly distant and futuristic character of the technology could lessen the sense of urgency to develop it. And as Cordesman notes, the US isn't very good at assessing its future technological needs in the defense sphere.
"Time and cost are often factors based on estimates of what takes place in peacetime," Cordesman said. "And that is a very poor way of meeting war-time needs." Smarter weapons would need to receive funding and concerted research to see the light of day (DARPA has specified to Business Insider that it is not working on smart weapons).
Cordesman said the common logic was that "we can't get it done, according to the calendar we have set for [a] particular incident. Now, since some of these crises last a decade, the calculation is usually not terribly accurate."
Smart gun use in US policy might be hampered by deficiencies in long-term strategic planning. But few believe the Syrian civil war will end in 2015, or expect that the humanitarian disaster in the country won't brew future conflict. The coming decades might hold no shortage of crises where the technology could be applicable from Washington's perspective.

But there's still the question of whether smart guns would only help elide deeper, more general issues in US policy. There isn't universal agreement on how and whether the US can benefit from arming foreign militias, or if the US and its allies should ever be&#xa0;<a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/07/do-no-more-harm/">tinkering</a> with the balance of power in the Middle East.
Smart guns might eventually become a way of allowing the US to arm its allies while keeping usable weapons out of the hands of bad actors. But they're no shortcut towards resolving the larger dilemmas at the heart of US foreign policy.

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