The Drug Lord
If he is Mexico’s most wanted man, how has Chapo Guzmán managed to evade the law and build an unrivaled business empire?
Johana Goodman
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Joaquín Guzmán Loera is the kind of success story that Mexico often lacks. As a child, he was so poor that he sold oranges to scrape together money for a meal. But since then, the 52-year-old has built a formidable business empire and a personal fortune currently ranked number 721 on Forbes magazine’s list of global titans. His rags-to-riches story only comes with one small glitch: His business empire is illegal.
Guzmán runs one of the world’s biggest drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico, the so-called Sinaloa cartel, named for its home state of Sinaloa. It smuggles a big part of the marijuana, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines that end up on American streets, and it has links to organized crime in 23 countries, according to Mexican and U.S. officials.
While Guzmán’s group makes a lot of money selling drugs, it’s now more of a conglomerate than a drug exporting company. It is into everything from providing prostitutes to producing and selling bootleg CDs. It also finances everything from Mexican home construction to tomato exports to the U.S.
“Don’t look at Chapo as a narcotics trafficker. He’s a diversified, multinational businessman,” says Edgardo Buscaglia, a U.S.-born academic who follows the drugs trade.
Guzmán’s constant turf wars and battles with rival drug dealers have contributed to a death toll that stands at more than 11,000 in the past two and a half years, an average of 365 murders per month. His feuds stretch back more than two decades and have left a rosary of tombstones that are milestones in Mexico’s violent drug business.
At the same time, Guzmán is a narco folk hero. Guzmán is feted on YouTube videos and by musicians who pen ballads, known as corridos, in his honor. Throughout Mexico, he is known simply as “El Chapo,” slang for someone short and stocky. He needs no last name.
Adding to legend, El Chapo has survived several assassination attempts by rival gangs, including a 1993 attack that killed a Roman Catholic cardinal. He also pulled off the greatest escape in modern Mexico—from a maximum security prison in 2001 in a laundry cart. Ever since, he has stayed a step ahead of Mexican and U.S. officials in a game of cat and mouse that is now in its ninth year.
Each year that passes with Mexico not able to catch El Chapo, his mystique grows—a direct challenge to the Mexican government. Last year, he flouted authorities by hosting a party, complete with boxes of whisky and a norteño band, in a remote Mexican village to watch his 18-year-old girlfriend Emma Coronel win a local beauty contest. Months later, she became his third wife.
And each year that El Chapo remains free to roam, questions grow as to why Mexico can’t catch the drug lord—even with U.S. help. The U.S. has put a $5 million price on his head (tips can be sent to chapotips@usdoj.gov), to which Mexico has added another $2 million bounty.
Officials hunting El Chapo say Guzmán has used money and ruthlessness to build a well-disciplined organization that protects him. He is believed to be hiding in the rugged Sierra Madre mountains that run through Sinaloa and bordering states. One U.S. official says finding El Chapo is as difficult as finding Osama bin Laden in the forbidding mountains of Pakistan. Another factor in El Chapo’s favor: the power of money. Guzmán is believed to have bribed enough Mexican law enforcement and army officials to get the help necessary to elude his pursuers. One frustrated U.S. official says that at least three times during the past three years, Mexican security agencies have gotten leads on Guzmán only to find he had gone by the time they turned up.
“The last trace that we had of the Chapo was way up in the mountains,” says Genaro García Luna, the head of Mexico’s public security ministry. Guzmán has also spread around enough money and created enough jobs that he has built up goodwill among locals, making him harder to catch.
Over the past few years, Guzmán has regularly visited a ranch in the remote mountains of Chihuahua state to check on his marijuana crop, according to a Mexican intelligence document. The ranch, owned by Guzmán’s associates, has an airstrip and an underground tunnel for access. “On at least three visits, he has arrived with a caravan of at least six vehicles, under the protection of some authorities in the Mexican army,” the document says. Mexico’s Defense Ministry said in an email it didn’t known anything about those allegations. “Various criminal organizations have used army clothing and vehicles as a cover for their activities,” the email said.
In April, a Catholic archbishop in Durango, next door to Sinaloa, caused a sensation when he said that Guzmán was living there. “Just up the road from [the town of] Guanaceví, that’s where he lives, but, well, we all seem to know this except for the authorities,” Durango archbishop Héctor Gonzalez Martinez told local reporters. Four days later, police found the bullet-riddled bodies of two army lieutenants near Guanaceví in the trunk of a car. The two had been blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs. Next to the dead men, a note read: “Neither the government nor the priests can handle ‘El Chapo.’”
Some of his reputed appearances have become part of local lore. In at least three different Mexican cities, including Culiacán, Sinaloa’s capital, El Chapo is reported to have turned up to eat at a local restaurant. Each occasion followed a set script: El Chapo was preceded by bodyguards who confiscated diners’ cell phones and didn’t allow patrons to leave. At the end of El Chapo’s meal, the gang boss picked up everyone’s bill. The owner of one of the restaurants involved says the story is false, but far from costing him business, the restaurant owner says the reports have helped increase his lunch trade.
Top Mexican officials say they don’t want to obsess about capturing Guzmán. “In the past, the strategy was just to capture top guys and ignore the operational guys. Now we are trying to weaken the structure of the cartels,” says Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora.
Some U.S. officials say El Chapo has aged rapidly in appearance, and draw parallels to the late Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was finally killed after years on the lam. They believe Mexico will catch Guzmán soon. “Chapo Guzmán is a dead man walking, and he knows it,” says Michael Braun, a former head of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
But Guzmán has been underestimated before. In 2005, then Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said Guzmán was “no longer operating” in the drug business. In early 2007, current Attorney General Mora wrote off Guzmán as a has-been in the drug business. “He’s like a washed-up soccer star,” he said in an interview.
El Chapo has proved them wrong. Experts say it was his gang’s push into northern Chihuahua state in an effort to take over smuggling routes from rival gangs that turned the state into a war zone, killing more than 3,300 people in the past 17 months, according to press reports. Another war between Guzmán and a former associate, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, led to a spree of violence in Sinaloa that killed more than 600 people. Among the dead: Guzmán’s son Édgar, killed in a mall parking lot in Culiacán.
Experts say Guzmán’s group continues to battle other cartels in more than half a dozen states, ranging from Chihuahua in the north to Quintana Roo on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
According to the few people who have met him, Guzmán comes across as down-to-earth and intelligent, despite a third-grade education. José Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former top anti-drug official killed in an airplane crash last year, once said: “El Chapo is the smartest of the drug traffickers.” Jose Antonio Ortega, a lawyer who took El Chapo’s deposition in prison shortly before his escape, concurs. “He’s a simple guy, a rancher type, who talks with a country accent, but he’s very smart,” says Ortega, who was kept waiting by El Chapo for 12 hours before meeting him in a well appointed prison cell that Guzmán used as his personal anteroom.
2009-09-01 18:46:12
Individuals like “El Chapo” would not exist if there weren’t drug consumers. The reality is that, the US is the biggest consumer of drugs in the world – we should start from there, educating and guiding our own citizens.
2009-09-01 22:32:38
cops,dea, or who is ever lookin for him aint goin to find him... he lives in arizona,california,texes.... everywhere
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i wouldn't mind meeting this guy
2009-10-16 09:29:52
even if they do get him it wont really do much to stop this drug problem because the u.s. keeps consuming and as long as theres demand there will be supply. these cartels only have power because america sends billions of dollars south to feed its addiction and then it sends tons of machine guns and ammunition. el chapo is just one of many
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Why not just eat the oranges?
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