The FBI and Interpol can check off Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera from their Most Wanted list, as he was captured in Mexico this week. Known as El Chapo (slang for ‘shorty’), he is the head of the Sinaloa Cartel and has been on Forbes’ most powerful list every year since 2009.
Guzmán began his meteoric rise from poor roots, gradually making it up the ranks of a huge drug empire. His cartel is responsible for shipping tons of cocaine from Columbia through Mexico to the United States, as well as for producing and distributing meth, marijuana and heroin. He is cited as having first introduced aircraft to move drugs and has cultivated ties to China, Thailand and India for the import of manufacturing chemicals. Excellent logistical skills and his penchant for constantly moving around and networking have resulted in his operating in 17 out of 31 Mexican states. He is ranked the 10th richest man in Mexico, with a net worth of about a billion dollars.
In 1993 he was captured, sentenced and incarcerated in the maximum security Mexican prison La Palma. In 1995, he was moved to a different maximum security Puente Grande which proved not entirely secure. He managed to put literally everyone working at the prison on his payroll, as well as bribing local police. It is said that he spent $2.5 million on his escape from prison in 2001 which implicated 78 people and involved leaving the prison hidden in a laundry cart.
Despite a five million dollar reward, the elusive El Chapo had been on the run ever since.
In 2009, the archbishop of Mexico’s Durango state told reporters that Guzman lived near the town of Guanacevi. “Everyone knows it, except the authorities,” he said. Days later, the bodies of two slain army lieutenants were found in Durango’s mountains, with a note: “Neither the government nor priests can handle El Chapo.”
This week’s arrest was the result of combined intelligence efforts of the Mexican authorities and the U.S. DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Marshall Services. Over the last few months, data from U.S. wiretaps, interrogations of personnel close to Guzmán came together like puzzle pieces to help identify his precise location in a condo in Mazatlan. Mexican marines surprised him and his body guards who were sleeping, making for a quiet and bloodless take-down. How and where the case against him unfolds, and how his arrest effects the drug business, is difficult to predict. Where there’s big money, there’s big fraud to fuel elusion. His capture is a real credit to the intelligence efforts of all agencies involved.
