El Chapo: The Most Wanted Man in Mexico

Some would say all of Mexico is El Chapo country. In many respects, Guzman's rise parallels that of Pablo Escobar, who ran Colombia's notorious Medellín cartel before his 1993 death in a hail of bullets. Both were born into poverty and fought their way to the top of the global drug trade. Both made Forbes's list of the world's richest people—Escobar reached No. 7 in 1989, and El Chapo appeared at No. 701 this year. (The magazine estimated El Chapo's personal fortune at $1.1 billion and his cartel's annual revenues at $7.8 billion.) Both men challenged the legitimacy of the state by putting thousands of policemen, soldiers, judges and politicians on their payrolls. Both built grand legends around themselves, beginning with escapes from maximum-security jails. And they cast themselves as high-living Robin Hoods, sharing the proceeds of their crimes with the poor. "The [kids] admire El Chapo because he has women, money, cars, weapons and power," says Josefina de Jesús García Ruiz, secretary of public security in Sinaloa, echoing what was said of Escobar in his heyday. "The average kid in this state sees him as a role model." Escobar's spectacular attacks—including the bombings of an Avianca passenger jet and a Bogotá office building—were his undoing: they shamed Colombia's government into calling in U.S. Special Operations forces to help hunt him down. Is El Chapo destined for a similar fate? "He's a slap in the face" to the Mexican state, says Ralph Reyes, chief of the DEA's Mexico and Central America section, based in Washington. "He escaped from jail, he's on the Forbes list, he's getting all this notoriety. This type of publicity is counterproductive [to him]." Calderón has made the arrest of El Chapo and other top drug figures a priority; he has dispatched 45,000 federal troops and police officers to towns and cities controlled by the cartels, started to clean up the police and judiciary and arrested high-ranking members of his own government, including a former assistant attorney general suspected of feeding intelligence to El Chapo's Pacific cartel. In April President Barack Obama announced a $700 million antinarcotics aid package to Mexico that includes new attack helicopters for the Army, advanced telecommunications equipment, night-vision goggles, body armor and other combat gear. The government's net has recently ensnared some of Mexico's biggest traffickers, including Mochomo and Gregorio Sauceda Gamboa, a founder of the Zetas, a group of renegade former soldiers hired as a paramilitary force by the Gulf cartel, El Chapo's principal rival.

Guzman is currently at war with every other major cartel in Mexico. Some observers say it's because he keeps trying to expand his territory; U.S. officials insist it's because of Calderón's war. "The government has routed these cartels out of their areas of protection. They've moved them into areas where they're not secure and forced them to overlap with rival gangs," says one U.S. official in Mexico City who assists in drug-interdiction efforts and who asked for anonymity for security reasons. In Tijuana, 500 people have died in the past year in government-vs.-cartel confrontations and in the battle between the Pacific cartel and the Tijuana cartel, controlled by remnants of the Arellano-Félix family, for control of the lucrative smuggling route. All told, drug violence in Mexico last year killed 6,290 people.

The carnage has been cited as evidence that Mexico is spiraling into chaos. But those waging war on the cartels say the bloodshed means that the wrongdoers are finally being confronted directly, as in Iraq, where more U.S. troops died in the first months of the surge than at any other time in the war. The cartels, says the DEA's Reyes, have been "accustomed to operating with total power and impunity." Now Calderón's push has forced them to delay cocaine shipments from Colombia for weeks. They're "having trouble not only getting drugs from Mexico into the United States but drugs into Mexico," says Reyes.

The kingpins can partly blame their own hubris: they became too big, too violent, too powerful for the government to ignore. "All of these cartels start with a 'no harm' approach, saying, 'I'm just another businessman.' But ultimately, there is a tipping point that makes them a target," says Mauricio Cárdenas, a former Colombian minister and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue center in Washington, argues, "As long as cartels are just killing each other and not putting into jeopardy the country's security, [it's tolerable]. But this was getting out of control." One Mexican intelligence official told me he's "confident" that El Chapo will be captured within the next year. "El Chapo is quite concerned, and he has a need to be concerned," says the U.S. official in Mexico City. Reyes believes that Guzman "is up against a lot. It's the most pressure he has ever faced."

Over the years, Guzman has made his cartel a vital part of Culiacán's economy, buying up condominiums, restaurants, discotheques, a milk factory and other properties while keeping many other enterprises flush with cash. "Ninety percent of the businesses here are tied to the narcos," I was told by one 33-year-old woman who works for an organization that helps drug addicts, as we cruised the city. Young men in standard narco garb—rhinestone-studded black T shirt, ostrich-leather boots, black shoulder bag likely stuffed with weapons and U.S. dollars, two cell phones strapped to the belt—swaggered along downtown streets. We stopped at a roadside shrine to Malverde—a 19th-century bandit who has become a patron saint to the narcos—and examined handwritten messages from traffickers asking his protection before smuggling cocaine across the U.S. border.

El Chapo was born about 60 miles from Culiacán in the mountain village of Las Tunas, in the heart of Mexico's Golden Triangle. (The name refers to the mountainous region that covers parts of three states: Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa.) Like nearly every other local campesino, his parents scratched out a living by cultivating marijuana and poppies on hillside plots. It was a world of casual violence. "The [sons] start killing chickens as farm boys, and they finish by killing people," says Bojórquez. The boy was a troublemaker who, like Escobar, fell into petty crime. In his 20s he reached out to the powerful Guadalajara cartel, then run by Miguel (El Padrino) Félix Gallardo, and was made a lieutenant in the organization. Unschooled but a natural administrator, Guzman was soon supervising the movement of tons of cocaine and marijuana each month across a network of rural airstrips inside Mexico. After Felix was arrested in 1989, Guzman started his own organization, known as the Federación, with a tight circle of associates who had grown up together in the hills. These men included the Beltrán Leyva brothers (Arturo, Alfredo and Carlos) and Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada García.

Their timing was perfect. U.S. and Colombian authorities had begun to roll back the major Colombian drug traffickers. Pablo Escobar had been driven into hiding and the Medellín and Cali cartels were fragmented, on the defensive. The major cocaine-trafficking routes through the Caribbean had dried up, thanks to better patrolling by the U.S. authorities. In a tectonic shift, the Colombians were relegated to the role of suppliers while the Mexican cartels, including El Chapo's, seized control of transport routes and distribution. Guzman pioneered new ways of smuggling cocaine into the United States, sometimes using tunnels, sometimes secreting it in dolls, fire extinguishers and cans of jalapeños and trucking them across the border.

El Chapo's rising profile had a cost. Rivals trying to assassinate him in May 1993 killed the archbishop of Guadalajara instead; a few days later El Chapo was arrested near the Mexican border in Guatemala—some say because an embarrassed Mexican government had pressured the drug baron's Guatemalan Army protectors to hand him over. For six years, El Chapo lived in comfortable captivity at Puente Grande prison in Guadalajara, reputed to be the nation's most escape-proof penitentiary. He enjoyed a private room, regular deliveries of whisky, the services of a mistress and, reportedly, weekend furloughs. Then, in January 2001, shortly before he was to be extradited to the United States to face a 50-year sentence for murder and drug trafficking, El Chapo managed to walk through a dozen remote-controlled doors and sneak out of the prison in a burlap sack hidden in the back of a laundry truck. The prison got a new nickname: La Puerta Grande—"The Big Door."