Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman
Joaquín Guzmán ran the Sinaloa cartel for two decades, escaped from maximum-security prisons twice, and is serving life in Colorado. Born about 1957 in a village in the Sierra Madre of Sinaloa, in a region where opium poppy had been grown since the Second World War, he left school in the third grade and was selling oranges and growing marijuana as a child. He came up through the Guadalajara cartel of the 1980s, and when that organisation fragmented after the murder of an American drug agent he took a share of the Pacific coast routes. His contribution was logistical rather than violent. He built tunnels under the border — the first at Agua Prieta in 1989, with an entrance operated by a hydraulic lift under a pool table — used rail tankers, tinned chillies and false-bottomed trucks, and treated the business as a distribution problem. He was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 and escaped from Puente Grande in 2001, reportedly in a laundry cart, after some years of running the prison from inside it. The thirteen years that followed were the bloodiest in modern Mexican history, with a war against the Zetas and the Beltrán Leyva organisation and a state offensive that put the army on the streets from 2006 and cost well over 100,000 lives. He was retaken in 2014, escaped in 2015 through a mile-long ventilated tunnel into his cell shower, was recaptured in 2016 and extradited. The trade continued without interruption. His trial in Brooklyn in 2018 ran for three months and produced testimony from fifty-six witnesses about bribes reaching to the top of the Mexican state. A former security minister was convicted in New York in 2023 of taking cartel money while running the war against it.
- Lived: 1957 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: Leader of the Sinaloa Cartel (c. 1989-2016)
