One afternoon last December, an
assassin on board a K.L.M. flight from Mexico City arrived at
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. This was not a business trip: the killer,
who was thirty-three, liked to travel, and often documented his journeys
around Europe on Instagram. He wore designer clothes and a heavy silver
ring in the shape of a grimacing skull. His passport was an expensive
fake, and he had used it successfully many times. But, moments after he
presented his documents to Dutch customs, he was arrested. The U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration had filed a Red Notice with Interpol—an
international arrest warrant—and knew that he was coming. Only after the
Dutch authorities had the man in custody did they learn his real
identity: José Rodrigo Arechiga, the chief enforcer for the biggest
drug-trafficking organization in history, Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
To
work in the Mexican drug trade is to have a nickname, and Arechiga went
by the whimsically malevolent handle El Chino Ántrax. He supervised the
armed wing of the Sinaloa—a cadre of executioners known as Los
Ántrax—and coördinated drug shipments for the cartel’s leader, Joaquín
Guzmán Loera, who was known as El Chapo, or Shorty. Arechiga was a
narcotraficante
of the digital age, bantering with other criminals on Twitter and
posting snapshots of himself guzzling Cristal, posing with exotic pets,
and fondling a gold-plated AK-47. Guzmán, who is fifty-seven, typified
an older generation. Obsessively secretive, he ran his
multibillion-dollar drug enterprise from hiding in Sinaloa, the remote
western state where he was born, and from which the cartel takes its
name. The Sinaloa cartel exports industrial volumes of cocaine,
marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamine to America; it is thought to be
responsible for as much as half the illegal narcotics that cross the
border every year. Guzmán has been characterized by the U.S. Treasury
Department as “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” and after the
killing of Osama bin Laden, three years ago, he became perhaps the most
wanted fugitive on the planet. Mexican politicians promised to bring
him to justice, and the U.S. offered a five-million-dollar reward for
information leading to his capture. But part of Guzmán’s fame stemmed
from the perception that he was uncatchable, and he continued to thrive,
consolidating control of key smuggling routes and extending his
operation into new markets in Europe, Asia, and Australia. According to
one study, the Sinaloa cartel is now active in more than fifty
countries.
On several occasions, authorities had come close to
catching Guzmán. In 2004, the Mexican Army descended on a dusty ranch in
Sinaloa where he was holed up, but he had advance warning and fled
along a rutted mountain track in an all-terrain vehicle. Three years
later, Guzmán married a teen-age beauty queen named Emma Coronel and
invited half the criminal underworld of Mexico to attend the ceremony.
The Army mobilized several Bell helicopters to crash the party; the
troops arrived, guns drawn, to discover that Guzmán had just departed.
American authorities have no jurisdiction to make arrests in Mexico, so
whenever D.E.A. agents developed fresh intelligence about Guzmán’s
whereabouts all they could do was feed the leads to their Mexican
counterparts and hope for the best. In Washington, concerns about the
competence of Mexican forces mingled with deeper fears about corruption.
A former senior Mexican intelligence official told me that the cartel
has “penetrated most Mexican agencies.” Was Guzmán being tipped off by
an insider? After a series of near-misses in which Chapo foiled his
pursuers by sneaking out of buildings through back doors, officials at
the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City took to joking, bitterly, that there is
no word in Spanish for “surround.”
Guzmán developed “a Zorro-like reputation,” Gil Gonzalez, who pursued him in Mexico for the D.E.A., told me. In dozens of
narcocorridos,
the heraldic Mexican ballads that glorify traffickers, singers
portrayed Guzmán as a country boy turned cunning bandit who had grown
rich but not soft, his
cuerno de chivo, or “goat horn”—Mexican slang for an assault rifle with a curved magazine—never far from his side.
Yet
Guzmán himself remained maddeningly obscure. Only a few photographs of
him circulated publicly. A famous series taken after an arrest in 1993
shows a stocky, dark-eyed, square-jawed young man standing awkwardly in a
prison yard; he gazes at the camera with a shyness that seems at odds
with his fearsome reputation. Chapo escaped eight years later, and had
been on the run ever since. Because he might have had plastic surgery to
alter his appearance, the authorities could no longer be sure what he
looked like. One
narcocorrido captured the predicament: “Only he
knows who he is / So go looking for someone / Who looks just like
him / Because the real Chapo / You’ll never see again.”
The
authorities tried to track Guzmán by monitoring telephone lines.
Narcotics smuggling necessitates regular phone communication between
farmers and packers, truckers and pilots, accountants and enforcers,
street dealers and suppliers. But traffickers at the top of the
hierarchy maintain operational security by rarely making calls or
sending e-mails. Guzmán was known to use sophisticated encryption and to
limit the number of people he communicated with, keeping his
organization compartmentalized and allowing subordinates a degree of
autonomy, as long as the shipments kept running on time. “I never spoke
to him directly,” one former Sinaloa lieutenant told me. “But I knew
what he wanted us to do.”
The Sinaloa cartel is sometimes
described as a “cellular” organization. Structurally, its network is
distributed, and has more in common with a terrorist organization like
Al Qaeda than with the antiquated hierarchies of the Cosa Nostra. When
the cartel suffers the loss of a major figure like El Chino Ántrax, it
can reconstitute itself—but not without a few phone calls among the
leadership. At the D.E.A., which taps hundreds of phone lines and e-mail
accounts associated with traffickers, the process of applying pressure
to a criminal organization and then monitoring furtive attempts at
outreach is known as “tickling the wires.” When El Chino Ántrax was
arrested in Amsterdam, the cartel was still coping with two other
high-level losses: in November, the twenty-three-year-old son of one of
Guzmán’s closest associates was arrested while trying to cross the
border in Nogales; in December, Mexican troops in a helicopter shot and
killed another key cartel enforcer, on a stretch of highway by the Sea
of Cortez.
As the cartel attempted to regroup, authorities on
both sides of the border intercepted scores of phone calls, texts, and
e-mails. They learned that Guzmán would soon be coming to Culiacán, the
state capital of Sinaloa, for a meeting with his sons Alfredo and
Iván—ascendant traffickers who were both close friends of El Chino
Ántrax. The D.E.A. presented an intelligence dossier to authorities in
Mexico, and in mid-January a special-forces unit of commandos from the
Mexican Marines, or
SEMAR, began to
assemble at a forward operating base near the resort town of Los Cabos,
along the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. The marines, who are the
Mexican equivalent of Navy
SEALs, were
joined by a small group of American advisers. Mexican authorities
code-named the mission Operation Gargoyle. Its object was to capture
Guzmán.
According to the Dallas
Morning News, the
government of Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto informed the marines
and their American partners that they would have approximately three
weeks to bring down the drug lord. A U.S. official involved in planning
the operation told me that this was true. Fighting drug traffickers in
Mexico has become a matter of triage, and the
SEMAR
unit was soon to be redeployed to battle another cartel, the Knights
Templar, in the restive state of Michoacán. (Eduardo Sánchez, the chief
spokesman for the government of Mexico, denied that any such time limit
was in place. “There was no window,” he said.)
As the marines
and their advisers moved into Los Cabos, they tried not to attract
attention. A battleship anchored off the coast was used as a decoy, so
that curious observers might conclude that the sudden influx of
commandos was part of a standard naval exercise. But one reason that
Guzmán had remained at large so long was his unparalleled network of
informants. One person involved in the operation told me, “As soon as we
landed, he knew.”
Guzmán had always been a
master of escape. Born in the mountain village of La Tuna, in Mexico’s
wild and craggy Sierra Madre Occidental, he was the oldest child of a
subsistence farmer who dabbled in the drug trade. For generations,
Sinaloan ranchers had cultivated cannabis and opium, and children were
taken out of elementary school to assist in the harvest. Guzmán left
school for good in third grade, and in the seventies, in spite of his
illiteracy, he became an apprentice to two drug chieftains: Amado
Carrillo Fuentes, who owned a fleet of airplanes and was known as the
Lord of the Skies; and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a police officer
turned drug baron, who ran the Guadalajara cartel and was known as El
Padrino—the Godfather.
Guzmán started as a kind of air-traffic
controller, coördinating cocaine flights from Colombia. But he was
clever and aggressive, and quickly began to acquire power. One night in
November, 1992, Guzmán’s henchmen massacred six people at a crowded
discothèque in Puerto Vallarta. They severed the telephone lines so that
nobody could call for help, then walked inside and opened fire on the
dance floor. The targets were Tijuana-based traffickers whom Guzmán was
challenging for control of the lucrative smuggling routes through Baja
California. They were in the bathroom when the shooting started, and
fled without being harmed. The next spring, the traffickers arranged for
their own hit men to murder Guzmán at the international airport in
Guadalajara. As gunfire erupted, Guzmán scrambled out of his vehicle and
crawled to safety. Seven people were killed, including Archbishop Juan
Jesús Posadas Ocampo. (The gunmen apparently mistook him for Guzmán.)
Ocampo’s murder caused a political uproar, and it was not long before
Guzmán, who had gone into hiding, was picked up by authorities in
Guatemala and turned over to Mexico. He was sentenced to twenty years in
prison, on charges of conspiracy, drug trafficking, and bribery, and
ended up in Puente Grande, in Jalisco, which was considered one of the
most secure prisons in Mexico.
Behind bars, Guzmán consolidated
both his empire and his reputation. He bought off the prison staff and
enjoyed a life of relative luxury: he conducted business by cell phone,
orchestrated regular visits from prostitutes, and threw parties for
favored inmates that featured alcohol, lobster bisque, and filet mignon.
While he was there, the Mexican attorney general’s office subjected him
to psychological interviews. The resulting criminal profile noted that
he was “egocentric, narcissistic, shrewd, persistent, tenacious,
meticulous, discriminating, and secretive.”
One day in January,
2001, a prison administrator pulled aside a makeshift curtain that
Guzmán had draped across the entrance to his cell and shouted, “He’s
escaped!” A subsequent investigation determined that Guzmán had hidden
in a laundry cart pushed by a paid accomplice. But many in Mexico
speculate that he didn’t have to bother with subterfuge. Guzmán
controlled Puente Grande so thoroughly by the time of his exit that he
might as well have walked out the front door. Criminal charges were
eventually brought against seventy-one people who worked at the prison,
including the warden.
If Chapo’s escape suggested that the
Mexican political system had been corroded by drug money, his subsequent
years as a fugitive did not diminish this impression. He retreated to
Sinaloa and expanded his operations, launching violent turf wars with
rival cartels over control of prized entry points along the U.S. border.
The sociologist Diego Gambetta, in his 1993 book “The Sicilian Mafia,”
observes that durable criminal enterprises are often woven into the
social and political fabric, and part of their “intrinsic tenacity” is
their ability to offer certain services that the state does not. Today
on the streets of Culiacán you see night clubs, fortified villas, and an
occasional Lamborghini. Chapo and other drug lords have invested and
laundered their proceeds by buying hundreds of legitimate businesses:
restaurants, soccer stadiums, day-care centers, ostrich farms. Juan
Millán, the former state governor of Sinaloa, once estimated that
sixty-two per cent of the state’s economy is tied up with drug money.
Sinaloa remains poor, however, and Badiraguato, the municipality
containing Guzmán’s home village, is one of the most desperate areas in
the state. There had always been some sympathy for the drug trade in
Sinaloa, but nothing deepens sympathy like charity and bribes. Eduardo
Medina Mora, Mexico’s Ambassador in Washington, described Guzmán’s
largesse in the state: “You are financing everything. Baptisms.
Infrastructure. If someone gets sick, you provide a little plane. So you
have lots of local support, because you are Santa Claus. And everybody
likes Santa Claus.”
Mexico’s municipal police were poorly
trained, poorly paid, and poorly equipped, rendering them susceptible to
bribery. “In practical terms, organized crime literally privatized the
municipal police forces across many parts of the country,” one senior
Mexican official told me. Guzmán’s influence over the public sector was
not confined to law enforcement. Last year, a former bodyguard for the
current governor of Sinaloa, Mario López Valdez, released a series of
YouTube videos in which he described accompanying López Valdez, who had
just taken office, on a trip to meet with Guzmán. In one video, the
bodyguard played a recorded conversation in which the Governor appeared
to instruct his subordinates not to antagonize the Sinaloa cartel—and,
instead, to crack down on its rivals. López Valdez insisted that the
recording was doctored. Last August, the bodyguard was discovered beside
a road in Sinaloa. He had been decapitated.
As long as Guzmán
remained in the mountains, the inhospitable terrain and the allegiance
of locals appeared to guarantee his safety. In 2009, Dennis Blair,
President Barack Obama’s national intelligence director, met with
Guillermo Galván, who was then Mexico’s Secretary of Defense. Galván
told him that everybody knew, roughly, where Guzmán was. The challenge
was taking him into custody. According to a diplomatic cable that was
later released by WikiLeaks, Galván explained that Guzmán was believed
to move among a dozen or so ranches, and to be protected by up to three
hundred armed men. The peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental are steep
and jagged, and the roads that vein their contours often taper to a
single dirt track. An armored convoy would be spotted by Guzmán’s
lookouts well before it arrived at its destination. And if a Blackhawk
helicopter was dispatched to attack his outpost he would hear it
thundering across the valley from miles out, leaving plenty of time to
flee.
More recently, however, intelligence collected by Mexican
authorities and the D.E.A. indicated that Guzmán might be changing his
habits. There is a saying in the Mexican drug trade that it is better to
live one good year than ten bad ones. Many young men enter the industry
expecting to enjoy a decadent life for a short time before being
incarcerated or killed. Young narcos behave recklessly: they go to night
clubs, they race Bentleys, and they post pictures of themselves online
with their co-conspirators (and with the occasional dead body). The only
traffickers in Sinaloa who beat the odds are those who are content to
follow a more austere life in the mountains. Until lately, Guzmán had
taken that approach. But because he was tired, or married to a much
younger woman, or overconfident of his ability to escape, Guzmán began
spending time in Culiacán and other cities. “Here’s a guy who has made
hundreds of millions of dollars in the drug trade, and he’s living like a
pauper up in the mountains,” Mike Vigil, a former D.E.A. agent who
worked in Mexico for many years, told me. “He likes the fiestas. He
likes the music. He likes to dance.” Another law-enforcement official
speculated that, though Guzmán was accustomed to a rustic life, Emma
Coronel was not. “She’s not much of a mountain person,” he said, adding
that they had twin daughters, and, even though Guzmán was a fugitive,
his wife was adamant that he be present in the girls’ lives: “She would
go out of her way to maintain that family life.”
Guzmán had
other weaknesses. “He loves the gourmet food,” a D.E.A. official told
me. From time to time, he would be spotted at an elegant restaurant in
Sinaloa or in a neighboring state. The choreography was always the same.
Diners would be startled by a team of gunmen, who would politely but
firmly demand their telephones, promising that they would be returned at
the end of the evening. Chapo and his entourage would come in and feast
on shrimp and steak, then thank the other diners for their forbearance,
return the telephones, pick up the tab for everyone, and head off into
the night.
It has been reported, erroneously, that Guzmán used a
statellite phone; in fact, his favored communication device was the
BlackBerry. Like many narcos, he was suspicious of satellite phones,
because most of the companies that manufacture them are American and the
devices are relatively easy for law-enforcement officials to
compromise. But the BlackBerry is made by a Canadian company, and Guzmán
felt more comfortable using one. This trust was misplaced: by early
2012, the D.E.A. had homed in on Guzmán’s BlackBerry, and could not only
monitor his communications but also use geolocation technology to
triangulate his signal.
That February, the agency confirmed that
Guzmán had travelled to Los Cabos for a liaison with a prostitute. He
had been married at least three times, and he had relationships with
many mistresses; nevertheless, he appears to have had an unflagging
appetite for paid companionship. (Numerous current and former officials
noted Guzmán’s prodigious consumption of Viagra. “He ate it like candy,”
one said.) The D.E.A. agents who monitored his e-mails and texts
marvelled at the extent to which his communications seemed focussed not
on managing his multinational empire but on juggling the competing
demands of his wife, his ex-wives (with whom he remained cordial), his
girlfriends, and his paid consorts. “It was like ‘Peyton Place,’ ” a
former law-enforcement official who kept track of the communications
told me. “It was a non-stop deal.”
After authorities traced the
BlackBerry signal to a mansion on a cul-de-sac in a wealthy enclave near
the coast, Mexican troops burst through the front door of the building.
Whether or not Guzmán had been alerted in advance remains unclear, but
he had enough time to sneak out the back of the property; he went to an
adjacent resort, where he blended into a crowd of vacationers before
moving on. Over the next three days, the authorities pursued him as he
moved around the city, desperately trying to arrange an escape route to
the mountains.
At one point during the chase, Guzmán must have
realized that his BlackBerry had been compromised, and decided to turn
this setback to his advantage. He met up with a subordinate and gave him
the BlackBerry. Someone involved in the operation said of Guzmán, “He
took us for a ride.” The authorities, unaware of the handoff, chased the
signal around Los Cabos, until they finally pounced on the sacrificial
subordinate. While they were occupied with arresting him, Chapo made it
into the desert, where a private plane picked him up and flew him back
to the safety of the Sierra Madre.
“He changed it up after Los Cabos,” one U.S. law-enforcement official told me, adding a line worthy of a
narcocorrido:
“He’s an illiterate son of a bitch, but he’s a street-smart
motherfucker.” Rather than switch BlackBerrys, as he had done in the
past, Guzmán now appeared to have stopped communicating altogether.
Like
bin Laden, he might have chosen to rely on couriers. But a courier
system is too inefficient for the fast pace of the narcotics trade, and
so, as U.S. and Mexican authorities eventually discovered, Chapo devised
an elaborate solution. In the past, he had occasionally restricted his
contact with others in the cartel by relaying his commands through a
proxy. For a time, a woman known as La Voz (the Voice) served as his
gatekeeper, sending and receiving messages on his behalf. After Los
Cabos, Guzmán reinstated this arrangement, but with additional
precautions. If you needed to communicate with the boss, you could reach
him via B.B.M., BlackBerry’s instant-messaging application. (Guzmán had
apparently learned to read and write well enough to communicate in the
shorthand of instant messages.) Your message would go not directly to
Guzmán, however, but to a trusted lieutenant, who spent his days in
Starbucks coffee shops and other locations with public wireless
networks. Upon receiving the message, the lieutenant would transcribe it
onto an iPad, so that he could forward the text using WiFi—avoiding the
cellular networks that the cartel knew the authorities were trolling.
The transcribed message would be sent not to Guzmán but to a second
intermediary, who, also using a tablet and public WiFi, would transcribe
the words onto
his BlackBerry and relay them to Guzmán. Although
Guzmán continued to use a BlackBerry, it was almost impossible to
track, because it communicated with only one other device. When he
received your message, his reply would be relayed back to you through
the same indirect means. Many members of the cartel did not realize that
when they wrote to the boss and received an answer, every word had been
transmitted via two intermediaries. This is sometimes described as a
“mirror” system, and it is fiendishly difficult for authorities to
penetrate (especially when the transcribers keep moving from one WiFi
hot spot to another). Nevertheless, by studying the communications
patterns of the cartel, analysts at the Special Operations Division of
the D.E.A. eventually grasped the nature of the arrangement. They
resolved to focus on the small ring of logistical facilitators
surrounding Guzmán, to identify the mirrors that he was using, and,
ultimately, to target their communications.
In early February of this year, when the special-forces unit from
SEMAR
began making forays into Sinaloa, it was the first time that Mexico’s
marines had ever pursued such a significant operation in the state.
Unlike the Mexican Army—which tended to move slowly, and always informed
state authorities before conducting an operation, even when those
authorities were corrupt—the marines were nimble and secretive. They
mobilized rapidly, on Blackhawk helicopters, and did not ask permission
before initiating raids. The marines pursuing Guzmán had seen intense
combat in recent years, battling the Zetas cartel in northeast Mexico.
They were veterans of a 2009 firefight that had killed a former
associate of Guzmán’s, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, during a raid in
Cuernavaca. One of the marines in the unit, a young officer from Tabasco
named Melquisedet Angulo Córdova, was killed in the shoot-out. He was
buried with full military honors. Shortly after his funeral, gunmen
charged into a home where his family had gathered to mourn, and murdered
his mother, his brother, his sister, and his aunt.
The warning could not have been clearer, yet, according to people who know the
SEMAR
unit, the marines grew more determined to bring down the traffickers.
They now made a fetish of secrecy. Whenever they were photographed in
public, they followed the custom of other élite security forces in
Mexico and wore black masks over their faces. They implemented clever
safeguards against penetration by the cartels. Apart from the admiral
who commanded them and a few senior personnel, none of them knew where
they were headed or who their target might be until they boarded a
Blackhawk to undertake the mission. Several days before an operation,
the commandos were obliged to surrender their cell phones, to protect
against leaks.
The first important arrest of Operation Gargoyle occurred on February 13th, when the
SEMAR
unit apprehended a group of Sinaloa assassins on a highway outside
Culiacán. The marines confiscated the men’s phones and sent them off for
analysis. Because cartel members frequently shed phones, a single
device can offer an intelligence windfall if it contains current numbers
for other members of the organization. In American debates over the
National Security Agency’s warrantless collection of “metadata,” this is
one reason that many authorities have been quick to defend these
techniques; a constellation of dialled phone numbers can be used to
build a “link chart” exposing the hierarchy of an organization.
Using
information extracted from the phones collected in the arrest, the
marines and the D.E.A. began to focus on a trafficker named Mario
Hidalgo Argüello. A plump-cheeked man with a droopy mustache and a
crooked boxer’s nose, he was a veteran of Mexico’s special forces who
had switched sides to work for the traffickers. Within the cartel, he
was known as El Nariz—the Nose. Now that Guzmán was spending more time
in urban areas, his entourage had become very small. Nariz was part of
this privileged circle, serving as Guzmán’s personal assistant and
errand boy.
In Culiacán, Guzmán rarely spent consecutive nights
in the same bed. He rotated from house to house and seldom told those
around him—even Nariz—where his next destination was, until they were en
route. Guzmán had a personal chef, an attractive young woman who
accompanied him everywhere he travelled. He is said to have feared
poisoning, and sometimes made his underlings taste food before he would
eat it. But one D.E.A. agent said of the chef, “She’s absolutely a great
cook. So maybe the whole personal-chef thing was more hedonism than
paranoia.”
Guzmán also liked takeout food, and, on the night of
February 16th, he sent Nariz out to pick up an order. Guzmán’s life had
become largely nocturnal, and he ate dinner very late. That evening, he
was sleeping at a safe house that belonged to his ex-wife Griselda
López. By the time Nariz left work, it was already past midnight. Nariz
returned to his own house in Culiacán, and discovered that the commandos
from
SEMAR had been waiting for him.
Under
questioning by the marines, Nariz admitted that Guzmán was hiding in
the city, and gave the address. “He flipped right away,” an American
law-enforcement official told me. Just before dawn, the marines arrived
at a cream-colored two-story house on Río Humaya Street, in the
middle-class neighborhood of Libertad. There were bars on the windows,
but that was standard in Culiacán. The marines readied their weapons and
produced a battering ram, but when they moved to breach the front door
it didn’t budge. A wooden door would have splintered off its hinges, but
this door was a marvel of reinforced steel—some of the marines later
likened it to an airlock on a submarine. For all the noise that their
efforts made, the door seemed indestructible. Normally, the friction of a
battering ram would heat the steel, rendering it more pliable. But the
door was custom-made: inside the steel skin, it was filled with water,
so that if anyone tried to break it down the heat from the impact would
not spread. The marines hammered the door again and again, until the ram
buckled and had to be replaced. It took ten minutes to gain entry to
the house.
The marines streamed through a modest kitchen and
into a series of windowless rooms. They noticed surveillance cameras and
monitors everywhere. A gaudy oil painting of a bucking bull, stuck full
of swords but still defiant, hung on one wall. But there was nobody in
the house. In a bathroom on the ground floor, they discovered a bathtub
that had been raised from its base, on hydraulic lifts, at a
forty-five-degree angle, revealing a dark opening leading to a steep set
of stairs: a tunnel.
In the early days of Guzmán’s career,
before his time at Puente Grande, he distinguished himself as a
trafficker who brought an unusual sense of imagination and play to the
trade. Today, tunnels that traverse the U.S.-Mexico border are a
mainstay of drug smuggling: up to a mile long, they often feature
air-conditioning, electricity, sophisticated drainage systems, and
tracks, so that heavy loads of contraband can be transported on carts.
Guzmán invented the border tunnel. A quarter of a century ago, he
commissioned an architect, Felipe de Jesús Corona-Verbera, to design a
grocery store that served as a front company, and a private zoo in
Guadalajara for his collection of tigers, crocodiles, and bears. By this
point, Guzmán was making so much money that he needed secure locations
in which to hide it, along with his drugs and his weapons. So he had
Corona-Verbera devise a series of
clavos, or stashes—secret compartments under the beds in his homes. Inevitably, a bolder idea presented itself: if you could dig a
clavo
beneath a house near the U.S. border, why not continue digging and come
out on the other side? Guzmán ordered Corona-Verbera to design a tunnel
that ran from a residence in Agua Prieta, immediately south of the
border, to a cartel-owned warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. The result
delighted him. “Corona made a fucking cool tunnel,” he said. Since then,
U.S. intelligence has attributed no fewer than ninety border tunnels to
the Sinaloa cartel.
When the marines began breaking into the
house on Río Humaya Street, Guzmán was inside, as was a bodyguard. As
the battering ram clanged against the door, they moved quickly into the
ground-floor bathroom. Chapo activated the escape hatch by pushing a
plug into an electrical outlet by the sink while flicking a hidden
switch on the side of the vanity mirror. Suddenly, the caulk around the
rim of the bathtub broke and the tub rose from its tiled frame. The
caulk had camouflaged the escape hatch; even the bodyguard might have
been unaware of its existence before Guzmán turned on the hydraulic
lift.
They scrambled down the steps into a narrow passage. The
space was lighted, but very tight, and they moved quickly, knowing that
they had only a slight head start on the marines. They reached a small
portal resembling the door of a bank safe, where the tunnel they were in
connected to the main sewer system of Culiacán; crawling through this
opening, they entered a cylindrical tunnel. The passage was unlit and
less than five feet high; nevertheless, they splashed through the dirty,
shallow water at high speed, as if Guzmán had rehearsed this escape.
By the time the
SEMAR
commandos entered the tunnel, Guzmán had been running for more than ten
minutes. A tunnel is an exceedingly dangerous environment in which to
stalk someone who is armed: if he should turn and fire at you, he
doesn’t even need to aim—one of the ricocheting bullets will likely hit
you. But the marines did not hesitate. In the streets of Culiacán,
meanwhile, dozens of troops were in position, ready to pursue Guzmán
when he returned above ground. In the sky, a covert U.S. drone looked
down on the city, poised to track the fugitive if he emerged from a
manhole and fled through the streets.
Meanwhile, Chapo ran
through the sewers, like Harry Lime in “The Third Man.” The tunnel
forked, and at one juncture the marines were momentarily flummoxed,
unable to tell which path he had taken. Then they spotted a tactical
vest on the ground—Guzmán or the bodyguard must have shed it—and charged
onward in that direction. Eventually, the marines emerged at a storm
drain by the banks of a muddy river, more than a mile from the point
where Guzmán had entered the tunnel. Once again, he had vanished.
Two
days later, on February 19th, President Obama, who was visiting Mexico
City, held a press conference with President Peña Nieto. Obama praised
the “excellent coöperation between the United States and Mexico” on
criminal-justice issues. When Peña Nieto came into office, in 2012, many
Washington officials had doubts about his determination to fight the
cartels. His predecessor, Felipe Calderón, had launched an unprecedented
assault against drug trafficking, deploying fifty thousand troops to
battle the traffickers in the streets; the armed forces pursued a
“kingpin strategy,” seeking to dismantle drug syndicates by killing or
capturing their leaders. Calderón’s approach received strong financial
and material support from Washington. But the campaign was a resounding
failure: the death toll in Mexico spiralled as the cartels fought
daylight gun battles with the authorities and among themselves. In
Ciudad Juárez, one of the flashpoints in the conflict, the annual murder
rate jumped from about three hundred in 2007 to more than three
thousand in 2010.
The carnage might have been somewhat redeemed had Calderón succeeded in curtailing the
narcotraficantes.
But, as Ioan Grillo observes in his recent book, “El Narco,” “In the
drug business, it seems, a war economy functions perfectly well.” The
flow of narcotics across the border never diminished significantly, and,
as cartels like Sinaloa and the Zetas vanquished smaller competitors,
they consolidated territorial control, growing more powerful and more
grotesque in the process. “Corpse messages”—piles of dismembered
bodies—were left on major street corners. Mexican voters who went to the
polls in 2012 were weary of the violence; Peña Nieto, a
youthful-looking former governor who represented the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional, or
PRI,
which had dominated Mexican politics for much of the past century,
promised a fresh start. He pledged to focus not on attacking the cartels
but on reducing the killing—though his plan for achieving this met with
skepticism. In the past,
PRI officials
had largely countenanced drug trafficking, in exchange for well-placed
bribes, and it wasn’t clear if Peña Nieto was sincere about pursuing a
different path.
For years, U.S. law-enforcement officers had
chafed at the pretense that they were merely “advising” their Mexican
counterparts in the fight against the narcos; some of them wanted
American armed forces to have wide operational latitude on the ground,
as they had once had in Colombia. Calderón had come closer to tolerating
such a scenario than any previous Mexican head of state had. But Peña
Nieto indicated that he preferred to maintain greater distance. When
young Mexican officers study their nation’s military history, the
curriculum dwells, inescapably, on the many invasions by the United
States; the prospect of an overbearing American law-enforcement presence
south of the border offended many Mexicans’ sense of sovereignty.
Soon
after Peña Nieto assumed office, he declared that all initiatives led
or assisted by the U.S. must be routed through an office in Mexico’s
Ministry of the Interior, which became known as “the single window.” It
was especially surprising, then, when Peña Nieto’s administration began
capturing or killing some of the country’s most brutal drug kingpins,
often in close collaboration with the U.S. Last July, the authorities
arrested Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, one of the leaders of the Zetas,
who sometimes burned his victims alive. The next month, military
operatives apprehended the leader of the Gulf cartel—El Pelón, or
Baldy—who was known for blindfolding his enemies and torturing them to
death. For Peña Nieto, establishing rhetorical distance from the gringos
may have created the political latitude for him to collaborate with
them.
At the time of the Obama meeting, the
SEMAR
unit was still pursuing Guzmán in Culiacán. (This was a departure:
Mexican armed forces had generally retreated to their bases following a
failed attempt to apprehend him.) After the marines emerged from the
sewers without capturing him, they discovered that the house on Río
Humaya Street was connected not just to Culiacán’s sewer system but,
through the sewers, to six other houses, each similarly furnished and
appointed, and each with its own bathtub escape hatch. Guzmán had been
shuttling nightly among these houses. Information from one of Guzmán’s
captured associates led the marines to a nearby warehouse, where they
uncovered a cache of heavy weaponry and more than three tons of cocaine
and methamphetamine. Some of the drugs had been concealed inside plastic
cucumbers and bananas, in preparation for a surreptitious journey
across the border.
The marines knew that, in addition to the
safe houses and the escape routes, Guzmán had aides who could provide
him with a new BlackBerry or a ride out of town. So
SEMAR
occupied each safe house it discovered, and focussed on pursuing the
men in Guzmán’s entourage, on the theory that if they cut him off from
his support network he would no longer have a place to hide. What had
started as a covert operation became overt as Mexican forces attempted
to heighten the pressure on Chapo. Eduardo Sánchez, the government
spokesman, told me that authorities established conspicuous roadblocks
“so that Mr. Guzmán could feel that we were after him.”
Soon
after the escape in the tunnel, the marines arrested Manuel López
Osorio, another former special-forces officer who had joined Guzmán’s
inner circle; he went by the name El Picudo (Pointy Nose). He, too,
became coöperative under questioning, and gave up a significant detail.
Picudo said that he had picked up Guzmán and the bodyguard by a storm
drain on the outskirts of Culiacán. He had driven them south of the
city, where they met up with another aide and switched vehicles.
According to Picudo, the bodyguard Guzmán was travelling with was his
most trusted employee: Carlos Hoo Ramírez, who was called El Condor.
The
marines knew who Condor was, and raided his house in Culiacán. It was
empty. They had also been monitoring his BlackBerry communications, but
the device appeared to be turned off. Suddenly, on February 20th, it
came to life: he was sending a text. The authorities traced the signal
and saw that it came from the port city of Mazatlán, a hundred and forty
miles to the southeast. In light of the debacle in Los Cabos, the
SEMAR
operators and their American colleagues worried that Guzmán might have
already left Mazatlán. He enjoyed considerable protection in the city,
where he had often received shipments from India and China of the
precursor chemicals used to manufacture meth. But it would be folly to
move from one major population center to another, and, judging from
Guzmán’s past behavior, he was probably already back in the Sierra
Madre.
By this point, federal authorities in Mexico City had
learned about the botched operation in Culiacán, and the three-week
window before the
SEMAR redeployment was
nearly closed. But, if Condor was so indispensable to the drug lord,
capturing him could provide valuable intelligence and squeeze Guzmán
even further. So the marines flew down to the coast.
Mazatlán is
a resort town popular with retirees from the U.S. and Canada. It has
long been a corridor for narcotics trafficking, but, as uncontested
Sinaloa territory, it has been spared the severe internecine violence
that has plagued more disputed areas. On the night of Friday, February
21st, about forty marines assembled in the city, along with a small
contingent of agents from the D.E.A., the U.S. Marshals, and the
Department of Homeland Security. The marshals, who specialize in
locating fugitives, had been able to trace the signal on Condor’s
BlackBerry to the Hotel Miramar, a white, twelve-story condominium
building with three columns of half-moon balconies overlooking the
Pacific. Geolocation technology can trace a signal to a given city block
or building, but not necessarily determine where in the building the
device is situated. So, in the early hours of Saturday morning, the
marines fanned out, forming a perimeter around the property. Someone
consulted the registry and discovered that two apartments had been
rented the previous day. A team of marines climbed to the sixth floor
and burst into one of the apartments, where they discovered two groggy
tourists, who were recovering from an evening of partying. (One of them,
an American, thought that their room had been stormed because they had
been smoking marijuana. The marines were perplexed when he produced,
from his wallet, a California medical-marijuana card.)
Meanwhile,
on the fourth floor, a team of six marines approached Apartment 401,
where they discovered Condor standing guard and holding an assault
rifle. He raised his weapon only for a moment, since it was obvious that
he was outnumbered. Guzmán’s decision to jettison his huge security
force had allowed him to move around quickly and inconspicuously, but he
was left essentially defenseless. The commandos needed no battering ram
as they crashed through a flimsy wooden door, shouting, “Marines!”
They
entered a two-bedroom apartment with potted plants, cheap furniture,
and a white tile floor. In one bedroom, the marines found two women: the
chef and a nanny, who had been sleeping with Guzmán’s two-year-old
twins, Mali and María Joaquina. A pink Pack ’n Play—which matched the
girls’ miniature pink suitcases—had been set up. The marines raced to
the master bedroom in the back, where they discovered Emma Coronel, who
had been sleeping. “Don’t kill him!” she shrieked.
Guzmán had
scrambled out of bed in his underwear, grabbed an assault rifle, and
darted into a small bathroom. “Don’t kill him!” Coronel pleaded again.
“He’s the father of my children!” The standoff lasted only a few
seconds, with the marines bellowing and Coronel screaming. Then Chapo
shouted, “O.K., O.K., O.K., O.K.!” and extended his empty hands through
the bathroom doorway.
It had been a stunningly swift operation:
less than three minutes after the marines stormed the apartment, Guzmán
surrendered. No one would have imagined such a legendary outlaw going
out in anything but a firefight. But
SEMAR
had developed a reputation as an outfit that shoots first and asks
questions later. “They notoriously kill everybody in the room when there
is the slightest provocation,” an American law-enforcement official who
has worked with
SEMAR told me. With his wife and daughters present, Guzmán may have realized that the only way to spare their lives was to surrender.
When
the marines searched the Miramar apartment, they found a blue vinyl
wheelchair: Guzmán had entered the building pretending to be a frail old
man. But when they took him into custody they discovered that he looked
much as he had in the earlier photographs. His teeth were a little
pearlier—he’d had them capped. His hair and his mustache were still
thick and jet black. (In the house on Río Humaya Street, in Culiacán,
the marines discovered a bottle of hair dye.) They got him dressed in a
pair of black jeans and a white shirt, then escorted him out of the
building and around the corner to a dirt soccer field, where he was
placed on a Blackhawk and transported to a nearby naval base. A Learjet
then took him to Mexico City. As the marines frog-marched him out of a
hangar at the airport, journalists photographed him looking furtively at
his captors. His face was bruised and swollen, which
SEMAR
attributes not to any rough handling but to dings that he had received
while sprinting through the dark tunnels beneath Culiacán. The marines
also noticed bruises and cuts on his feet, and learned that when he fled
the house on Río Humaya Street he didn’t have time to grab his shoes;
he had run through the tunnels barefoot.
Guzmán was gruff but
respectful with his captors. He had been planning to leave for the
mountains that day, he told them. If the marines had arrived just a few
hours later, he would have been gone. “I can’t believe you got me,” he
said.
At eleven-forty-two that morning, Peña
Nieto announced the capture on Twitter: “I acknowledge the work of the
security agencies of the Mexican state in pulling off the apprehension
of Joaquín Guzmán Loera in Mazatlán.” U.S. officials had already leaked
the news to the Associated Press, but Peña Nieto wanted to be certain
that his troops had the right man. In the summer of 2012, Mexican
authorities announced that they had captured Guzmán’s son Alfredo, and
held a press conference in which they paraded before the cameras a
sullen, pudgy young man in a red polo shirt. A lawyer representing the
man then revealed that he was not Guzmán’s son but a local car dealer
named Félix Beltrán. Guzmán’s family chimed in, with barely suppressed
glee, that the young man in custody was not Alfredo. In another recent
case, officials in Michoacán announced that they had killed the infamous
kingpin Nazario Moreno, a triumph that was somewhat undercut by the
fact that Moreno—who was known as El Más Loco, or the Craziest One—had
supposedly perished in a showdown with government forces in 2010.
(D.E.A. agents now joke that El Más Loco is the only Mexican kingpin to
have died twice.)
Fingerprints and a DNA swab confirmed that the
man captured at the Miramar was indeed Guzmán. It was a huge victory
for Peña Nieto and for the D.E.A., if largely a symbolic one. Nobody had
any illusions that the arrest would slow down the drug trade. “If you
kill the C.E.O. of General Motors, General Motors will not go out of
business,” a Mexican official told me. Guzmán’s genius was always
architectural, and the infrastructure that he created will almost
certainly survive him. Earlier this month, five weeks after Guzmán’s
apprehension, two new drug tunnels were discovered in Sinaloa territory,
starting in Tijuana and emerging in the industrial outskirts of San
Diego. Some believe that, even before Guzmán’s capture, his role in the
organization had become largely symbolic. “He was a non-executive
chairman,” Ambassador Mora told me. “An emblematic figure.”
Even
so, the arrest signified a powerful reassertion of the rule of law in
Mexico. Alejandro Hope, a former senior official in Mexican
intelligence, told me that the message of Operation Gargoyle is simple
and resounding: “No one is beyond sanction.” Yet, almost as soon as Peña
Nieto’s government took Guzmán into custody, questions arose about its
ability to hold him. According to a memo sent to Attorney General Eric
Holder a few hours after the Mazatlán raid, Guzmán is the subject of
indictments in Arizona, California, Texas, Illinois, New York, Florida,
and New Hampshire. The morning after his capture, Michael McCaul, the
Texas Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security committee,
announced that Guzmán should be extradited to America, telling ABC,
“There is a history here—he escaped from a prison in 2001.” A federal
prosecutor in New York declared that Guzmán should be tried in New York.
The head of the D.E.A. office in Chicago vowed, “I fully intend for us
to have him tried here.” But Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo
Karam, was quick to object. Guzmán still needed to complete his original
twenty-year sentence, and then face multiple new charges, before the
Mexican government would consider turning him over to the U.S. Earlier
this month, he announced that Mexico has “no intention” of extraditing
Guzmán, citing a concern that other Mexican officials raised with me:
that American authorities might flip Guzmán and grant him a reduced
sentence, in exchange for his coöperation. The U.S. has a history of
“reaching deals with criminals,” Karam noted. The opposition to
extradition, however, could be driven by less noble concerns: flipping
Guzmán might provide the American government with evidence against top
Mexican officials.
In a story that aired on the Televisa
network, the Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola reported that,
during the flight from Mazatlán to Mexico City, Guzmán told the marines
that he had killed between two and three thousand people. If this figure
includes not just individuals he murdered personally but people he
authorized subordinates to kill, it is surely a gross underestimate.
Nobody knows exactly how many people have been killed in Mexico’s drug
wars over the past decade, but between the dead and the disappeared the
number likely exceeds eighty thousand. As both the instigator and the
victor of some of the bloodiest battles on the border, Guzmán bears
responsibility for an appalling proportion of these atrocities. His
victims were overwhelmingly Mexican; one reason that the drug war has
been so easy for most Americans to ignore is that very little of the
violence visited upon Mexico has spilled into the U.S. During the years
when Juárez was the most dangerous city on the planet—and a resident
there had a greater statistical likelihood of being murdered than
someone living in the war zones of Afghanistan or Iraq—El Paso, just
across the border, was one of the safest cities in America. Given this
record, it makes intuitive sense that Guzmán should answer for his
crimes where the worst of them were committed.
But the Mexican
officials I spoke with acknowledge that the criminal-justice system in
their country is fragile, and that corruption remains endemic. Last
summer, an old friend of Guzmán’s, Rafael Caro Quintero, was released in
the middle of the night from the prison where he had been serving a
forty-year sentence for murdering a D.E.A. agent. He was sprung on a
technicality by a panel of Mexican judges, under circumstances that
struck many observers as suspicious. The U.S. Justice Department
furiously objected that Caro Quintero still faced charges in America and
declared that the Mexicans should extradite him. But he had already
disappeared into the mountains.
The prospect of a similar
dead-of-night release for Chapo may not be far-fetched. The level of
distrust between U.S. and Mexican officials on this issue is pronounced;
indeed, one theory I heard for the Americans’ decision to leak the news
of Guzmán’s capture to the Associated Press was that going public would
foreclose any possibility of Mexican authorities quietly letting him
go.
“Once bitten, twice shy,” Ambassador Mora told me,
maintaining there was no possibility that his country would risk the
political embarrassment of allowing its most notorious convict to escape
a second time. But there are plausible scenarios short of actual escape
that would be troubling. According to the U.S. Treasury Department,
Caro Quintero continued to operate his drug business during his years in
prison, much as Guzmán did while he was at Puente Grande. Guzmán is
ostensibly being held “in isolation,” at Mexico’s most secure prison,
Altiplano, about fifty miles west of Mexico City. He is permitted visits
not just with his lawyer but also with members of his family, many of
whom have been implicated in the activities of his cartel. Shortly after
the arrest in Mazatlán, Guzmán’s son Alfredo lashed out on Twitter.
“The Government is going to pay for this betrayal—it shouldn’t have
bitten the hand that feeds it,” he wrote. “I just want to say that we
are not beaten. The cartel is my father’s and will always be my
father’s.
GUZMÁN LOERA FOREVER.” His brother, Iván, vowed revenge: “Those dogs that dared to lay a hand on my father are going to pay.”
One
curious feature of Guzmán’s capture was the fact that he was betrayed,
in rapid succession, by at least two of his closest aides: Nariz and
Picudo. Had either one refused to coöperate, Guzmán would likely remain
free today. I was impressed, initially, by the speed with which the
marines had elicited leads from these subordinates, both of them
ex-members of Mexico’s special forces who had been hardened by years in
the cartel. One U.S. law-enforcement official told me that it is not
unusual for cartel members to start coöperating as soon as they are
captured. “There’s very little allegiance once they’re taken into
custody,” he said.
But when I raised the subject with a former
D.E.A. agent who has spoken to Mexican counterparts involved in the
operation, he had a different explanation. “The marines tortured these
guys,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “They would never have given it up,
if not for that.” The D.E.A. refused to comment on the torture
allegation. However, two senior U.S. law-enforcement officials told me
that, though they had no specific knowledge of the Mexican authorities
using torture in the operation, they “wouldn’t be surprised.” Eduardo
Sánchez, the spokesman for the Mexican government, denied the
allegation, and maintained that, in this and other operations, “federal
officials, agents, and officers perform their duties strictly within the
applicable legal framework and with utmost respect for human rights.”
But the Mexican armed forces have been implicated before in the use of
torture as an interrogation technique in the pursuit of drug
traffickers. A 2011 Human Rights Watch report found that members of
Mexico’s security services “systematically use torture to obtain forced
confessions and information about criminal groups,” and documented the
use of such techniques as “beatings, asphyxiation with plastic bags,
waterboarding, electric shocks, sexual torture, and death threats.” The
broad employment of brutal techniques, coupled with the high profile and
the urgency of the hunt for Guzmán, makes it seem all the more
plausible that Mexican authorities used unsavory, and illegal, means to
pursue him.
What will become of the Sinaloa cartel remains
unclear. Chapo’s top associates, Ismael Zambada and Juan José
Esparragoza, are both older than he is, and seem unlikely to assume
day-to-day management. Guzmán’s sons would appear to be candidates, but,
as the coddled children of a wealthy trafficker, they may be more
enamored of the narco life style than of the business itself. “The drug
trade is one of the few really meritocratic sectors in the Mexican
economy,” Alejandro Hope said. “Being the son of Chapo Guzmán doesn’t
necessarily guarantee you’ll be his successor.”
But the question
of who will inherit the Sinaloa cartel may be somewhat beside the
point, because, well before Guzmán’s capture, the landscape of crime in
Mexico had begun to shift. Whereas Sinaloa is a traditional drug cartel,
focussing chiefly on the manufacture and export of narcotics, newer
groups, such as the Zetas and the Knights Templar, have diversified
their money-making activities to include extortion, human trafficking,
and kidnapping for ransom. With cocaine consumption declining in the
U.S., and marijuana on a path toward widespread legalization, a
Darwinian logic is driving the cartels’ expansion into more parasitic
varieties of crime. Organizations that once concentrated exclusively on
drugs now extract rents from Mexico’s oil industry and export stolen
iron ore to China; the price of limes in U.S. grocery stores has doubled
in the past few years because the cartels are taxing Mexico’s citrus
farmers. “We don’t have a drug problem—we have a crime problem,” more
than one Mexican official told me, and, as the criminal syndicates
continue to evolve, this dynamic could end up rendering organizations
like Guzmán’s obsolete. The prohibition of narcotics may have created a
monster, but, as Alejandro Hope pointed out, even if you decriminalized
all drugs tomorrow the monster would find a way to survive. “You can’t
legalize kidnapping,” he said.
Some speculate that Guzmán wasn’t
really captured against his will: seeing that his time had come, he
chose to enjoy a quiet retirement behind bars. One by-product of the
culture of corruption in Mexico is a reflexive cynicism about any
official story put out by the government. Several years ago, a fearless
journalist named Anabel Hernández published a book about the Sinaloa
cartel, called “Los Señores del Narco.” (It was recently published in
English, under the title “Narcoland.”) Hernández argued that Guzmán’s
influence was so pervasive, and the Mexican political system so
thoroughly rotted by graft, that the whole Chapo saga could be
interpreted as a grand charade. Guzmán was “imprisoned” at Puente
Grande, but he was actually running the place. He “escaped,” when in
reality, Hernández suggests, the President of Mexico at the time,
Vicente Fox, personally authorized his release, in exchange for a
colossal bribe. (Fox has angrily denied this accusation.) Guzmán spent
years as a “fugitive,” though everyone knew where he was, and the
authorities were simply lying when they claimed that they “could not
catch him.” Hernández’s book sold more than a hundred thousand copies in
Mexico—her taste for conspiracy and her tone of bitter knowingness
struck a chord. So it should come as no surprise that many observers
believe that Guzmán’s “capture” in Mazatlán was a theatrical event
directed by the drug lord himself. When I reached Hernández and asked
her what she made of the arrest, she challenged the premise of my
question. “
If Chapo Guzmán has been captured,” she said. “
If
that is the real story.” She is not convinced that the man who was
photographed in Mazatlán, and whose DNA was tested, is the real Chapo.
When
Guzmán was questioned in prison by authorities, he, too, seemed to
suggest a case of mistaken identity. He maintained his innocence, his
rote replies taking on a smug absurdity:
Q: May the deponent say to which organization he belongs.
A: I don’t belong to any cartel. . . . I am a farmer.
His
products were not cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and meth, Guzmán
insisted, but corn, sorghum, beans, and safflower. He made twenty
thousand pesos a month, he continued, or about eighteen thousand dollars
a year. In a poll of Mexicans conducted after the arrest, half the
respondents said that Guzmán was more powerful than the government of
Mexico; in Culiacán, in the days after his capture, hundreds of
protesters took to the streets, holding signs demanding his release.
Guzmán’s
wife, Emma Coronel, was born in California, and she retains U.S.
citizenship. After the raid in Mazatlán, the authorities let her go,
along with her daughters, and she has since disappeared from public
view. She was only seventeen when she caught Chapo’s eye, in 2006, while
competing in a beauty contest at the annual Festival of Coffee and
Guava, in her home state of Durango. Her uncle Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel
was one of Chapo’s closest associates at the time, and when the cartel
boss conveyed his interest she may have had little choice but to indulge
it. A
norteño band, Los Alegres del Barranco, was playing at the
festival. Like Chapo, the band members came from the Badiraguato area,
and they had found success playing
narcocorridos about the
cartel. They are rumored to have performed at private parties for Guzmán
and his associates; they even toured the U.S., with gigs in Los
Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami.
After the raid, Los Alegres
posted a new single, “La Captura de Joaquín Guzmán,” on YouTube. A
jaunty guitar-and-accordion number, it’s not so different from their
other ballads, apart from the words. “They don’t know what they’ve done,
and what kind of trouble they’ve got themselves in, the people who
ordered my arrest,” the band sings, assuming the voice of the kingpin.
“It won’t be long before I return to La Tuna and become a fugitive
again. That’s what the people want.”
♦
