At 6:40 AM last Saturday, Joaquín Guzmán Loera was taken prisoner by Mexican Navy special forces in the pretty little seaside resort of Mazatlán, where senior Americans love to retire and where the juniors of the drug trade love to party. Since his escape from jail in 2001, he had moved freely around Mexico, and, it would seem, much of the rest of the world. People who know about these things even say that he was frequently in San Diego, California, shopping for the designer tennis shoes and fancy moccasins he favored. But in the end the best-known, and possibly even the most powerful of Mexico’s many, many drug traffickers was pretty much where he’d always been: in his home state of Sinaloa. He was found dozing peacefully in a plain furnished apartment overlooking Mazatlán’s oceanfront drive—the kind of place rented by families looking to save money on a comfortable vacation. Reportedly, there was a pot of beans on the kitchenette stove at the time of his arrest. His fortune is legendary, but Guzmán has always been a country boy at heart.
His capture was so easy that one wonders if he was tired of the hard life, looking to be caught, needing some relief from the pressure of transporting thousands of tons of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, you name it, in addition to the daily agony of deciding whom to kill, whom to trust. And then there was all the money requiring cleaning, tons of that too, literally, barrels and cratefuls of cash coming in every week: What to do with the boxes of it left over once the bodyguards, spies, goons, hit men, police officers, judges, mayors, governors, customs officials, army generals, prison guards, railroad workers, trucking bosses, journalists, ranch hands, relatives, cabinet ministers, bank officers, helicopter, jet, and airplane pilots, business associates, and barbers have been paid off? This last item is not negligible; the person who comes in to wield scissors very close to your neck once a month or so and monitor your half-hearted attempts at a disguise—a moustache, a dye job—is someone you definitely want to tip richly if you’re Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán.
Everyone has to be tipped, in fact, every single person you come into contact with—if you’re Guzmán and there’s a seven-million-dollar reward on your head. Tipped and feared. The jefe was reported to drive around Sinaloa and the states of Durango, Chihuahua, and Sonora with an army of bodyguards, in armored cars, lookouts everywhere. It’s a tiresome business, and so it becomes a real question: What was Guzmán doing, slumbering in an apartment building right on Mazatlan’s main tourist drag, five days after Navy special forces knocked down the reinforced metal door to one of his seven houses in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacán, giving him just enough time to escape through one of the tunnels that connected the houses to each other and to the public water system? In the mountains and craggy valleys of the Sierra Madre, Guzmán has been impossible to capture even on those occasions when the security forces showed some interest in doing so. But he fled from Culiacán last week not to the Sierra but to Mazatlán. Perhaps he thought he’d been tipping to everyone´s satisfaction, and miscalculated.
Until the Gulf Coast traffickers made their bid for national coverage starting in the late 1970s, the great majority of Mexico’s most successful drug traffickers came from Sinaloa—from the lowland municipios, or counties, of Guamuchil and Navolato, or from the Sierra Madre highland county of Badiraguato, where Chapo Guzmán was born, sometime in the mid-1950s. Badiraguato is among the small number of municipios in Mexico in which real, constant hunger is the standard condition of life to this day. Guzmán comes from generations of highland marijuana and opium poppy-farming families. Those crops don´t pay much, but they pay more than corn.
In the mid-1970s, encouraged by the United States, the Mexican government launched a series of anti-drug military operations in the highlands, which were really anti-campesino operations. Rummaging in the National Archives in Mexico City, the Sinaloan historian Froylan Enciso recently found charges, never acted on, filed in Culiacán in 1975 by several women from San José, a hamlet just downhill from La Tuna, Guzman’s birthplace. The women were protesting the incursion of Mexican army troops into their village—population about four hundred. The troops, they said, had come looting and pillaging into their homes. One young boy was shot, the men fled, the women were forced to strip naked and molested, a woman who had just sold some cattle was robbed of her money. The last name of one of those women was Loera. Joaquín Guzmán Loera would have been around seventeen years old then, and Enciso speculates that this woman could have been a close relative. The account is, in any event, typical of the period. Army operations in rural Sinaloa have been recurrent ever since that time, and it is fair to say that Guzmán, like thousands of Sinaloans, has lived his adult life in a state of war and his use of violence comes naturally.
In the early 1980s, when military operations in Sinaloa became too bothersome, the drug capos went into exile a couple of states south, in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Guzmán, by then an operator for the pioneer trafficker Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, went with him. By 1990 Félix was in jail, paying for his involvement in the murder of a DEA agent. To avoid a costly war the Sinaloa clans parceled out their vast territories among the different family groups—the Arellano Félix family got Tijuana, the Carrillo Fuentes clan got Ciudad Juárez. Guzmán, still young, didn’t get much, but he soon changed all that. He challenged the Arellano Félixes for Tijuana and in 1993 was involved in a confused shoot-out at the Guadalajara airport in which the archbishop of Guadalajara—who had previously been the archbishop of Tijuana—wound up dead. Guzmán decided to lie low in Guatemala, but he was captured and extradited to Mexico almost immediately and spent the next eight years in jail.