Who is El Chapo?
El Chapo was a Mexican drug lord also known by his real name , was born on the 4th April 1957). He nickname was “Shorty” because of his 168 cm.
He was a former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, an international crime syndicate. He is considered to have been the most powerful drug trafficker in the world.
Guzmán was born in Sinaloa and raised in a poor farming family. He endured physical abuse at the hands of his father, and also entered the drug trade through his father, helping him grow marijuana for local dealers during his early adulthood. Guzmán began working
with Héctor Luis Palma Salazar by the late 1970s, one of the nation’s rising drug lords.
He helped Salazar map routes to move drugs through Sinaloa and into the United States. He later supervised logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, one of the nation’s leading kingpins in the mid 1980s, but Guzmán founded his own cartel in 1988 after Gallardo’s arrest.
Guzmán oversaw operations whereby mass cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin were produced, smuggled into, and distributed throughout the United States and Europe, the world’s largest users.
see also Top 20 shocking Photos of Celebrities Without Their Makeup
He achieved this by pioneering the use of distribution cells and long-range tunnels near borders, which enabled him to export more drugs to the United States than any other trafficker in history.
Guzmán’s leadership of the cartel also brought immense wealth and power; Forbes ranked him as one of the most powerful people in the world between 2009 and 2013, while the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimated that he matched the influence and wealth of Pablo Escobar.
Guzmán was first captured in 1993 in Guatemala and was extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder and drug trafficking.He bribed prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum-security prison in 2001.
His status as a fugitive resulted in an $8.8 million combined reward from Mexico and the U.S. for information leading to his capture, and he was arrested in Mexico in 2014.
He escaped prior to formal sentencing in 2015, through a tunnel under his jail cell.[18] Mexican authorities recaptured him following a shoot-out in 2016 and extradited him to the U.S. a year later. In 2019, he was found guilty of a number of criminal charges related to his leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, and is currently serving a life sentence at ADX Florence.
El Chapo Early life
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera was born into a poor family in the rural community of La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico. He was born on 4 April 1957. His parents were Emilio Guzmán Bustillos and María Consuelo Loera Pérez. His paternal grandparents were Juan Guzmán and Otilia Bustillos, and his maternal grandparents were Ovidio Loera Cobret and Pomposa Pérez Uriarte.
For many generations, his family lived at La Tuna. His father was officially a cattle rancher, as were most in the area where he grew up; according to some sources, however, he might also have been a gomero, an opium poppy farmer.
He has two younger sisters named Armida and Bernarda and four younger brothers named Miguel Ángel, Aureliano, Arturo, and Emilio. He had three unnamed older brothers who reportedly died of natural causes when he was very young.
As a child, he sold oranges and dropped out of school in third grade to work with his father. He was regularly beaten, and he sometimes fled to his maternal grandmother’s house to escape such treatment. However, he stood up to his father to protect his younger siblings from being beaten.
It is possible that Guzmán incurred his father’s wrath for trying to stop him from beating them. His mother, however, was his “foundation of emotional support”. The nearest school to his home was about 60 miles (100 km) away, and he was taught by traveling teachers during his early years.
El Chapo Early career
During the 1980s, the leading crime syndicate in Mexico was the Guadalajara Cartel, which was headed by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (alias “El Padrino” or “The Godfather”), Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (alias “Don Neto”), Juan José Esparragoza Moreno (alias El Azul, “The Blue One”) and others.
In the 1970s, Guzmán first worked for the drug lord Héctor “El Güero” Palma by transporting drugs and overseeing their shipments from the Sierra Madre region to urban areas near the U.S.–Mexico border by aircraft.
Since his initial steps in organized crime, Guzmán was ambitious and regularly pressed on his superiors to allow him to increase the share of narcotics that were smuggled across the border.
He also favored a violent and serious approach when doing business; if any of his drug shipments were not on time, Guzmán would simply kill the smuggler himself by shooting him in the head.
El Chapo Drug empire
Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel, at the time of his arrest, was the wealthiest and most powerful of Mexico’s drug cartels. It smuggles multi-ton cocaine shipments from Colombia through Mexico to the United States by air, sea and road, and has distribution cells throughout the U.S.
The organization has also been involved in the production, smuggling and distribution of Mexican methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin from Southeast Asia.
El Chapo First escape and second arrest
First escape: 2001
While still in prison in Mexico, Guzmán was indicted in San Diego on U.S. charges of money laundering and importing tons of cocaine into California, along with his Sinaloa attorney Humberto Loya-Castro, or Licenciado Perez (“Lawyer Perez”), who was charged with bribing Mexican officials on Sinaloa’s behalf and making sure that any cartel members arrested were released from custody.
After a ruling by the Supreme Court of Mexico made extradition between Mexico and the United States easier, Guzmán bribed guards to aid his escape. On 19 January 2001, Francisco “El Chito” Camberos Rivera, a prison guard, opened Guzmán’s electronically operated cell door, and Guzmán got into a laundry cart that maintenance worker Javier Camberos rolled through several doors and eventually out the front door.
He was then transported in the trunk of a car driven by Camberos out of the town. At a petrol station, Camberos went inside, but when he came back, Guzmán was gone on foot into the night. According to officials, 78 people have been implicated in his escape plan. Camberos is in prison for his assistance in the escape.
The police say Guzmán carefully masterminded his escape plan, wielding influence over almost everyone in the prison, including the facility’s director, who is now in prison for aiding in the escape.
One prison guard who came forward to report the situation at the prison disappeared 7 years later, and was presumed to have been killed on the orders of Guzmán.
Guzmán allegedly had the prison guards on his payroll, smuggled contraband into the prison and received preferential treatment from the staff.
In addition to the prison-employee accomplices, police in Jalisco were paid off to ensure he had at least 24 hours to get out of the state and stay ahead of the military manhunt. The story told to the guards being bribed not to search the laundry cart was that Guzmán was smuggling gold, ostensibly extracted from rock at the inmate workshop, out of the prison. The escape allegedly cost Guzmán $2.5 million.
Personal and family criminal activities
Guzmán’s family is heavily involved in drug trafficking. Several members of his family, including his brother, one of his sons, and a nephew were killed by Sinaloa’s archrival cartels, Los Zetas and the Beltrán Leyva Organization.
In 1977, Guzmán married Alejandrina María Salazar Hernández in a small ceremony in the town of Jesús María, Sinaloa. The couple had at least three children: César, Iván Archivaldo, and Jesús Alfredo. He set them up in a ranch home in Jesús María.
When he was 30 years old, El Chapo fell in love with a bank clerk, Estela Peña of Nayarit, whom he kidnapped and with whom he had sexual relations. They later married.
In the mid-1980s, Guzmán married once more, to Griselda López Pérez, with whom he had four more children: Édgar, Joaquín, Ovidio, and Griselda Guadalupe.
Guzmán’s sons followed him into the drug business, and his third wife, López Pérez, was arrested in 2010, in Culiacán.
In November 2007, Guzmán married an 18-year-old American beauty queen, Emma Coronel Aispuro, the daughter of one of his top deputies, Inés Coronel Barreras, in Canelas, Durango. In August 2011, she gave birth to twin girls, Maria Joaquina and Emali Guadalupe, in Los Angeles County Hospital, in California.
El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzmán arrest as Gunbattles erupt
Ovidio Guzmán López, a son of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, was detained Thursday after a government security patrol was attacked in the street, Mexico’s security minister said.
Rumors of an arrest had swirled for hours before the announcement, setting off violent gunbattles across Culiacán in Sinaloa state, home to the murderous Sinaloa Cartel, which El Chapo ran for decades before he was finally sentenced in the United States.
Mensaje del Gabinete de Seguridad sobre los hechos suscitados en Culiacán, Sinaloa: pic.twitter.com/gQ0pwrryr0
— Secretaría de Seguridad y Protección Ciudadana (@SSPCMexico) October 18, 2019
In a video posted to social media on Thursday night, Security Minister Alfonso Durazo Monraño confirmed that Ovidio Guzmán was among four men who were discovered by a defense and National Guard contingent after it was attacked while on patrol in Culiacán.
“During that action, one of them was identified as Ovidio Guzmán López,” Durazo said.
has been released to quell the violence. The governor of Sinaloa said more information would be provided Friday morning.
Gunbattles erupt as Mexico says El Chapo’s son is located https://t.co/ftf1bxdS3v via @nbcnews
— blogtify (@blogtify1) October 18, 2019
Choking smoke poured into the air and gunfire could be heard for hours as word of Guzmán’s discovery spread, according to Reuters. Vehicles and a gas station were set on fire while cartel gunmen roamed the city in trucks, at least one of which was armed with a mounted machine gun, videos posted on social media showed.
State security officials told Telemundo, NBC’s Spanish-language network, that 30 to 40 inmates escaped from Aguaruto prison in Culiacán.
[spacer height=”20px”]
see also :
Fact Check
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us!
Thanks for reading and remember to share this post on social media & stand a chance to win $10,000