Joaquín Guzmán

Joaquín Guzmán (born 1954/57?, La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico) was the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico from the late 20th century.

Guzmán was born and raised in Badiraguato municipality, an impoverished and remote area of Sinaloa state in northwestern Mexico that was the birthplace of many notorious drug traffickers. He began his criminal career in the 1980s as a member of the Guadalajara drug cartel, headed by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. Guzmán rapidly rose through the ranks of the organization. When it disbanded in the late 1980s, he became a leader in the Sinaloa cartel. Under his guidance, the Sinaloa cartel developed creative smuggling techniques and strategies, including building air-conditioned tunnels under the Mexico-U.S. border, hiding drugs in chili pepper cans and fire extinguishers, and catapulting drugs over the border. His organization produced and smuggled various kinds of illicit drugs, including marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

In 1993 Guzmán was arrested in Guatemala and extradited to Mexico. There he was tried and acquitted on charges of murder but found guilty of drug trafficking and possession of firearms and eventually was sentenced to more than 20 years in a maximum-security prison. In exchange for bribes, however, he was granted extensive liberties by prison authorities, who allowed him to continue managing the criminal organization. According to various sources, he became head of the cartel in 1995. In 2001 he escaped with the help of corrupt prison guards. A subsequent investigation led to the arrest on corruption charges of many employees of the prison, including its warden.

In the early 21st century, Guzmán was believed to be responsible for most of the marijuana and cocaine trafficked from Colombia and Mexico to the United States and to be the largest smuggler of methamphetamine in the Asia-Mexico-U.S. triangle (in which methamphetamine was produced in Mexico with Asian-made chemicals and then smuggled to the United States). His net worth was estimated at $1 billion by Forbes magazine in 2009, and some accounts put the annual revenue of his cartel at $3 billion. In Mexico, Guzmán’s fame rose to the level of folklore: he was glorified by some as a hero of the people, and his life story was set to song in many popular narcocorridos (“drug ballads”).

The United States government came to regard Guzmán as a priority target in its war on drugs. In 2004 the U.S. government announced a $5 million reward for information leading to Guzmán’s arrest on federal drug charges. In 2012 the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which called Guzmán “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” invoked the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to freeze the U.S. assets of members of his family.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the Sinaloa cartel engaged in bloody battles with rival cartels and Mexican law-enforcement authorities that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. In 2006 a full-scale offensive against the drug cartels by the Mexican army resulted in the arrests of many traffickers but failed to destroy the major cartels or to capture Guzmán. After years spent in hiding, Guzmán was apprehended in Mazatlán, Mexico, in February 2014. His arrest was the result of a weeks-long operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Mexican marines.

On the night of July 11, 2015, Guzmán once again escaped custody, fleeing the maximum-security Altiplano prison near Toluca through a shaft beneath the shower in his cell to a more than 1-mile- (1.5-km-) long tunnel that led to a house on a construction site. The roughly 5.6-feet- (1.7-metre-) high wood-reinforced tunnel through which Guzmán fled had lighting and ventilation, indicating that it had been in the works for some time. (A motorcycle apparently had been used within the tunnel during its digging to remove soil.) A massive manhunt was mounted, and questions were almost immediately raised about the possibility of official complicity in the escape, which came as a huge blow to Pres. Enrique Peña Nieto, who had made the crackdown on drug cartels a cornerstone of his new administration and who had trumpeted Guzmán’s capture as a pivotal triumph. On January 8, 2016, it was announced that Guzmán had been captured in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, after a shoot-out. The following year he was extradited to the United States, where he was charged with various crimes, including drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder conspiracy. His trial began in November 2018 amid intense security. In February 2019 he was found guilty of all the charges against him, and five months later he was sentenced to life in prison.

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In 2021 Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, was arrested in the United States and accused of being a participant in his drug empire. Later that year she pleaded guilty to several charges and was sentenced to three years in prison.