The rise and fall of ‘El Chapo,’ Mexico’s most wanted kingpin

FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Recaptured drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by soldiers at the hangar belonging to the office of the Attorney General in Mexico City, Mexico January 8, 2016. REUTERS/Henry Romero/File Photo

By Dave Graham

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is Mexico’s most notorious kingpin who shipped tonnes of drugs around the world, escaped two maximum-security jails and became one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives.

He now faces the prospect of life in prison.

Jurors on Monday will begin deliberations on 10 criminal counts facing Guzman, 61, in the trial that began in November in New York.

The audacious exploits of El Chapo, or Shorty, captured the world’s imagination and turned him into a folk hero for some in Mexico, despite the thousands of people killed by his brutal Sinaloa cartel.

Beyond putting Guzman’s personal life and drug dealings on public display, the case has also highlighted Mexico’s long-time fight to bring down its chief adversary in the bloody war on drug trafficking.

In January 2016, after some three decades running drugs, Guzman was caught in his native northwestern state of Sinaloa.

Six months earlier, he had humiliated Mexico’s then-president, Enrique Pena Nieto, by escaping from prison through a mile-long tunnel dug straight into his cell – his second time escaping a Mexican jail.

Just days after his 2016 capture, Guzman’s larger-than-life reputation was sealed when U.S. movie star Sean Penn published a lengthy account of an interview he conducted with the drug lord, which the Mexican government said was “essential” to his capture a few months later.

“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats,” Penn said Guzman told him at the drug lord’s mountain hideout.

Mexico’s government extradited Guzman in January 2017, a day before Donald Trump took office as U.S. president on vows to tighten border security to halt immigration and drug smuggling.

Guzman’s legendary reputation in the Mexican underworld began to take shape when he staged his first jailbreak in 2001 by bribing prison guards, before going on to dominate drug trafficking along much of the Rio Grande.

However, many in towns across Mexico remember Guzman better for his squads of hitmen who committed thousands of murders, kidnappings and decapitations.

Violence began to surge in 2006 as the government launched a war on drug trafficking that caused criminal groups to splinter and killings to spiral.

Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel went on smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, and crystal meth across Mexico’s border with the United States.

In February 2013, the Chicago Crime Commission dubbed him the city’s first Public Enemy No.1 since Al Capone.

ELUSIVE KINGPIN

Security experts concede the 5 foot 6 inch gangster was exceptional at what he did, managing to outmaneuver, outfight or outbribe his rivals to stay at the top of the drug trade for over a decade.

Rising through the ranks of the drug world, Guzman carefully observed his mentors’ tactics and mistakes, forging alliances that kept him one step ahead of the law for years.

Mexican soldiers and U.S. agents came close to Guzman on several occasions but his layers of body guards and spies always tipped him off before they stormed his safe houses.

In preparing for a raid in 2014, U.S. officers restricted information to a small group for fear of corruption among Mexican law enforcement, DEA agent Victor Vasquez testified in Guzman’s trial.

SINALOA ROOTS

Guzman was born in La Tuna, a village in the Sierra Madre mountains in Sinaloa state where smugglers have been growing opium and marijuana since the early twentieth century.

He ascended in the 1980s working with Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, alias “The Boss of Bosses,” who pioneered cocaine smuggling routes into the United States.

The aspiring capo came to prominence in 1993 when assassins who shot dead Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas claimed they had actually been aiming at Guzman.

Two weeks later, police arrested him in Guatemala and extradited him to Mexico. During his eight-year prison stay, Guzman smuggled in lovers, prostitutes and Viagra, according to accounts published in the Mexican media.

After escaping, Guzman expanded his turf by sending in assassin squads with names such as “The Ghosts” and “The Zeta Killers,” in reference to the rival Zetas gang.

Guzman hid near his childhood home, agents said, but rumors abounded of him visiting expensive restaurants and paying for all the diners.

In 2007, Guzman married an 18-year-old beauty queen in an ostentatious ceremony in a village in Durango state.

The state’s archbishop subsequently caused a media storm when he said that “everyone, except the authorities,” knew Guzman was living there. Guzman’s bride, Emma Coronel, gave birth to twins in Los Angeles in 2011. She attended nearly every day of her husband’s trial, at one point donning a red blazer that matched his own.

WAGING WAR

Between 2004 and 2013, Guzman’s gangs fought in all major Mexican cities on the U.S. border, turning Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo into some of the world’s most dangerous places.

In one such attack, 14 bodies were left mutilated under a note that read, “Don’t forget that I am your real daddy,” signed by “El Chapo.”

Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel often clashed with the Zetas, a gang founded by former Mexican soldiers, arming its crew with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.

In 2008, hitmen working for a rival murdered Guzman’s son Edgar, a 22-year-old student. Guzman reportedly left 50,000 flowers at his son’s grave.

In the 1990s, Guzman became infamous for hiding seven tons of cocaine in cans of chili peppers. In the following decade, his crew took drugs in tractor trailers to major U.S. cities including Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago, indictments say.

Forbes magazine put the kingpin’s wealth at $1 billion, though investigators say it is impossible to know exactly how much he was worth.

(Reporting by Dave Graham and Mexico City Newsroom; Editing by Daina Beth Solomon and Alistair Bell)

El Chapo loses last minute bid to postpone trial

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman walks out of United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in the Brooklyn borough of New York, New York, U.S., October 30, 2018. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

By Brendan Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Tuesday turned down a last-ditch effort by accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to delay his trial, scheduled to begin next Monday with jury selection in Brooklyn federal court.

Lawyers for Guzman said in a motion last week that they needed more time to review more than 14,000 pages documents, largely related to key witnesses expected to testify against their client, that prosecutors turned over on Oct. 5.

However, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan said at a hearing on Tuesday that the volume of documents was in line with what they should have expected, noting that prosecutors had said in July that it could be 25,000 pages and that sprawling, complex cases like Guzman’s were necessarily challenging for both sides.

“Nobody is going to be as ready to try this case as they would like to be,” he said.

In what he called a small concession to the defense, Cogan ruled that opening statements in the trial would begin no earlier than Nov. 13, which could allow some extra time to prepare if jury selection finishes early next week.

Cogan also raised concerns at the hearing about the prosecutors’ planned case at the hearing. He said he was concerned that the prosecutors had indicated that they were prepared to present evidence that Guzman was involved in more than 30 murder conspiracies, even though the charges against him are for drug trafficking.

“This is a drug case,” he said. “I’m not in any way going to let them try a murder conspiracy case that happens to involve drugs.”

He said that while some evidence of murder conspiracies connected to alleged drug trafficking would be allowed, it would be limited.

Guzman, 61, has been in solitary confinement since being extradited to the United States from Mexico in January 2017. He was known internationally as the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Susan Thomas)

Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo’ gets April 2018 U.S. trial date

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman (R) and his attorneys Michael Schneider (L) and Michelle Gelernt are shown in a sketch of a court appearance at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, U.S., May 5, 2017. REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg

By Brendan Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. judge has scheduled the trial of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman — for years his country’s most wanted man — on drug trafficking and conspiracy charges for April 16, 2018.

U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn federal court acknowledged at a hearing Friday that the date was “somewhat aspirational” and could be delayed, given the complexity of the case and the amount of evidence that lawyers must review ahead of trial.

The hearing came the day after Cogan refused to order Guzman released from solitary confinement in a New York City federal prison, where his court-appointed lawyers have said he faces needlessly harsh and restrictive conditions that make it difficult for him to mount his defense.

The judge did, however, rule that Guzman could send pre-screened letters to his wife, Emma Coronel, who was present at Friday’s hearing. She has not been allowed to visit him.

Michelle Gelernt, one of Guzman’s lawyers, again brought up the conditions of Guzman’s imprisonment at Friday’s hearing, saying it was difficult to review evidence because lawyers were only allowed to speak to Guzman through a plexiglass barrier.

Cogan said he would send a magistrate judge to look at the room where Guzman meets with his lawyers and make recommendations about how the problem could be overcome, though he said he did not want to “micro-manage” the prison.

Guzman also said at the hearing, through an interpreter, that he understood that four of the witnesses expected to testify against him had previously been represented by the same federal public defender’s office that represents him, though not by the same attorneys, raising the possibility of conflicts of interest.

He said he wished to keep his attorneys nonetheless.

All four of those witnesses, whose names have not been disclosed, are currently serving prison sentences in the U.S., Coogan said.

Guzman, who sold oranges as a child before turning to the drug trade in the 1970s, was extradited from Mexico to the United States to face drug trafficking charges on Jan. 19. He had previously escaped from two Mexican prisons.

In his most recent escape in 2015, Guzman walked out of prison through a mile-long, highly engineered tunnel from his cell, a sign of the huge influence he was able to wield even from behind bars.

(Editing by Alistair Bell)

Mexico captures protégé, turned enemy, of drug lord Chapo Guzman

Accused drug kingpin Damaso Lopez (C), nicknamed “The Graduate”, is escorted by police officers in Mexico City, Mexico May 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican security forces on Tuesday arrested accused drug kingpin Damaso Lopez, believed to be locked in a bloody struggle for control of the Sinaloa Cartel against the sons of its captured leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

The attorney general’s office announced that its agents with the help of the army had captured Lopez, 51, one of the top-ranking figures in the world’s most successful drug cartel, which has been destabilized by “El Chapo’s” extradition in January to the United States.

Guzman’s latest imprisonment triggered a violent power struggle that has led to daylight gun battles involving truck-mounted machine guns in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, with Mexican officials attributing the bloodshed to a tussle between Lopez and the former leader’s sons.

“(Lopez) is considered one of the main drug traffickers and generators of violence in Sinaloa and the south of the Baja California peninsula,” Omar Garcia, head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, told a news conference.

Last month the body of a man tossed from an airplane landed on a hospital roof in Lopez’s Sinaloan home town, Eldorado, and shootings have become common this year around the tourist resorts of Baja California.

Lopez was believed to have been seeking a new alliance with rival Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and his arrest will likely be a relief for Guzman’s family and their faction.

“This arrest reduces the possibility of an alliance that the detainee was seeking with another organized crime group that operates in several states of the country,” Garcia said.

Lopez, nicknamed “The Graduate,” was captured in an apartment in a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood in the early hours of Tuesday, a few weeks after a video emerged of him eating at a Mexico City restaurant.

He was held for several hours at the apartment with a heavy army presence outside the building before being sped in a convoy of white vehicles through the city to a unit of the attorney general’s office, live TV footage showed.

Lopez is himself a former security official, believed to have studied at Sinaloa’s state university, who Mexican officials say played a role in orchestrating Guzman’s first escape from prison in 2001, before joining the cartel.

The U.S Treasury Department in 2013 called him Guzman’s “right hand man” and froze his U.S. assets. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in the same year, accused of importing $280 million of drugs to the United States.

Guzman, who broke out twice from prison in Mexico, was recaptured for the last time in January 2016. One of the world’s most wanted drug lords, he was extradited to the United States to face charges there on Jan. 19, the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president.

Trump has vowed to break the power of translational drug cartels and said that his planned wall on the U.S.-Mexico border would stem the flow of drugs into the United States. He has issued executive orders that aim to improve coordination between U.S. law enforcement agencies and their foreign partners.

(Reporting by Dave Graham and Miguel Gutierrez; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by W Simon, Grant McCool and Lisa Shumaker)

Shootouts in Mexico show Trump’s drug cartel fight will be tough

forensic scientists work at crime scene

By Christine Murray and Lizbeth Diaz

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Since Mexico’s top drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was extradited to a U.S. jail, gunfights in broad daylight have rocked his home state of Sinaloa in a power struggle that is a reminder of how hard it is to crush the country’s drug cartels.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at dismantling the cartels his spokesman called “a clear and present danger.” To succeed, history suggests, Trump will have to go further then capturing or killing gang leaders.

When leaders such as Guzman are taken out, others replace them or the cartels splinter. Either way, the flow of drugs to lucrative U.S. markets is rarely interrupted for long.

As boss of the Sinaloa cartel, Guzman escaped from prison twice before Mexico’s navy arrested him last year after a chase through city sewers. Flown to the United States in January, he is awaiting trial in a New York jail.

In his absence, violence has flared. The Sinaloans, long the world’s largest drug gang with a footprint across most of the United States, appear to be facing both an internal power struggle and challenges from upstart rivals.

Last month, there were 116 homicides in Sinaloa, 50 percent more than the same month in 2016, an official at the state attorney general’s office told Reuters.

Shootouts in the state capital Culiacan resulted in 12 deaths over three days in the last week alone, the office said in a statement. The state education ministry suspended classes in 148 schools on Wednesday, citing security issues.

A video obtained by Reuters from a Federal Police official showed a pick-up truck fitted with a mounted machine gun circling a gas station during a two-minute exchange of gunfire.

The official said the footage was taken in Culiacan. Reuters could not independently verify that. Earlier, a Mexican marine and five other people were killed in clashes with a drug gang’s armed convoy that was roaming the city.

Tomas Guevara, who studies crime at Sinaloa State University, attributed the outburst of violence to the breakdown of an alliance between factions, with Guzman’s sons Alfredo and Ivan Archivaldo on one side and another leader, Damaso “El Licenciado” Lopez, on the other.

Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical analysis at security consultancy Stratfor, said Chapo was out of touch now he was in a U.S. jail.

“That seems to have emboldened ‘El Licenciado’,” Stewart said.

After Guzman was extradited the night before Trump’s inauguration, former and current U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials told Reuters they expected an imminent move on Chapo’s sons by their rivals. A letter this week to a top Mexican journalist claimed they were injured in the latest violence.

U.S. HELP

In a call with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto this month, Trump offered help, saying Mexico had not done a good job knocking the cartels out, according to a CNN report.

Trump’s executive order tells federal agencies to increase help for foreign partners on security and on intelligence sharing. The order was vague on details. The U.S. government and Mexico already work closely to tackle cartels.

For example, on Thursday, Mexican marines used a Black Hawk helicopter to kill eight alleged gang members including the head of the Beltran-Leyva gang, a rival of El Chapo. The United States sold Black Hawks to Mexico under the anti-cartel Plan Merida.

Steve Dudley of think-tank Insight Crime said it was impossible to end the flow of drugs, but more could be done on violence. Success would depend on stabilizing the volatile turn in bilateral relations under Trump.

“The overriding concern on the part of law enforcement officials on both sides of the border is that they are now at the whim of a seemingly erratic, chaotic approach,” he said.

Mexico’s national security commission did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Christine Murray and Lizbeth Diaz; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and James Dalgleish)

Son of drug lord ‘El Chapo’ could be among Mexico kidnapped

A general view shows a restaurant where unknown assailants kidnapped a group of people in the Pacific tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico,

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A son of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman could be among a group of people kidnapped from a restaurant in the Pacific Mexican tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta, the state attorney general said on Tuesday.

A group of six or seven people suspected to be members of Guzman’s feared Sinaloa Cartel were abducted by eight armed men from an upscale eatery in the heart of the resort early on Monday.

Puerto Vallarta, in the state of Jalisco, is one of Mexico’s top vacation destinations, attracting all-inclusive tourists and high-end sun seekers to its beaches.

“There is a possibility that Ivan Guzman is among the kidnapped,” Jalisco Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer told local radio. However he cautioned that it was hard to tell, as false ID cards were found at the scene.

Jalisco, which lies south along the Pacific coast from Sinaloa, is home to the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which has become one of the country’s most powerful drug gangs in recent years.

Guzman was one of the world’s most wanted drug kingpins until he was captured in January. Six months earlier, he had broken out of a high-security penitentiary in central Mexico through a mile-long tunnel.

His lawyers are now seeking to block his looming extradition to the United States.

(Reporting by Veronica Gomez; Writing by Christine Murray; Editing by Simon Gardner and Frances Kerry)