Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Chapo Guzman is probably responsible directly and indirectly for at least 100,000 deaths in Mexico during the years of the drug cartel wars and the disappearances of untold others. He wanted efficiency in his drug operations.
And if you were unable to do that or you just got careless, he was going to deal with you through putting a bullet in your head. He was pretty much a psychopath. Chapo Guzman Loera is public nominee number one in Los Angeles, in New York, in Miami, in El Paso, in Juarez, and you name it. I mean, his influence is everywhere.
Noiser presents Real Narcos, the podcast series that takes you to the front line with special agents and law enforcement pursuing the world's most dangerous narco criminals. Now we're taking things up a level, bringing the story of America's war on drugs right up to the present day. This is the story of the hunt for El Chapo, the scourge of Mexico and America's most wanted. We'll join agents on the ground as they piece together Chapo's backstory, chart his rise to power,
then capture and recapture him time and time again, until finally they make it stick. These guys are the real deal. And this is Real Narcos. It's the morning of November 5th, 2018, and one corner of New York City has come to a total standstill. Brooklyn Bridge is closed, for all save a select few. It may be rush hour, but this is way more important than getting to work on time. Pedestrians push up against barricades, desperate to get a look.
Silence reigns. Then, on the Manhattan side, a convoy of police vehicles turn onto the bridge. Their windows are heavily tinted, but everyone knows who's inside. The cars speed past the onlookers and into Brooklyn. This spectacle will repeat every day for the next three months. Each morning, the cops will transport the prisoner from a maximum security jail in lower Manhattan to the federal district court in Brooklyn.
It'll take 12 full weeks for all the witnesses to be heard, for the reams of evidence to be processed. There's a lot to get through. The new millennium may only be 18 years old, but this is already the trial of the century. In Brooklyn, the prisoner is bundled out of the van and straight into the courtroom, before the rabid posse of press photographers can get a side of him. Inside the building, the man's handcuffed hands straighten out the creases in his dark suit. Then, he's led to a secure room.
This humble looking venue in Brooklyn might not seem like anything to write home about, but for the duration of this trial, you can forget the sights that Manhattan has to offer. This courtroom is the place to be in New York City. Tourists will fly from all over the United States, all over the world, to observe proceedings. Paparazzi will jostle for position outside every morning, noon, and night as witnesses and attorneys come and go.
The man on trial is quite simply the most notorious criminal in America right now. He's probably the world's most wanted man since Osama Bin Laden. His name is Joaquin Guzman Loera. He's better known by his nickname, El Chapo. It's Mexican Spanish for shorty. El Chapo may only stand at a height of 5 feet 4 inches, but to call him larger than life would be a gross understatement. He's accused of earning more than $14 billion from narcotic sales.
His criminal career has spanned over 30 years. He's a man personally responsible for thousands of deaths and indirectly responsible for tens of thousands more. He has stood center stage through the bloodiest period in Mexico's modern history. Flanked by security, Joaquin Guzman enters the PAC courtroom. As he takes his position at the defense table, the 61-year-old cocaine emperor blows a kiss to his 29-year-old wife, Emma Coronel.
Chapo has been in solitary confinement for nearly two years. He asked the judge for permission to embrace Coronel. Permission denied. After multiple escapes from custody, the authorities really can't take chances this time. It was one thing to escape from jail before the internet age. Mexico is one huge place, with plenty of remote regions that make perfect hideouts. It's another thing entirely to manage a drug empire remotely while on the run in the modern era of digital communication.
But that's exactly what El Chapo did. And it's only now, three decades after he first hit the headlines, that he's getting a meaningful day in court. So how did he do it? How did this man ride roughshod over Mexican justice and evade the long arm of the U.S. government? How did he become an A-list celebrity criminal, a subject of fascination and even reverence, despite a never-ending list of heinous crimes and innocent victims? Let's travel back in time and find out.
It's 1989, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration agents stationed in Mexico are in a state of shock. For years, their primary target has been Miguel Felix Gallardo. Now finally, the erstwhile head of the Guadalajara cartel has been put away. But his incarceration has come at a heavy cost. Four years ago, in February 1985, tragedy struck the DEA team in Guadalajara.
Their colleague Enrique Camarena was kidnapped and murdered by Felix Gallardo's henchmen. Known as Kiki, Agent Camarena was the first U.S. narcotics agent to be kidnapped and murdered on foreign soil. Mike Vigil is the former head of international operations for the DEA. In a career spanning 31 years in several continents, Vigil spent over a decade in Mexico working to bring down the leading cartels.
I met Kiki Camarena when I was assigned to Nogales, Arizona, and he was based in Calexico, California. We coordinated certain investigations. We got to be very good friends. You know, he was a very decent man, came from humble origins, but, you know, a very courageous DEA agent.
But one thing that I remember about Kiki is that he had an infectious laugh, got along with everybody, you know, he just had great interpersonal skills. And he was a family man, you know, he loved his family. He also loved the work. He was a brother to all the DEA agents in the agency. Gilberto Gonzalez is another DEA agent on the ground in Mexico in the late 80s.
My name is Gilbert Gonzalez. I spent over 20 years working as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. And I presently serve as the executive director of the Texas Narcotic Officers Association. And I entered DEA at a very interesting time. It was right after the assassination and torture of Special Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar.
So when I first joined DEA, the agency was very much focused on that particular investigation. From Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to work in Guadalajara, Mexico, working specifically the investigation on the
the assassination of Agent Camarena and those individuals in Mexico that were involved that were still not in prison, that were still out working, selling drugs, working the cartels. So the focus was on those individuals. - Camarena's murder changes the terms of the game. The war on drugs is now international front page news and narcotics have shot right to the top of the priority list for decision makers in Washington, DC.
Elaine Shannon is an investigative journalist and an expert on the drug strain. She remembers how her sources responded to the news of Camarena's disappearance. Got a call from a source high up in DEA who said, "This isn't just a murder. Something is wrong. The Mexican government at the highest level is not helping look for our agent. We are raising the issue to the highest levels.
We helped to get the White House involved, the Treasury and State Departments were already involved, and there were squabbles going on within the United States government about how hard to push Mexico to look for the missing man. I could see right off that this was not just a drug murder. This was a major international political incident. Narcotics agents need to have their wits about them more than ever before. The stakes couldn't get much higher.
Gilberto González remembers the atmosphere among his fellow DEA operatives. The situation in Mexico after Camarena's torture and assassination was really quite hazardous. That it was extremely dangerous, that it was a place that very few people wanted to work. It's a place that had a lot of peril. Not everybody wanted to volunteer to work in Mexico in those early years. There was a lot of tension in the air. One of our agents had been kidnapped, tortured to death.
Not only did they torture him, they recorded the interrogation under torture. And when they were torturing Agent Camarena, one of the questions that was asked to him under torture, I know because I've listened to those tapes, they asked him, "Do you want to die?" And Agent Camarena says, "No, I have children." And when he responds with, "No, I have children," in the tape, you could actually hear the torture intensify.
You would think that when you make a comment like that, the individual that's interrogating you and that's in charge of your torture perhaps can relate to you, at least on a very basic human level. It had the opposite effect. So I knew who we were dealing with at the time. Then, as if Camarena's tragedy wasn't enough, news filters in of another crisis. It centers on a guy called Victor Cortez. He's another DEA agent, another member of the Guadalajara team.
One morning, Cortes leaves home like he always does. It won't be a late one, he tells his pregnant wife. She's right to ask. He's spent plenty of nights at the office lately, as have all the agents on the hunt for Kiki's killers. Cortes is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He's tough. Not yet 40, but worldly wise. Little does he know, things are about to head south, big time. Cortes stands on a Guadalajara street corner. Another man stands beside him, an informant.
Across the street, a group of men, drug traffickers. Cortez is onto them. His informant has led him here. The afternoon sun beats down. Cortez keeps a beady eye on the men, jotting down observations in a notebook. Then several police cars screech around the corner. They pull up right in front of Cortez. The men get out of the car. They're wearing police uniforms, but that doesn't count for much.
Cortes suspects immediately that these guys are in cahoots with the drug traffickers over the way. His suspicions are confirmed as one of the men draws a pistol. Cortes feels cold steel on his skin as the man presses the gun barrel into his forehead. They push him into the back of the police vehicle. Minutes later, they arrive at a police station. Cortes is taken to the back and thrown in a cell. DEA agents in Mexico are always on the lookout for crooked cops. Corruption is endemic.
There's a good chance someone you're working with one minute might be taking bribes the next. But these guys are so brazen, they've grabbed Cortez, an American citizen off the street in broad daylight, and bundled him into a marked police car. Cortez might be forgiven for thinking this is all just a misunderstanding. They've got the wrong guy. These are boys in blue. Any minute now, one of the bosses will set him free with an apology. He might even make it home in time for dinner. He couldn't be more wrong.
An officer does enter the cell, but instead of setting Cortez free, he binds the agent's wrist behind his back. Then he ties a blindfold around his head. Cortez feels his legs kicked from under him. He hits the ground, body tensed in anticipation for whatever's coming next. Then, just like with Kiki Camarena,
the torture begins another very good friend of mine special agent victor cortez after camarena was tortured to death was also conducting the investigation on the individuals involved in his torture he was also arrested taken to state police holding cell and was also tortured in a very heinous way i mean
Victor will tell you. I mean, he's told me he was in his jail cell and when they were getting ready to shock him again, they were shocking him as part of the torture treatment. He would bang his head against the jail cell, the concrete wall to knock himself out in order to try and deal with his pain that he was under. Thank God Victor was rescued. Finally, the torture ends and Cortez lies panting on the cold stone floor. He knows he needs to make a break for freedom. There's no way he can go through all that again.
Lucky for him, his fellow DEA agents are already on the case and are working on getting him out. When the cops grabbed Cortes off the street, they'd cast around to make sure there were no witnesses. The coast seemed clear, but actually just around the corner, a woman selling tacos from a stall saw the whole thing. After the screech of tires had faded from earshot, she headed straight to the DEA office a few blocks away. This is all the intel that Tony Ayala, DEA chief in Guadalajara needs.
After what happened to Agent Camarena, Ayala is desperate to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. Ayala gets straight on the phone to the state police commander. Cortez must be released or the consequences will be severe. The phone call ends. It's not clear whether the commander has accepted these demands. So Ayala holsters his gun and heads down to the police station himself, backed up by 11 DEA agents. Back in the cell, Cortez is hauled to his feet. His blindfold is removed.
and he's dragged out of the cell. He has no idea where they're taking him, his muscles tense. This could be his best opportunity to escape, but he needs to pick exactly the right moment. Cortez is led around a corner. He gasps with relief when he sees Tony Ayala stood at the end of the hallway. Without a word, the cops shove Cortez in the direction of his DEA boss. Freedom.
DE agents went to the place where he was being held and call it an act of God, call it a coincidence, call it whatever you want. He was being moved from one jail cell to the other when the DE agents saw him and they made eye contact and they released Victor and he's alive and well. As it turns out, the governor of Jalisco State has intervened in the case. Mexican politicians are still reeling from Camarena's abduction. It's caused diplomatic turmoil. They don't want another identical situation on their hands.
Cortes' ordeal is thankfully over. Pretty soon he'll return home to the United States. He will set foot in Mexico just once more during his career, but his close shave will haunt him for decades to come.
The Cortez affair sends shockwaves through the ranks of DEA agents stationed in Mexico. When I got to the Guadalajara resident office and I opened the file drawer, the first case file that I opened was Victor Cortez and the fact that he had been kidnapped and tortured and survived. And I saw actual pictures of Victor when they rescued him after his torture and his ordeal. So that brought it right to reality. Camarena's death and Cortez's kidnap are travesties of justice.
but they are proving to be catalysts for change. The motivation for myself, and I can speak for some of my friends, was the fact that these individuals had something to do with the torture and assassination of our own agent. That gets a bit personal as well, when they kill one of your own, and in such a heinous manner. So it also is a motivation to continue to do the work that we did. America's efforts against the drugs trade are being ratcheted right up.
The U.S. is plowing resources into anti-drug efforts, and there are signs the Mexican government is rooting out some of the most egregious instances of corruption. New agents join the DEA, hungry to play their part. Among them is Joe Bond. In Mexico, we had to be very, very, very careful. We knew that our counterparts were listening to us, observing us, some of them resentful of our job there, and just waiting for us to make a mistake.
It was very dangerous for us to be in the streets. We had bulletproof vehicles. We had security in our homes. We sometimes had to be escorted to certain meetings. So yeah, we had to be very careful. We knew what the cartels were capable of. Taking the fight to the cartels has never been more important than it is now. And in the years to come, the stakes will only get higher. The drug violence will escalate. Much of it will revolve around a single individual.
A man who will achieve unprecedented power in Mexican society, El Chapo. Agent Mike Vigil watched the rise and fall of Chapo up close and personal. He observed as the Mexican kingpin emerged from obscurity to dominate the drugs trade, both within Mexico and over the border in the United States.
Chapo Guzman wanted Chicago, they wanted certain cities, you know, large metropolitan areas where he could generate a lot of profit. And his organization was trafficking drugs from the West Coast all the way to the East Coast. At one point in time, probably 60 to 80 percent of the drugs that were coming into the United States from Mexico were coming or originated from Chapo Guzman.
Diana Washington Valdez is an award-winning journalist and author from Texas. She's an expert on the Mexican cartels and the cross-border drugs trade. Chapo Guzman is probably responsible directly and indirectly for at least 100,000 deaths in Mexico.
and the disappearances of untold others. We were publishing the latest list of victims that we had were the names, their age, and the manner of death, the caliber of bullets that were used against them. I will never forget an academic from Germany who came here and asked me one time, "Who are these people?" And I had to say, "I don't know. We don't know."
They're just names. Reports are given to us almost daily to the media, and that's it. They remove the bodies, bury them, and it's over. Jim Dinkins is a former law enforcement officer. He served as the head of Homeland Security Investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Chaupo is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. And it's not surprising considering the thousands of men and women in Mexico that have been killed with cartel violence over the years. And him personally, as ruthless as he is, command and control of one of the most prolific cartels in the universe, he's obviously caused the death of hundreds of individuals. Really to the point of not only just killing people,
But putting him on display is warning signs for everybody else that he was in control and death would become you if you crossed him. Want a website with unmatched power, speed, and control? Try Bluehost Cloud, the new web hosting plan from Bluehost, built for WordPress creators by WordPress experts. With 100% uptime, incredible load times, and 24-7 WordPress priority support, your site will be lightning fast with global reach.
And with Bluehost Cloud, your sites can handle surges in traffic no matter how big. Plus, you automatically get daily backups and world-class security. Get started now at Bluehost.com. So who is this man they call El Chapo? And how did he earn this fearsome reputation? El Chapo is the latest in a long line of drug lords to emerge from Mexico's rural hinterland. Joaquin Guzman Loera, as he is born, comes into the world on April 4th, 1957 in a place called La Tuna.
It's a small town in the state of Sinaloa. He is one of seven children. His parents are Emilio and Maria. Joaquin has a childhood of serious poverty. Mike Vigil explains:
Chapo Usman was born on April 4th, 1957 in the very poor mountainous area of La Tuna in the municipality of Barirawato in the state of Sinaloa. And they grew up in a horrible house that was almost a cave-in made out of adobes. The floor was made out of packed dirt and
They eat out a very poor livelihood. They were way, way below the poverty level. And it was not only Chapo Guzman, but, you know, he had two sisters and four brothers. So the household consisted of like nine people. And the mother would bake bread.
which Chapo Guzman would sell on the streets. He sold oranges, he sold whatever he could to make a few pennies so that they could eke out survival. The boy who will become the planet's most feared drug trafficker grows up in fear of his father, a violent alcoholic. When his dad starts to lash out, it's to women, his mother and grandmother, that the boy runs to for protection.
This instills in young Joaquin a lifelong reverence to matriarchal figures.
When he was later interviewed by a prison psychologist, Chapo Guzman stated that he believed in matriarchs. When he was a young kid, his father, Emilio Guzman, was a drunk and a woman chaser. And he used to beat the kids, he used to beat his wife. And Chapo Guzman was protected by his mother.
On occasion, when the violence from his father was so great, he would flee to his maternal grandmother's house, who would also protect him. It's hard to scratch out a living in this part of the world. Chapo's father is a farmer, officially a cattle rancher. But he also cultivates opium poppies on the side. Emilio Guzman can barely make ends meet. And what money he does earn doesn't always end up in the household budget.
Chapo Guzman's father grew opium poppies, which they scored and extracted the opium gum and sold to drug traffickers who converted it into heroin hydrochloride. Chapo Guzman did not like what his father was doing because he was taking that money and not using it to support the family, but he would take it and, you know, run around with women and, you know, he was an alcoholic.
But the women around El Chapo are not enough to mitigate his father's influence. His dad may be abusive, but the young boy still looks up to him. In fact, he's a chip off the old block. Chapo is only a teenager when he follows in his father's footsteps by entering the drug business.
It was actually his father that introduced him to marijuana cultivation. You know, they would grow small plots, but very little went to the family. So Chapo Guzman decided, along with his cousins, that they were going to do the same thing but support the family. So that's what he did, and that was his first introduction to the drug world. As a toddler, Chapo sold oranges to peasant farmers for a few pesos here and there.
He's always had business acumen. Now as a teenager, growing weed is a foolproof way to make a fast buck.
So they would go up into the mountains and they would take black holes and put it into these mountain streams and then funnel the water through gravity into the marijuana cultivations. And they were rustic at what they did, but they knew how to cultivate, you know, how to seed these areas and then how to chop down the marijuana plants
and then stack them and dry them. And then later they would take off the stems and then try to manicure the marijuana as much as possible. And then you had drug traffickers that would come into the area and buy the marijuana from Chapo Guzman. And they would pay him a pittance of what it was worth. You know, the little money that he made helped sustain the family.
— You know, if you listen to Chapo Guzmán talk, he comes across like a peasant, like a campesino. And, you know, I'm not being negative. He is so intelligent that he's able to build this massive criminal empire. — From a distance, it's easy to criticize this willingness to join the drug strain. But government support and the legitimate private sector aren't always visible out here.
In villages like Latuna, deep in west central Mexico, many of the role models for young kids are drug traffickers. And what they offer to boys like Joaquin Guzman is something their legit life can't.
a route out of grinding poverty. A lot of these individuals grew up as youngsters and they saw these drug traffickers driving new vehicles, brand new trucks, nice clothing, expensive jewelry. And here they are, they don't even have enough money to buy a soda pop and a sandwich.
So they became the role models. They have no other role models. And to them, it was the best way to escape extreme poverty and get the creature comforts of life very quickly, very easily. And they figured that if their fathers and their uncles were doing it, you know, it was good enough for them as well. When you start getting involved in the drug business, sooner or later you face a pivotal decision.
Are you going to sample the product yourself or stay clean? Chapo Guzman is not a Puritan by any stretch, but he's careful to make the drugs work for him, not the other way around. And here's another thing that people don't know. You know, when Chapo Guzman first started involving himself in the drug trade, he used drugs.
He used marijuana and then later he used cocaine, but then stopped because he had blind ambitions to become a cartel leader. And he knew that if he were addicted to drugs, that probably would never happen. So he stopped using drugs. His foray into the marijuana business offers proof enough that drugs are the way to get rich. Still a teenager, El Chapo leaves home and heads for the state capitol.
where he aspires to make his fortune. He went to the city of Culiacan, which is the state capital of Sinaloa, and he started to meet other drug traffickers. In Culiacan, things go up a notch for the teen drug pusher. Here, Felix Gallardo's Guadalajara cartel is the only show in town. Chapo seeks out low-ranking cartel henchmen and offers his services.
Signed up, he keeps his head down and begins climbing the greasy pole. He starts out as a hitman, a soldier.
And it's alleged that Pedro Aviles Perez, one of the pioneers of the Mexican drug trade, he's the one that pioneered the use of aircraft in smuggling drugs across Mexico, was his uncle. And it was he that introduced him to Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who was head of the Guadalajara Cartel. And it was the only cartel that existed in Mexico at the time
DEA agent Gilberto Gonzalez. He worked his way up from being a soldier in that cartel. He also worked for Rafael Caro Quintero, managing and working some of his marijuana cultivation fields. So he was, besides being an enforcer, he was a worker. He was someone that worked his way up from within the cartels.
which gave him, I think, a breadth of experience and a lot of institutional knowledge on how these cartels operate, how they function, how they structure the day-to-day world of the criminal drug trafficker. Before long, this young man from Latuna has impressed his new employers. They devolve more and more responsibility to him.
Chapo Guzman requests that they give him an opportunity to become more involved in the Guadalajara cartel, and Félix Gallardo puts him in charge of handling several loads of cocaine that are being flown from Colombia into Mexico. Chapo Guzman, in turn, wants to impress Félix Gallardo,
And he starts to move those drugs across the border within 48 hours. The kid known as Shorty even gets a new, more complimentary nickname. And that's where he starts to be called El Rapido, the rapid one, because of his quick movements of drug loads. So Chapo Guzman starts to slowly work his way up the ranks in the Guadalajara cartel.
But now it's the late 1970s, and El Chapo is about to receive his biggest assignment to date. He's given responsibility for overseeing a shipment of drugs from the Sierra Madre Mountains. He makes sure to grab this opportunity with both hands. The first shipment goes off without a hitch. It leads to more and more shipments. Chapo keeps his foot on the gas. He tells the suppliers to increase the flow of contraband. He can handle it. And if his employees slack or step out of line, then he executes them himself.
A single bullet to the forehead does the trick. By 1981, the 24-year-old Joaquin Guzman is hammering at the door of the cartel leadership. He's finally about to get the one introduction he's been holding out for when he's taken to meet the Godfather himself. It's the beginning of an association that will change the course of Mexican history, putting Chapo Guzman's name up in the lights for all the wrong reasons. In the next episode of Real Narcos, Felix Gallardo recruits El Chapo to his inner circle.
A young man from Sinaloa begins digging a vast network of tunnels under the United States border. The rise of Chapo Guzman seems unstoppable. But then the cartel train hits the buffers. Will his career fizzle out? Or will Chapo turn chaos to his advantage? That's next time on Real Narcos. Real Narcos is a Noiser podcast and World Media Rights co-production hosted by me, John Cuban. The series was created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Duddle.
It's been edited by Katrina Hughes with music from Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. If you have a moment, please leave us a review wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
