El Chapo Guzmán, father of Ovid: from orange seller to protagonist of incredible billion-dollar leaks

Joachim El Chapo Guzman Loera, father of today’s inmate Ovidio Guzmán, is one of the most famous drug lords in history for the spectacularity of his captures, his extradition to the United States and the trial in New York in 2018 which had media coverage from the main western chains . But also to know how to escape from the maximum security prisons of Mexico.

The head of the Sinaloa Cartel has amassed a fortune estimated at $14 billion which he forged from the traffic of some 155 tons of cocaine in the United States since the 80s, but are also award-winning between 2,000 and 3,000 homicides. El Chapo achieved notoriety for his illegal dealings, but surged into the media agenda after his first escape in 2001.

He was born in La Tuna, Bidiraguato, Sinaloa, where many Mexican drug traffickers come from; The son of farmers, he has just attended the third grade (he finished high school in prison) and from the age of 15 he started dealing drugs when he learned to grow marijuana and extract milk from poppies to make heroin .

“I remember how my mother made bread to support the family. I’ve sold oranges, I’ve sold sodas, I’ve sold candy. My mother was a hard worker, she worked a lot. We grow corn, beans. I took care of my grandmother’s cattle and chopped wood,” the chief said in a taped interview for Rolling Stone magazine, which ended up being the key to his latest catch, in January 2016 after an operation by the Mexican Navy which ended in the deaths of its guardsmen and six others were injured.

However, El Chapo he was imprisoned twice and escaped from prison on both occasions, which triggered a flurry of reports and versions that remain inconclusive to this day.

The chronological order forces us to start telling the story in 1993, when a group of rival drug traffickers led by Arellano Felice Brothers ambushed him at the Guadalajara airport. After the shooting, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo died riddled with bullets “The cardinal was confused (with Guzmán) by the armed men… Guzmán was about to arrive in a white Grand Marquis of the time and the cardinal arrived in a similar car”according to sources investigating the case.

The Arellano Félix, heads of the Tijuana Cartel, were competing for land for drug trafficking in regions bordering the United States with El Chapo and after the failed (but no less fatal) attack they managed to escape in a small plane. While, Guzmán fled by taxi he made his way to Chiapas and then attempted to cross the border into Guatemala. On June 11, 1993 he was captured by the Guatemalan security forces who did not accept the drug trafficker’s bribe (they did not collect the $5 million reward offered by Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari) and was extradited to Mexico. Guzmán was locked up in the maximum security prison of Puente GrandeYellowish.

January 19, 2001

Joaquín Guzmán was imprisoned for 8 years until he managed to escape. And there are still doubts about how he achieved the feat, although what is certain is that the boss of the Sinaloa cartel could not have achieved it without the complicity of the prison authorities.

At the New York trial, some witnesses revealed some details about El Chapo’s escape. In prison he was not one of the others, he enjoyed privileges such as visits from relatives, a cell phone, clothing and other benefits. He was reunited with his friend Hector the guero Palma, who was also being held there, so it was not difficult for him to gain the trust of the prison guards and other inmates.

But his relationship with Dámaso López, deputy director of the prison, who became a partner of El Chapo after his escape. López, nicknamed El Licenciado, testified in New York court that Guzmán paid him $10,000, bought him a house and covered the medical bills of one of his sons in exchange for his prison privileges. When corruption at the prison came to government attention, López resigned from office.

The other key story to retrace Guzmán’s path to freedom was that of Vicente Zambada Niebla, the vincentilloson of Ismael Zambada, the May, El Chapo’s partner in the Sinaloa Cartel. According to Vincent, Guzmán had the help of a man surnamed Chito, the prison laundry manager, who hid it in a trolley with dirty sheets and towels. El Chapo, who earned that nickname for his six-foot height, had no problem getting into his car and going unnoticed.

Zambada Niebla stated that it was Guzmán himself who told him the story, that he passed through six doors and that at one point, when Chito He entertained himself chatting with a policeman so as not to arouse suspicion, the car tilted and almost fell. That he was afraid of being discovered, but then he told it with laughter.

“The route that the drug lord took inside the prison was from his bedroom, in module 3, to the dining room, then to the kitchen and from there to the area where the garbage cans are located in the prison” . And he continues: “The residents of the Puente Grande prison have ensured that at 4 in the morning on Saturday 20 the lights and the prison alarm went on, signaling a leak, after a small plane had flown over the place”.

In Mexican newspaper chronicles of the time, it is indicated that Guzmán actually escaped in a garbage truck and not a laundry truck. But the version that appears in the book “The drug lords” (Anabel Hernández García, 2010) assures it El Chapo he didn’t use any of those methods to escape, but instead He came out of the main gate of the prison of Puente Grande, which then, in jargon, was called “Puerta Grande”. In the exaggeration of history and popular imagination, Guzmán has corrupted the entire prison.

July 11, 2015

After being on the run for more than 13 years, Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán was captured for the second time February 22, 2014 at a hotel in the resort of Mazatlán, Sinaloa, where he was apparently attending a party. And there the sequel to his film Escape began to be written, but this time it was much more spectacular.

Guzmán had succeeded in introducing his product to the United States through a series of tunnels. In 1990, the first border tunnel built in Douglas, Arizona was taken over by Jesús Corona Verbera, whom Guzmán called The architect and that in 2003 he was sentenced to prison in the United States. But the head of the Sinaloa cartel followed his technique and method, which years later would help him break out of prison for the second time.

Guzmán was locked up in El Altiplano Prison, a federal prison located in Almoloya de Juárez, in the State of Mexico, 25 kilometers from Toluca, the state capital, and approximately 90 kilometers from Mexico City. He was confined to the special treatment area, corridor number 2, room number 20.

And 17 months after his capture, he was released by his own law. According to the testimony of Graduate Lopez it was Emma Coronel, the wife of El Chapo, the mastermind behind the leak. Coronel was allegedly the one who carried her husband’s instructions to cartel members to coordinate the escape. The plan: dig a tunnel.

Emma, ​​along with three of her husband’s children, Ivan, Alfred and Ovid, They allegedly bought a house under construction located southwest of the prison, in the Santa Juanita neighborhood, surrounded by cornfields. There the work and the “rescue” operation would begin. The first step was to bring Guzmán a GPS watch to pinpoint the exact location of his cell. And as those years went by, Ovid was already preparing to be the one who will one day run the Sinaloa Cartel with his father’s blessing.

The tunnel was 1.70 meters high, between 70 and 80 centimeters wide. and an extension of 1,500 meters until ending in Guzmán’s cell cubicle which was used as a shower and blind spot for security cameras. Human rights conventions prevent a camera from monitoring the intimate moments or hygienic points of detainees.

At 8:00 pm that Saturday, Guzmán received his medication, walked around his cell, changed his shoes, and squatted down where he washed. Ed disappeared through a 50cm hole, once again his size was the key to achieving escape. In the tunnel there was a ventilation and lighting system. And a motorcycle mounted on rails so that the getaway was quick. As he walked through the mile and a half of the tunnel, El Chapo was break the lights to avoid getting caught when they persecuted him, but only three hours later the prison authorities would retrace the drug lord’s escape route.

Guzmán arrived at the exit where his brother-in-law was waiting for him in a four-wheel drive truck and from there he was transferred to a clandestine runway where a small plane was waiting for him which took him to Sinaloa.

Roberto Cruz Bernal had the task of monitoring the prison cameras and was the first to enter the tunnel unarmed and in the dark. Subsequently, he was arrested as a suspect. The three policemen who entered the tunnel to follow him El ChapoIt took them an hour and a half to get out, a journey which the fugitive made in less than half an hour. The prison director, Valentín Cárdenas, arrived 80 minutes later. For this moment it had already been three and a half hours since Guzmán disappearedat 20:52, according to the latest camera record.

Where is El Chapo Guzman now?

Six months after the escape, in January 2016, El Chapo He was captured for the third time in the city of Los Mochis, Sinaloa. On January 8, the then Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto confirmed this on Twitter. Then came the negotiations with the United States, the extradition and the trial in which Mexico’s most famous drug trafficker was sentenced to life imprisonment.

El Chapo is being held in the Maximum Security Administrative Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, better known by its English acronym of ADX or as “Alcatraz of the Rockies”. Located in a remote, semi-arid area of ​​Colorado, it has six outer towers with armed guards, plus many more from a nearby penitentiary, and its perimeter is constantly monitored by mobile patrols. Since its inauguration in 1994, no inmate has ever managed to escape.

The cells measure 3.5 meters long by two meters wide. They have beds, a desk, a stool and a shelf, but all of this is made of concrete, to keep it from being moved. the prisoners pass 23 hours a day locked up there and have one hour of individual recreation.

In addition to Guzmán, they have passed through the prison Theodore Kaczynski, the unabomber who has terrorized for years with his letter bombs; Dzhokhar Tsarnaevsentenced to death for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and Zacarias Moussaouian al Qaeda member involved in planning the September 11, 2001 attacks. El Chapo, 63, spent hours working on paperwork for his appeal, which was denied in early 2022.

Now, without a doubt, he must already be aware of the arrest of his son Ovidio and must somehow be pulling the strings to continue to maintain control of that emporium of deathdrugs and billions of dollars called the Sinaloa Cartel.