The rise and fall of El Chapo

He got married, had children, enjoyed meals at restaurants, and continued to manage, and dramatically expand, his multi-billion-dollar narcotics business

The forested Mexican Municipality of Badiguarato is an impoverished and remote place where a third of the area's approximately 30,000 residents live in deep poverty, struggling for subsistence. There are no proper roads, tourists are nowhere to be found, and the government's presence is negligible. It is from these humble origins that Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman rose to become the world's most wanted man, a shadowy and powerful figure at the top of a multi-billion dollar criminal empire whose tentacles spread across the globe.

By most accounts, Guzman was born in 1957. Few details have emerged about his early life, but some say poverty forced him to sell oranges to survive, and that he only went to school through elementary.

By Guzman's own account in a video which has recently come to light, by the time he was a 15 years of age a lack of opportunities in Badiguarato pushed him into a life of crime. "Around there, even until now there are no sources of jobs," he said. "There was no other way and there still isn't to survive."
The diminutive Guzman - who stands just 1.68 meters tall, hence his nickname El Chapo, or Shorty - got his start in the business at the very bottom. He worked his way up through the ranks, driving shipments of drugs to the U.S. border, chauffeuring for an older generation of Mexican crime bosses, such as the powerful Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, for whom Guzman was later in charge of logistics.
It was Felix Gallardo's 1989 arrest, following the kidnapping and murder of an under-cover DEA officer, that propelled Guzman to the upper echelons of Mexico's criminal underground. After the arrest, leading drug traffickers met in the Pacific beach resort of Acapulco to carve up Gallardo's Guadalajara Cartel into smaller factions, with Guzman and two key allies being given the state of Sinaloa and the Pacific Coast. It was here that Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel was born.
It wasn't long before Guzman was violently clashing with rivals. A 1989-1993 feud with the Tijuana Cartel - which con-trolled the profitable drug corridor through San Diego, California - nearly cost him his life. In November 1992, Guzman narrowly escaped death when gunmen ambushed his car. Seven months later, a botched attempt to kill him at Guadalajara ended with the accidental death of the Archbishop of Guada-lajara, Juan Jesus Posada Ocampo, in the airport parking lot.
Guzman fled Mexico amid the massive out-cry following the Cardinal's death. He was tracked down and arrested in July 1993. In 2001, however, he staged the first of his prison escapes. After allegedly paying $2.5 million in bribes, he was sneaked out in a laundry basket.
In the years between his daring escape and his re-capture in 2014, Guzman rose to become the single most significant drug trafficker in the world. By 2009, Forbes magazine included Guzman in its list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
"He got married, had children, enjoyed meals at restaurants, and continued to man-age, and dramatically expand, his multi-billion-dollar narcotics business," the New Yorker magazine's Patrick Raddan Keefe noted. (Guzman's wife, Emma Coronel, is a former beauty queen who was born in California and holds dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship. She gave birth to twin girls in California in the summer of 2011.)
The U.S. put a $5 million bounty on Guzman's head, naming him the world's biggest drug trafficker. The city of Chicago named him Public Enemy Number 1, a dubious honor which hadn't been given since the heyday of mobster Al Capone in the 1930's. "If I was to put those two guys in a ring, El Chapo would eat that guy (Capone) alive," Jack Riley, the top Drug Enforcement Agency official in Chicago told the AP at the time. Despite being a key figure in turf wars against rivals and former allies that left thou-sands dead across huge swathes of Mexico, Guzman was so powerful that many wondered whether he had effectively co-opted the Mexican government into helping eliminate his rivals on his behalf. "The Sinaloan cartel of Chapo Guzmán and Mayo Zambada (a key ally) they say, be-came emboldened by an alliance with federal officials to attempt a takeover of all of Mexico's trafficking supported by federal troops," British journalist Ioan Grillo wrote in his book 'El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency'. "This accusation was put out on hundreds of messages, or narcomantas, written on blankets and dangled from bridges."Guzman was finally apprehended again in February 2014 -- only to escape a little more than a year later, likely with the help of corrupt prison officials.
Despite major fanfare, many believe that his recent re-capture on January 8, following an ill-advised meeting with actor Sean Penn, will have little effect on the drug trade, which flourishes on high-demand. "It will do absolutely nothing," former Drug Enforcement Agency agent Russel Jones told Vice News after Guzman's capture. "Every time we arrest one, it does absolutely nothing to the flow of drugs."
Notably, Guzman himself has voiced his opinion that he, like other drug traffickers, is replaceable, and that business will continue unabated. "The day I don't exist, it (drug trafficking) won't go down at all," he said.