‘El Chapo’ takes you along for the hunt
In 2001, when Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious Mexican drug lord known as “El Chapo,” made his first escape from custody hiding in a laundry cart, Andrew Hogan was a small-town Kansas kid dreaming of playing college football and becoming a state trooper.
Thirteen years later, Hogan and El Chapo dramatically came face to face, weapons drawn, in an underground parking garage in the Sinaloa city of Mazatlán.
How the former DEA agent who led the years-long manhunt in Mexico to capture El Chapo got to that moment in his life is the captivating first-person account Hogan tells in Hunting El Chapo
(Harper, 352 pp., ★★★☆).
The book, written with Douglas Century and subtitled The Inside Story of the American Lawman Who Captured the
World’s Most-Wanted Drug Lord, begins in cinematic fashion, in 2009, when Hogan has moved on from being a county deputy in Kansas to a DEA agent.
In a series of suspenseful adventures, he and DEA partner Diego Contreras first take down a major marijuana operation that’s laundering millions though Phoenix businesses. They then embed themselves in multimilliondollar deals that take them to Panama City and eventually connect them to El Chapo’s impenetrable Sinaloa cartel.
In 2011, committed to nailing El Chapo, Hogan becomes head of the DEA’s Sinaloa Cartel desk in Mexico City. This dangerous assignment is where you’d expect the thick of the action, except other than a fizzled raid and scary moments on the streets, the book takes a long turn here from being a crime thriller to a mundane cop procedural.
While this police work becomes Hogan’s obsession and leads to El Chapo’s arrest, the book dives into it so deeply that it becomes a tedious techie paper chase. Fortunately, drama reignites when Hogan, the DEA and an elite force of Mexican marines are in hot pursuit and hunt down El Chapo in Mazatlán.
Hunting El Chapo has other flaws, though none fatal. The narrative often is overbearing with bravado and machismo. Hogan neglects to inform readers that he has a family until moving his wife and sons to Mexico City.
El Chapo, who was extradited to the United States, has pleaded not guilty to a 17-count indictment in U.S. federal court in Brooklyn charging him with overseeing a multibillion-dollar international drug trafficking operation and carrying out a ruthless campaign of murders and kidnappings.
With El Chapo’s trial six months out, expect an overdose of all kinds of media. Coming in October is the memoir of the former DEA deputy administrator who oversaw years of tracking El Chapo. Meanwhile, Netflix’s series El Chapo is in its second season; a film version of Don Winslow’s 2015 novel The Cartel is in the works; and Sony has snapped up rights to make Hogan’s book into a movie.
But for now, this may be the most authentic glimpse inside the world of El Chapo — because Hogan actually went there and did what few thought possible.