Chapo rose from pauper to kingpin
It was nighttime in May of 1990, in the heyday of the cocaine boom across America. Twenty Mexican federal police officers and a handful of U.S. Customs agents, acting on a tip, descended on a stucco home on the edge of Agua Prieta, Mexico — a stone’s throw from Arizona. “Policia,” they yelled, guns drawn, before busting down the front door.
The house was empty but looked lived in, with dishes in the kitchen and toys in the backyard. The officers moved quickly to a spacious game room, complete with a bar and a pool table, set atop a 10by-10 foot concrete panel on the floor.
An informant had told them that what they were looking for was under the pool table. They moved it aside and went to work with a jackhammer. Then, a stroke of luck: One of them turned the knob of a faucet and suddenly the floor panel rose into the air — like a hydraulic lift in an auto shop.
A metal staircase led down to a stunning discovery: Beneath the house, connecting to a warehouse in the U.S. 300 feet away, was an underground tunnel outfitted with lighting, air vents and tracks on the floor to transport carts full of drugs. Future of smuggling
It was, at the time, unheard of, a new level of sophistication in the cross-border war on the cartels shipping tons of cocaine and marijuana northbound every year. Still, said retired Customs agent Terry Kirkpatrick: “None of us … looked at it with the vision that this would be the future of drug smuggling.”
Nor did they know then who was behind it: The one they called “Shorty” because of his 5-foot-6 frame, a man who grew up poor and had no formal education but would rise from a small-time Mexican marijuana producer to lead the world’s most powerful drug cartel.
The tunnel marked the dawn of a new, craftier and more deadly era in the drug war: the beginning of the reign of “El Chapo.” Learning young
A week after his capture in the resort city of Mazatlan, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman sits in a cell in Mexico’s highestsecurity prison, a sprawling complex surrounded by barbed-wire fences.
It is a far cry from the life he lived as the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, further still from his beginnings in the mountain village of La Tuna de Badiraguato, Sinaloa, on the country’s Pacific coast.
There, Guzman was one of at least six children of a man who supposedly raised cattle but, authorities have said, actually worked in the region’s main industry — growing and smuggling opium and marijuana.
By the late 1970s, when Guzman was in his 20s, Mexican kingpin Hector Luis Palma Salazar placed him in charge of transporting drugs from Sinaloa to coastal cities on their way north to the U.S., according to “The Last Narco,” a Guzman biography.
After that Guzman rose quickly through the ranks, and by the early ‘80s was supervising logistics for Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, founder of the Guadalajara cartel.
Guzman worked as a Gallardo lieutenant for years, then emerged as one of the dominant figures on the drug-trafficking scene as Gallardo was hunted by the DEA and eventually arrested for the 1985 murder of agent Enrique “Camarena.
“He shows up as an all of a sudden, overnight thing,” said Edward Heath, who ran the DEA’s Mexico office during the Camarena killing. ‘Godfather of tunnels’
As he consolidated power, Guzman began showing a flair for inventive smuggling. According to U.S. prosecutors and federal indictments, he opened a business disguised as an air taxi service and used two Learjets to ferry drugs. In 1989, cocaine concealed as boxes of Mexican soap was shipped into Southern California. Even shipments of jalapeno peppers were stuffed with coke.
Then there were the tunnels. “You could call him the godfather of tunnels along the border,” said Kirkpatrick.
That passageway was the first of many linked to Guzman. About a halfdozen other tunnels were found in ensuing years in California and Arizona that ran the length of several football fields and were equipped with hydraulic lifts and electric rail cars.