Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (Spanish: [xoaˈkin aɾtʃiˈβaldo ɣusˈman loˈeɾa]; born 4 April 1957), commonly known as "El Chapo", is a Mexican former drug lord and the former top leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán is believed to be responsible for the deaths of over 34,000 people, and was considered to be the most powerful drug trafficker in the world until he was extradited to the United States and sentenced to life in prison.
Guzmán was born in Sinaloa and raised in a poor farming family. He endured much physical abuse at the hands of his father, through whom he also entered the drug trade. During his early adulthood, his father helped him grow marijuana for local dealers. By the late 1970s, Guzmán had begun working with Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, one of the nation's rising drug lords. He helped Salazar map routes to move drugs through Sinaloa and into the United States. He supervised logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, one of the nation's leading kingpins, in the mid-1980s, but founded his own cartel in 1988 after Félix's arrest.
Guzmán oversaw operations whereby cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin were mass-produced, smuggled into, and distributed throughout the United States and Europe, the world's largest users. He pioneered the use of distribution cells and long-range tunnels near borders, which enabled him to export more drugs to the United States than any other trafficker in history. Guzmán's leadership of the cartel brought immense wealth and power; Forbes ranked him one of the most powerful people in the world between 2009 and 2013, while the Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that he matched the influence and wealth of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Guzmán was first captured in 1993 in Guatemala and then was extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder and drug trafficking. He bribed multiple prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum security prison in 2001. His status as a fugitive resulted in an US$8.8 million combined reward from Mexico and the U.S. for information leading to his capture, and he was arrested in Mexico in 2014. He escaped prior to formal sentencing in 2015, through a tunnel dug by associates into his jail cell. Mexican authorities recaptured him following a shoot-out in January 2016, and extradited him to the U.S. a year later. In 2019, he was found guilty of a number of criminal charges related to his leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated in ADX Florence, Colorado, United States.
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera was born on 4 April 1957 into a poor family in the rural community of La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa. His parents were Emilio Guzmán Bustillos and María Consuelo Loera Pérez. His paternal grandparents were Juan Guzmán and Otilia Bustillos, and his maternal grandparents were Ovidio Loera Cobret and Pomposa Pérez Uriarte. For many generations, his family lived at La Tuna. His father was officially a cattle rancher, as were most in the area where he grew up; according to some sources, however, he might also have been a gomero, an opium poppy farmer. He has two younger sisters named Armida and Bernarda and four younger brothers named Miguel Ángel, Aureliano, Arturo, and Emilio. He had three unnamed older brothers who reportedly died of natural causes when he was very young.
Few details are known about Guzmán's upbringing. As a child, he sold oranges and dropped out of school in third grade to work with his father and as a result is functionally illiterate. He was known for being a practical joker and enjoyed playing pranks on his friends and family when he was young. He was regularly beaten, and he sometimes fled to his maternal grandmother's house to escape such treatment. However, he stood up to his father to protect his younger siblings from being beaten. It is possible that Guzmán incurred his father's wrath for trying to stop him from beating them. His mother was his "foundation of emotional support". The nearest school to his home was about 100 km (60 mi) away, and he was taught by traveling teachers during his early years. The teachers stayed for a few months before moving to other areas. With few opportunities for employment in his hometown, he turned to the cultivation of opium poppy, a common practice among local residents. During harvest season, Guzmán and his brothers hiked the hills of Badiraguato to cut the bud of the poppy. Once the plant was stacked in kilos, his father sold the harvest to other suppliers in Culiacán and Guamúchil. He sold marijuana at commercial centers near the area while accompanied by Guzmán. His father spent most of the profits on liquor and women and often returned home with no money. Tired of his mismanagement, Guzmán cultivated his own marijuana plantation at age 15 with cousins Arturo, Alfredo, Carlos, and Héctor Beltrán Leyva, and he supported his family with his marijuana production.
When he was a teenager, his father kicked him out of the house, and he went to live with his grandfather. It was during his adolescence that Guzmán gained the nickname "El Chapo", Mexican slang for "shorty", for his 1.68-metre (5 ft 6 in) stature and stocky physique. Most people in Badiraguato worked in the poppy fields of the Sierra Madre Occidental for most of their lives, but Guzmán left his hometown in search of greater opportunities through his uncle Pedro Avilés Pérez, one of the pioneers of Mexican drug trafficking. He left Badiraguato in his twenties and joined organized crime.
During the 1980s, the leading crime syndicate in Mexico was the Guadalajara Cartel, which was headed by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (alias "El Padrino" or "The Godfather"), Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (alias "Don Neto"), Juan José Esparragoza Moreno (alias El Azul, "The Blue One") and others. In the 1970s, Guzmán first worked for the drug lord Héctor "El Güero" Palma by transporting drugs and overseeing their shipments from the Sierra Madre region to urban areas near the Mexico–U.S. border by aircraft. Since his initial steps in organized crime, Guzmán was ambitious and regularly pressed on his superiors to allow him to increase the share of narcotics that were smuggled across the border. He also favored a violent and serious approach when doing business; if any of his drug shipments were not on time, Guzmán would simply kill the smuggler himself by shooting him in the head. Those around him learned that cheating him or going with other competitors—even if they offered better prices—was unwise. The leaders of the Guadalajara Cartel liked Guzmán's business acumen, and in the early 1980s introduced him to Félix Gallardo, one of the major drug lords in Mexico at that time. Guzmán worked as a chauffeur for Félix Gallardo, before being put in charge of logistics, where Guzmán coordinated drug shipments from Colombia to Mexico by land, air, and sea. Palma ensured the deliveries arrived in the United States. Guzmán earned enough standing and began working for Félix Gallardo directly.
Throughout most of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Mexican drug traffickers were also middlemen for the Colombian trafficking groups, and transported cocaine across the Mexico–U.S. border. Mexico, however, remained a secondary route for the Colombians, given that most of the drugs trafficked by their cartels were smuggled through the Caribbean and the Florida corridor. Félix Gallardo was the leading drug baron in Mexico and friend of Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros, but his operations were still limited by his counterparts in South America. In the mid-1980s, however, the U.S. government increased law enforcement surveillance and put pressure on the Medellín and Cali cartels by effectively reducing the drug trafficking operations in the Caribbean corridor. Realizing it was more profitable to hand over the operations to their Mexican counterparts, the Colombian cartels gave Félix Gallardo more control over their drug shipments. This power shift gave the Mexican organized crime groups more leverage over their Central American and South American counterparts. During the 1980s, however, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was conducting undercover groundwork in Mexico, where several of its agents worked as informants.