Joaquín Guzmán

Joaquín Guzmán (born December 25, 1954?, La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico) is the former head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico since the late 20th century. Guzmán helped develop creative ways of smuggling drugs into the United States, and at one point the U.S. government called him “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker.” He was arrested by Mexican officials on several occasions, and in 2015 he escaped from prison through a lengthy underground tunnel. After being captured the following year, Guzmán was extradited to the United States in 2017. There he was found guilty of various charges and sentenced to life in prison.

Early life

Guzmán’s birth date is disputed; sources give either December 25, 1954, or April 4, 1957. He was raised in Badiraguato municipality, an impoverished and remote area of Sinaloa state in northwestern Mexico that was the birthplace of many notorious drug traffickers. He began his criminal career in the 1980s as a member of the Guadalajara drug cartel, headed by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. Guzmán rapidly rose through the ranks of the organization until it disbanded in the late 1980s.

Sinaloa cartel

Guzmán subsequently became a leader in the Sinaloa cartel. Under his guidance, the Sinaloa cartel developed creative smuggling techniques and strategies, including building air-conditioned tunnels under the Mexico-U.S. border, hiding drugs in chili pepper cans and fire extinguishers, and catapulting drugs over the border. His organization produced and smuggled various kinds of illicit drugs, including marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

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In 1993 Guzmán was arrested in Guatemala and extradited to Mexico. There he was tried and acquitted on charges of murder but found guilty of drug trafficking and possession of firearms and eventually was sentenced to more than 20 years in a maximum-security prison. In exchange for bribes, however, he was granted extensive liberties by prison authorities, who allowed him to continue managing the criminal organization. According to various sources, he became head of the cartel in 1995. In 2001 he escaped with the help of corrupt prison guards. A subsequent investigation led to the arrest on corruption charges of many employees of the prison, including its warden.

In the early 21st century, Guzmán was believed to be responsible for most of the marijuana and cocaine trafficked from Colombia and Mexico to the United States and to be the largest smuggler of methamphetamine in the Asia-Mexico-U.S. triangle (in which methamphetamine was produced in Mexico with Asian-made chemicals and then smuggled to the United States). His net worth was estimated at $1 billion by Forbes magazine in 2009, and some accounts put the annual revenue of his cartel at $3 billion. In Mexico, Guzmán’s fame rose to the level of folklore: he was glorified by some as a hero of the people, and his life story was set to song in many popular narcocorridos (“drug ballads”).

The United States government came to regard Guzmán as a priority target in its war on drugs. In 2004 the U.S. government announced a $5 million reward for information leading to Guzmán’s arrest on federal drug charges. In 2012 the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which called Guzmán “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” invoked the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to freeze the U.S. assets of members of his family.

Arrest and escape

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In the first decade of the 21st century, the Sinaloa cartel engaged in bloody battles with rival cartels and Mexican law-enforcement authorities that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. In 2006 a full-scale offensive against the drug cartels by the Mexican army resulted in the arrests of many traffickers but failed to destroy the major cartels or to capture Guzmán. After years spent in hiding, Guzmán was apprehended in Mazatlán, Mexico, in February 2014. His arrest was the result of a weeks-long operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Mexican marines.

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On the night of July 11, 2015, Guzmán once again escaped custody, fleeing the maximum-security Altiplano prison near Toluca through a shaft beneath the shower in his cell to a more than 1-mile- (1.5-km-) long tunnel that led to a house on a construction site. The roughly 5.6-feet- (1.7-meter-) high wood-reinforced tunnel through which Guzmán fled had lighting and ventilation, indicating that it had been in the works for some time. (A motorcycle apparently had been used within the tunnel during its digging to remove soil.) A massive manhunt was mounted, and questions were almost immediately raised about the possibility of official complicity in the escape, which came as a huge blow to Pres. Enrique Peña Nieto, who had made the crackdown on drug cartels a cornerstone of his new administration and who had trumpeted Guzmán’s capture as a pivotal triumph.

Personal life

In 1977 Guzmán wed Alejandrina María Salazar Hernández, and the couple had several children. While still married, he began a relationship with Emma Coronel Aispuro, who was born in the United States but raised in Mexico. In 2007 they had a wedding ceremony. At the time he was 50, and she was 18. While Coronel is frequently referred to as Guzmán’s wife, she claims that they were not legally married. The couple later had twin daughters. When Guzmán went on trial in the United States, Coronel attended the proceedings daily. In 2021, two years after his conviction, she was arrested in the United States and accused of being a participant in his drug empire. Later that year she pleaded guilty to several charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. Coronel was released in 2023.