El Chapo

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, known as "El Chapo," was a Mexican drug lord who led the Sinaloa Cartel and was considered the world's most powerful drug trafficker before his extradition to the United States and life sentence. Born on 4 April 1957 in the rural community of La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, he grew up in a poor farming family and endured frequent physical abuse from his father, who also introduced him to the drug trade. Guzmán dropped out of school in third grade and is functionally illiterate; as a child, he sold oranges and later cultivated his own marijuana plantation at age 15 with cousins, including members of the Beltrán Leyva family, to support his household after his father mismanaged profits. His father eventually expelled him from the home, and he went to live with his grandfather. In his twenties, Guzmán left Badiraguato to join organized crime, working under his uncle Pedro Avilés Pérez, a pioneer of Mexican drug trafficking. By the late 1970s, he collaborated with rising drug lord Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, mapping routes to move drugs through Sinaloa into the United States. In the mid-1980s, he supervised logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a leading kingpin, and after Félix’s arrest in 1988, Guzmán founded his own cartel. Under his leadership, the Sinaloa Cartel mass-produced cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin, smuggling them into the United States and Europe. He pioneered distribution cells and long-range tunnels near borders, enabling him to export more drugs to the U.S. than any other trafficker. Forbes ranked him among the world’s most powerful people from 2009 to 2013, and the Drug Enforcement Administration compared his influence and wealth to that of Pablo Escobar. Guzmán is believed responsible for over 34,000 deaths. He was first captured in Guatemala in 1993, sentenced to 20 years in Mexico, but escaped a maximum-security prison in 2001 by bribing guards. Recaptured in 2014, he escaped again in 2015 via a tunnel dug into his cell. Mexican authorities caught him after a shoot-out in January 2016, and he was extradited to the U.S. the following year. In 2019, he was convicted on multiple charges, sentenced to life, and incarcerated at ADX Florence in Colorado.