Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most notorious kingpin was extradited to the United States on Thursday, as ‘meat’ to President Donald Trump, who takes oath of office today.
One of America’s most wanted fugitives, he escaped two maximum-security jails and shipped countless tonnes of drugs around the world.
In January 2016, Guzman was finally caught in his native northwestern state of Sinaloa. Six months earlier, he had humiliated Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto by escaping from prison through a mile-long tunnel dug straight into his cell.
It was the second time in his career the 59-year-old capo had escaped a federal Mexican jail and he spent the following months awaiting extradition to the United States.
Just days after his capture, “Chapo’s” larger-than-life reputation was sealed when U.S. movie star Sean Penn published a lengthy account of an interview he conducted with the drug lord – a meeting the Mexican government said was “essential” to his eventual capture a few months later.
“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats,” Penn said Guzman told him during their discussion at the drug lord’s mountain hideout. On Thursday, Mexico´s government finally extradited Chapo, on the eve of Donald Trump´s inauguration as U.S. president, from a prison in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border.
Guzman’s legendary reputation in the Mexican underworld began to take shape in 2001, when he staged his first jailbreak, bribing guards in a prison in western Mexico, before going on to dominate drug trafficking along much of the Rio Grande.
However, many in towns and villages across Mexico remember Guzman better for his squads of assassins who committed thousands of murders, kidnappings and decapitations.
Violence crept up in the 2000-2006 rule of president Vicente Fox, and his National Action Party (PAN) successor Felipe Calderon, staked his reputation on bringing the cartels to heel.
Instead, the killings spiraled, claiming nearly 70,000 lives under Calderon while Guzman’s fame grew. In February 2013, Chicago dubbed him its first Public Enemy No.1 since Al Capone.
Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel went on smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, and crystal meth across Mexico’s 2,000 mile border with the United States. Indictments allege Guzman’s narcotics were sold from New England all the way to the Pacific.
Guzman’s capture in February 2014 was a big victory for Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – making his flight the following year all the more embarrassing.
