April 4, 1957 - Joaquín Guzmán
At his peak, Guzmán ran an organization that moved industrial quantities of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana across hemispheres — a logistics operation that law enforcement agencies spent decades attempting to dismantle. He escaped from maximum-security Mexican prisons twice before his eventual extradition, and the violence attributed to his cartel's territorial conflicts accounts for a death toll in the tens of thousands. His rise traced a familiar arc through the narco hierarchy — route mapper, logistics supervisor, lieutenant — before he broke off to build the Sinaloa Cartel into what authorities described as the world's most powerful drug trafficking organization.
From Wikipedia
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.
Further reading
- The Last Narco
Journalist Malcolm Beith delivers an inside account of El Chapo Guzmán's rise to become the world's most powerful drug lord, operating from the hills of Sinaloa.
View on Amazon → - El Chapo
This profile traces Guzmán's brutal ascent from harvesting opium as a child farmhand to becoming the highest-profile narco-terrorist since Pablo Escobar.
View on Amazon → - Drug Warrior
DEA agent Jack Riley recounts his three-decade pursuit of El Chapo Guzmán while exposing the deeper forces driving America's opioid epidemic.
View on Amazon →
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