Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera
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In 1930, the Chicago Crime Commission named Al Capone Public Enemy #1, which was an official designation they came up with just for him. After Capone was sent away, the title went unassigned for another 83 years. In 2013, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera became the second man to hold that title for his influence over the narcotics traffic in North America.
Guzmán’s rise to the top of Mexico’s Sinaola Cartel is the typical ganglord backstory; he started out as a street tough who started his own marijuana cultivation business by age 15. By early adulthood, he had joined the local opium-growing racket and killed his way to the top.
In 1993, he was sentenced to 20 years in a Guatemalan prison for drug and murder charges, but he managed to bribe his way out and get back to the killing. As leader of the Cartel, Guzmán accumulated a personal fortune in excess of $1 billion and made the Forbes list of the most influential people in the world three years in a row.
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Unlike his mentors in Mexico’s drug scene, Guzmán refused to be just a middleman for Colombian cocaine smugglers and started his own methamphetamine production business. He pioneered routes through Texas and California for his drug mules and paved the road north with enough bribes to pave the desert with money. Not content with feeding America’s need for speed, Guzmán started encroaching on other cartels’ turf and shipping cocaine and heroin to the seller’s market in the United States.
In response, the U.S. government exerted a great deal of pressure on Mexico to catch Guzmán, as if that would stop the drugs. The crackdown arguably triggered Mexico’s current state of near-civil war, in which every cartel from Guatemala to Arizona is industriously strangling its rivals over territory.
By 2014, with the suppression of the Colombian cartels, Guzmán’s Sinaola Cartel all but took over the traffic into the United States. It is believed that Guzmán may have become the richest gangster in the world by this point and was smuggling more drugs to the U.S. than anyone else in history.
Soy 502/TwitterGuzmán’s arrest.
Of course you don’t go from a teenaged marijuana farmer to the chairman of the board for international narcotics without whacking a few enemies, and Guzmán has made a macabre art out of it. In 2010, the Juarez Cartel started making inroads into Guzmán’s marijuana cultivation turf in Sonora.
One farmer, 26-year-old Hugo Hernandez, apparently made a deal with the Juarez group. In response, Guzmán’s thugs beat the life out of him, cut his body into seven pieces, sliced off his face, and then stitched the face onto a soccer ball for a quick game. They left a note on the body that read: “Have a happy new year. It will be your last.”
In 2015, Guzmán – who was fresh from his second or third prison escape at the time – decided he’d had enough of the Islamic State interfering with his European and Middle Eastern export markets.
In typical Sinaola style, he publicly announced that he would slaughter ISIS members next to their families and feed them to dogs. Unfortunately for Guzmán, and for much of the world, it doesn’t look like he’s going to get a chance to carry out his threat. In January 2016, Mexican Marines cornered Guzmán in a private residence and took him in — perhaps, this time, for good.
Next, read about the most brutal gangs around the world. Then, read about the brutal deaths of Bonnie and Clyde.
