THE ETERNAL FUGITIVE

By TOMÁS OCAÑA & CAMILO VARGAS

During more than four decades, El Chapo Guzman has developed a network of operations that resembles an enormous multinational corporation, with operations on five continents and multimillion-dollar profits that boggle the imagination.

El Chapo manages the supply of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine from Latin America and controls large drug-trafficking routes through a system of franchises similar to the largest U.S. corporations.

The first link in the chain begins in the cocaine laboratories of Colombia. In the 1980s, while working for Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Guzman forged alliances with the Cifuentes Villa clan, heirs to the cocaine distribution route once controlled by Pablo Escobar (see Documents).

The connection with the Cifuentes Villa clan is today of vital importance for the Sinaloa cartel. As Univision has confirmed, the man who appears at El Chapo’s side in his most recent photograph is Hildebrando Cifuentes Villa, the last of the Colombian clan that remains at large.

Hildebrando Cifuentes, the only clan member who has inherited Pablo Escobar’s routes, remains at large.

“The Cifuentes Villa clan were in charge in Colombia of generating contacts with the cartel for the commercialization and shipment of drugs into Mexico,” explained General Ricardo Restrepo, director of the national antinarcotics police unit in Colombia.

According to military sources, El Chapo also allied himself with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), who provided him with a substantial part of the cocaine his cartel traffics. “Mexicans are the ones who pay well for this pod,” said Marlon (an alias), a former FARC guerrilla who spoke with Univision.

El Chapo gained fame in Colombia as “El Rápido” (the Fast One) when he arrived to mobilize up to ten daily flights of cocaine to Mexico, according to the DEA’s confidential reports.

In 2007, El Chapo tried to top his own record. The U.S. Coast Guard, in an operation in conjunction with the governments of Panama and Mexico, seized a 20-ton shipment of cocaine with a value of $300 million that was traveling aboard the ship Gatun. To this day, it is considered the largest shipment seized on the high seas in history.

In recent years, Guzman has expanded his area of distribution. Today, Europe is his second-largest market after the U.S., with Spain serving as his port of entry.

Last year, the Organized Crime and Drug Unit of the Spanish police captured Jesus Gutierrez Guzman, El Chapo’s first cousin and emissary, and three accomplices wanted by U.S. authorities. The capture occurred after the seizure of 822 pounds of the alkaloid at the port of Algeciras in the south of Spain.

Africa and Asia do not escape the cartel’s tentacles. In Africa, the key country for his operations is Guinea Bissau. In Asia, according to a recent report from the DEA, he has connections with Thai organizations that send him marijuana and contraband arms.

In addition, his networks extend as far as Australia, where drugs from the Sinaloa cartel arrive on private planes from Chicago.

It is incredible that, being the head of such an enterprise, the drug kingpin remains free. And that can only be explained, according to Mexican journalist Jesus Esquivel, by the fact that El Chapo is shielded by the enormous corruption of the Mexican government and his great powers of intimidation.

In 2006, General Rolando Eugenio Hidalgo, assigned to the Novena Zona (Ninth Zone) in the state of Sinaloa, had to be sent as military adjunct to the embassy in Moscow after directing a surveillance operation in La Tuna, not far from the rancho of the kingpin’s mother.

There are theories that state the governments of Mexico have discouraged and imprisoned El Chapo’s principal rivals, like the Zetas cartel. An analysis of the arrests associated with drug cartels in Mexico, conducted by the U.S. radio station NPR, shows that for every four Zetas only one member of the Sinaloa cartel was caught.

The Mexican government has rejected such theories. “These accusations are totally unfounded, false. In the majority of cases, it reflects a lack of comprehension of the events, the result of other interests,” responded former president Felipe Calderon at the time.

The Mexican President gave examples of the several big bosses of the Sinaloa cartel who had been arrested, including Vincent "El Mayito" Zambada, son of Mayou Zambada, one of the main partners of Guzman.

But isn't just the Mexican government that rejects them. “The government has attacked the Zetas harder,” says Mike Vigil, the former director of the International Division of the DEA, but it has been because the organization is more dangerous and violent.

Some experts maintain, however, that the Mexican government does not seem disposed to carry out operations to find the drug trafficker.

According to journalist Jesus Esquivel from the magazine Proceso de Mexico, Calderon possibly violated the Mexican constitution when he opposed a plan devised by the Pentagon to capture El Chapo that used a Navy Seals operation in collaboration with the DEA, similar to what was carried out to kill Osama bin Laden.

Military forces failed to capture El Chapo in 2007, during his wedding to Emma Coronel. “El Chapo Guzman’s escorts jumped onto ATVs and spread out over the entire sierra,” related former agent Vigil. “Obviously, the army didn’t know which one was El Chapo Guzman, which ATV he was riding, only that he was escaping.”

Some theories go even farther. Journalist Anabel Hernandez claims the existence of a secret agreement between the DEA and El Chapo Guzman to cooperate in the fight against the other Mexican cartels. “Couldn’t it be that El Chapo Guzman is the most powerful drug trafficker of all time because he is protected by the most powerful country in the world?” asks Hernandez.

Hernandez’s hypothesis is sustained by a court case in Chicago against Vicente Zambada Niebla, son of one of El Chapo Guzman’s associates. In it, Zambada Niebla’s attorneys point to the fact that their client was a part of an agreement between the U.S. government, through its officials, and the Sinaloa cartel.

“WE DON’T MAKE PACTS WITH THE DEVIL,” SAID A FORMER DEA AGENT ABOUT A POSSIBLE AGREEMENT WITH EL CHAPO.

The supposed agreement had been formed at a meeting between Vicente Zambada Niebla and two top DEA agents, with the permission of the Office of the Attorney General of the United States, at the Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City in 2008.

The U.S. Attorney General admitted during the trial that took place in Chicago against Vicente Zambada Niebla that the meeting had happened, but assured there had been no agreement. “We don’t make pacts with the devil,” said Mike Vigil, former DEA agent.

“The claim is ridiculous,” says Robert Bonner, former director of the DEA between 1900 and 1993. Although he adds, “Of course the DEA takes information from one cartel and uses it against another cartel.”

Authorities maintain that the search for El Chapo continues. But there are those, like Javier Valdez, journalist at Rio Doce, who maintain that it doesn’t make sense to continue to call him the world’s most-wanted criminal. “It kind of makes me laugh,” says Valdez, “that El Chapo is the world’s most-wanted criminal. Who’s looking for him? No one is looking for him.”

Read more:

Network of Accomplices

Narco-Tunnels

Testimonials

Timeline

Archives & Evidence

Captured