Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers by Roberto Saviano Read Free Book Online Page B

confession on the long journey from Tapachula to Toluca, he had been gambling not with his freedom but with his life.

El Chapo from top to bottom
    Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera—his full name, although he only likes to use his first given name—was born on April 4, 1957, in the hamlet of La Tuna in Badiraguato, Sinaloa. It’s a place deep in the Sierra Madre Occidental, in an area known as the “Golden Triangle,” made up of a group of municipalities spanning the borders between Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua states. Around there, the most popular profession is that of drug trafficker.
    Joaquín is the son of Emilio Guzmán Bustillos and Consuelo Loera Pérez, the oldest of seven children with barely a year between each of them: Armida, Bernarda, Miguel Ángel, Aureliano, Arturo, and Emiliano. He had three older siblings, but they died of the diseases of poverty when he was very young; he cannot even remember their names. For generations, his family have lived and died in La Tuna.
    El Chapo, as they affectionately call the more stunted boys in those parts, is five and a half feet tall, shorter than average for the local men. He attended school only as far as the third grade of elementary, something he’s always been ashamed of. In some of his formal statements he claimed to have completed high school in prison, but that is not true.
    It is not surprising that Guzmán never managed to finish elementary school. Every year, hundreds of children in the region drop out when their parents send them to work on the marijuana and poppy harvests. When they go back, they repeat the year until they get fed up and decide there is only one certainty about the future: “Either you become a narco, or you get killed.”
    Guzmán began his criminal career at the bottom, following thefamily tradition of growing cannabis and opium poppies in the gullies and hillsides of the Sierra Madre Occidental. At that point he embodied the most vulnerable link in the criminal chain.
    Some say that he went on to join the police, where he met Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo—whose job was to guard the then governor of Sinaloa, Leopoldo Sánchez Celis, a political patron to drug traffickers. Félix Gallardo went into the business in the mid 1970s. We first hear about Guzmán as his driver, in the period when Félix Gallardo, Pedro Avilés, Manuel Salcido, Emilio Quintero Payán, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and Rafael Caro Quintero were running the Guadalajara-based gang later called the Sinaloa Cartel.
    Guzmán obtained rapid promotion because he was full of ideas for expanding the business. At the same time, as we’ve seen, he was distrusted for being violent and impulsive, and too fond of living it up. When Félix Gallardo was arrested in April 1989, Guzmán teamed up with El Güero Palma. Carrillo Fuentes was arrested the same year, and when he came out in 1990, El Chapo and El Güero joined him. Of the three, Guzmán was the weakest: he was thirty-three, physically less than imposing, and almost illiterate.
    Amado Carrillo Fuentes was born in Guamuchilito, Sinaloa. He, by contrast, was an impressive figure, tall and fit, charismatic, methodical, and smart. At thirty-four, a long delinquent life stretched ahead of him. With an uncle like the legendary Don Neto, Amado was never going to be a bottom feeder in the crime world.
    Héctor Palma was twenty-eight, tall and blue-eyed, and he had finished high school. Despite his youth, he outranked El Chapo in the hierarchy.
    El Chapo was only protected as long as Carrillo Fuentes willed it. Upon arrival at Almoloya de Juárez maximum security prison, in the State of Mexico, he realized that the protection had come to an end.

Under threat
    Once the Boeing 727 landed at Toluca airport, Álvarez Nahara immediately got in touch with the secretary of defense, Antonio Riviello, and gave him a summary of El Chapo’s statement, which a few hours later he formally recorded in document number 1387. 4
    The