Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (born 4 April 1957), commonly known as "El Chapo" and "JGL", is a Mexican former drug lord and a former leader within the Sinaloa Cartel, an international crime syndicate.

He is considered to have been one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world.

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, helping him grow marijuana for local dealers during his early adulthood.

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera was born on 4 April 1957 into a poor family in the rural community of La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico.

His parents were Emilio Guzmán Bustillos and María Consuelo Loera Pérez.

His paternal grandparents were Juan Guzmán and Otilia Bustillos, and his maternal grandparents were Ovidio Loera Cobret and Pomposa Pérez Uriarte.

For many generations, his family lived at La Tuna.

His father was officially a cattle rancher, as were most in the area where he grew up; according to some sources, however, he might also have been a gomero, an opium poppy farmer.

He has two younger sisters named Armida and Bernarda and four younger brothers named Miguel Ángel, Aureliano, Arturo, and Emilio.

He had three unnamed older brothers who reportedly died of natural causes when he was very young.

Few details are known about Guzmán's upbringing.

As a child, he sold oranges and dropped out of school in third grade to work with his father and as a result is functionally illiterate.

He was known for being a practical joker and enjoyed playing pranks on his friends and family when he was young.

He was regularly beaten, and he sometimes fled to his maternal grandmother's house to escape such treatment.

However, he stood up to his father to protect his younger siblings from being beaten.

It is possible that Guzmán incurred his father's wrath for trying to stop him from beating them.

His mother was his "foundation of emotional support".

The nearest school to his home was about 100 km away, and he was taught by traveling teachers during his early years.

The teachers stayed for a few months before moving to other areas.

With few opportunities for employment in his hometown, he turned to the cultivation of opium poppy, a common practice among local residents.

During harvest season, Guzmán and his brothers hiked the hills of Badiraguato to cut the bud of the poppy.

Once the plant was stacked in kilos, his father sold the harvest to other suppliers in Culiacán and Guamúchil.

He sold marijuana at commercial centers near the area while accompanied by Guzmán.

His father spent most of the profits on liquor and women and often returned home with no money.

Tired of his mismanagement, Guzmán cultivated his own marijuana plantation at age 15 with cousins Arturo, Alfredo, Carlos, and Héctor Beltrán Leyva, and he supported his family with his marijuana production.

When he was a teenager, his father kicked him out of the house, and he went to live with his grandfather.

It was during his adolescence that Guzmán gained the nickname "El Chapo", Mexican slang for "shorty", for his 5 ft stature and stocky physique.

Guzmán began working with Héctor Luis Palma Salazar by the late 1970s, one of the nation's rising drug lords.

He helped Salazar map routes to move drugs through Sinaloa and into the United States.

He later supervised logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, one of the nation's leading kingpins in the mid 1980s, but Guzmán founded his own cartel in 1988 after Félix's arrest.

Guzmán oversaw operations whereby mass cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin were produced, smuggled into, and distributed throughout the United States and Europe, the world's largest users.

He achieved this by pioneering the use of distribution cells and long-range tunnels near borders, which enabled him to export more drugs to the United States than any other trafficker in history.

Guzmán was first captured in 1993 in Guatemala and then was extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder and drug trafficking.

He bribed multiple prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum-security prison in 2001.

Guzmán's leadership of the cartel also brought immense wealth and power; Forbes ranked him as one of the most powerful people in the world between 2009 and 2013, while the Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that he matched the influence and wealth of Pablo Escobar.

His status as a fugitive resulted in an $8.8 million combined reward from Mexico and the U.S. for information leading to his capture, and he was arrested in Mexico in 2014.

He escaped prior to formal sentencing in 2015, through a tunnel dug by associates into his jail cell.

Mexican authorities recaptured him following a shoot-out in January 2016, and extradited him to the U.S. a year later.

In 2019, he was found guilty of a number of criminal charges related to his leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated in ADX Florence, Colorado, United States.