Guadalajara Cartel

El Chapo first got into the drug trade through his father as a hired hand, tending to a number of plots growing illegal plants, after which he moved to the nearby town of Badiraguato to look for more opportunities.

After a short while, he was rising fast through the ranks of the Guadalajara cartel, which exercised control over much of Sinaloa and was led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.

He was entering the drug trade at a particularly lucrative and dangerous time.

The rise of hippie culture in the United States and the takedown of a major drug pipeline going from Europe to America called the French Connection in 1972 meant the demand for illicit drugs was at an all-time high, with production in Sinaloa stepping up to meet it.

Then in 1984, sensing opportunity elsewhere, he moved to Zacatecas, a province located smack bang in the middle of Mexico, where he began working for fellow Sinaloa native Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, a mentor figure who took him under his wing.

By this point, Guzmán had become a successful mid-level drug peddler that still had to answer to those higher up, but this was all about to change.

In 1985, American Drug Enforcement Agency agent Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and tortured to death on the orders of Félix Gallardo after investigating the financial networks of the Guadalajara cartel.

Galvanized by the murder of one of their colleagues, over the next four years, the Guadalajara cartel was systematically dismantled by the DEA, leaving room for El Chapo and a new generation of drug lords to fill the power vacuum left behind, meaning that by the end of the '80s, Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel was the dominant gang in Sinaloa.

He learned the routes and the schedules, the border vulnerabilities, and he also figured out the value of delivering shipments of drugs when promised.

Back in the '70s and '80s, the 1970s and '80s, he worked his way into the Sinaloa organization associated with Miguel Guardo, often called the Guadalajara Cartel.

Now, Guardo helped coordinate trafficking corridors and relationships among the regional bosses at the time.

This is kind of a time when Mexico was becoming increasingly important to the Colombian cocaine suppliers who were seeking access into the United States.

So all along the way, Guzmán learned that his reputation could function as kind of enforcement and reliability to the drug bosses, and that began to open more doors.

Guzmán learned that punishment and retaliation discouraged theft and betrayal from those underneath him, and it was actually something that Guzmán built his entire career around.

Back in 1989, there was a major fracture that occurred in the Guadalajara Cartel, and Gallardo was arrested.

Now, the balance of the organized crime in Mexico became destabilized at this time, and the old structure started fracturing.