The Hunt for El Chapo! Joaquín Guzmán’s Rise to Power, His Escapes, and Capture | Profiling Evil

So I wanna start with his childhood in Sinaloa and an education that f- followed in the illegal drug trade.

Joaquín Guzmán was born in 1957 in La Tuna, a small community in Sinaloa.

Now the region down there is beautiful.

It's rugged, it's poor, it's historically difficult for the government to control in that area.

Farming families had very few ways to make a living.

M- marijuana and opium poppies, those things could generate cash in a terrain that was suited for its growing secrecy, and thus it started to blossom there.

Now, Guzmán, he grew up in that tough, isolated farming environment, and accounts of his childhood kind of describe the hardship that he went through.

He had an abusive father by all accounts, limited schooling, and an early exposure to the cultivation and movement of illegal drugs.

And none of that made his later choices inevitable, but it kind of helps explain the criminal economy that's available to an ambitious young man living in those kinds of circumstances.

Now, many people ask about Guzmán's nickname, El Chapo.

[laughs] It was commonly understood to be a reference to his short and kind of stocky stature, and from all accounts, he didn't particularly like the name, but it stuck.

And what distinguished Guzmán from other boys in the area, people who were also working in the illegal drug, drug trade, wasn't his appearance, the th- thing that got him the name El Chapo, but it was his attention to the business operations that he was working on.

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.

A-and frankly, the geography helped.

Now, this was where Guzmán did his apprenticeship.

He saw all of that trafficking that was going on, and he saw it at a scale that required far more armed men than they had.

It, it required pilots and drivers, warehouse operators, lookouts, and accountants, and communication specialists, and corrupt cops, and government officials who were willing to look the other way and disrupt the system, even if it meant that it was gonna hurt somebody.

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.

Control of valuable shipping corridors was falling to some of the competing groups, and a group from, uh, called the Arellano Félix Organization became dominant around Tijuana.