Joaquín Loera Guzmán had earned and deserved his title as the world’s richest and most powerful criminal when he was arrested in February. The Sinaloa cartel of which he was the absolute jefe de los jefes (boss of the bosses), has become by far the biggest mafia organisation in the carnage that has cursed Mexico since the narco war detonated in 2006. It is also the most cogent organised crime syndicate in the world, trafficking – according to some estimates – up to 90% of drugs consumed in the US and varying proportions across Europe, Africa and the east.

Guzmán had been on the run since his escape from jail in 2001, having been initially arrested in 1993. He had been subject to what the US Drugs Enforcement Administration calls “the biggest manhunt of all time”. Like all Mexican dons, he has a nom de narco, and is known as El Chapo (Shorty) – ostensibly to describe his appearance. He controls his own terrain in the beautiful Pacific state after which the Sinaloa cartel is named, most of western Mexico, and much of Central America, while his alliances with other cartels and gangs spread his influence into the cocaine-producing Andean nations, across the gangland distribution networks in the US, and the entrepots of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard. While on the run, Guzmán had made it to number 14 on the Forbes magazine rich list. So he is both a member of the global business elite and folk hero bandit in Mexican narco lore. A narcocorrido ballad sung by a band called Los Buitres (the Vultures) and available online goes: “He sleeps at times in houses/At times in tents/Radio and rifle at the foot of the bed/And sometimes his roof is a cave/Guzmán is everywhere.”

Those who watch what goes on in Mexico with care believe he also has friends everywhere, especially in high places. They are unconvinced by the official scenario – the outlaw finally caught by the good guys. Many believe – and a shocking new film now appears to confirm this – that authorities knew where El Chapo was all along, and had been making deals with him. Guzmán’s cartel had, and still has, a private hangar at Mexico City airport, which would be hard to achieve playing cops and robbers.

A biography of Guzmán calls him The Last Narco, which he certainly is not – indeed, the reality is that in terms of violence, he is being overtaken on the outside lane by the newcomers’ new levels of ruthlessness. But he is, in his way, the last of the old-guard mafia dons, the last of that breed epitomised – in the Italian mafia lore with which we are more familiar – by the figure of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, the godfather. The last mafioso of the old school, who rules like a medieval baron, by consensus within his terrain and fearsome violence outside it – patron, ally to politicians, generals and judges who work with him, indispensable to the system that claims to fight him. Guzmán’s origins run deep in what is now the first real 21st-century war, a war quintessentially of its time, for its lack of any real cause, for its post-political savagery, for its inseparability from the supposedly “legal” global economy into which Guzmán is stitched, a war that has claimed about 100,000 lives, taken with shocking ferocity, with an estimated 20,000 missing, and for which there is no end in sight; an abyss that seems to have no bottom. A war of our time.



A Mexican soldier guarding $15m seized in an operation in Tijuana. Photograph: Susana Gonzalez/Corbis

The pioneer of Mexico’s narco-trafficking mafia was Chapo Guzmán’s uncle, Pedro Avilés Pérez, from Sinaloa, who escalated the smuggling of marijuana and heroin into the US during the late 1960s and 70s when the counter-culture demanded an apparently infinite supply of both. But the godfather, the original Mexican drug lord, was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a protege of Avilés, also from Sinaloa, who took over his operation after Avilés was killed in a shootout in 1978. Gallardo founded the Guadalajara cartel and became the then biggest narco-trafficker in the world.

Apart, crucially, from its eastern stretch towards the Gulf, the border with the US was carefully and strategically carved into drug-smuggling “plazas”, each considered the territory of a subdivision of Gallardo’s cartel, which would pay the authorities for protection and cooperation – with percentages shaved off at every level, to the top – on its turf. In return, the government would finger freelance or rival operators so that the authorities could give the impression of an authentic enforcement operation. The Italians have a term to describe this kind of arrangement: pax mafiosa – the mafia’s peace, whereby criminal syndicates know their place, law enforcement knows its place, the product keeps flowing and the revenues keep coming back. In 1985, however, a calamity impacted the cartel, the Mexican government’s conviviality with it – and US complicity in that relationship. An undercover agent for the DEA, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, was fingered, kidnapped and tortured to death in Guadalajara. The US demanded of Mexico that Gallardo and his lieutenant, Rafael Caro Quintero, be jailed, which they were in 1989.

This led to a split in the Guadalajara cartel, different branches claiming its mantle. One, led by Gallardo’s nephews and nieces, founded the Tijuana cartel while another formed the Juárez cartel. And a third faction was formed: by the man who perceived himself as heir to the Avilés/Gallardo empire, and his “plaza” as the whole border, indeed the whole country: Avilés’s nephew – Guzmán.

The moment Gallardo was arrested, Guzmán declared war on every other criminal organisation in Mexico. Guzmán, however, was captured early into his leadership of the cartel, and it was from jail, in luxury confinement at El Puente Grande maximum security prison near Guadalajara, that Guzmán adapted his tactics to build alliances in public office and high politics.

Folklore has it that he escaped from jail in a laundry truck. Breakout of the Millennium was the title of one narcocorrido ballad commemorating the event, but a book – Narcoland – by Mexico’s leading journalist and author on matters narco, Anabel Hernández, proved, citing documents and video footage, that he had walked out in police uniform, with a police escort.



Once free, Guzmán declared war again, this time on the Gulf cartel for the busiest commercial border crossing in the world, between Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and Laredo, Texas.

Young women wear headbands with Joaquín Guzmán’s name, during a march to call for his freedom in his home state in the north-west of Mexico. Photograph: Daniel Becerril/Reuters

And thus the present carnage began. In 2005, Guzmán attacked Nuevo Laredo. In early summer that year, the position of police chief was vacant for several weeks until Alejandro Dominguez dared step forward from the federal attorney general’s office to take the post on 8 June: he was gunned down nine hours later. The offensive took the violence to another level altogether, and in December 2006 new president Felipe Calderón sent in the army, kicking the hornets’ nest and detonating total war.

For eight years, Mexico has been brutalised by the near-daily news of further bodies uncovered in mass graves, hung decapitated from motorway bridges, strewn mutilated along the byways and across the deserts – even tourist resorts.

Guzmán went underground as Mexico descended into the abyss, boasting that he paid out $5m a month to corrupt officials, and making sudden, brazen appearances such as that in May 2005 at a restaurant in Nuevo Laredo, his enemy’s doorstep, when 40 diners found the doors suddenly locked by his gunmen to be told: “Don’t be alarmed, order whatever you want, and we’ll pay.” Another of his banquets in Mexico City was raided by the army – but too late, finding only four hapless members of the band paid to entertain Guzmán, who were arrested for possession of firearms. He appeared again on the border opposite Lukeville, Arizona, to urge his gunmen into action for control of desert crossings into the US.

Hernández’s book contains one anecdote that not only gives the lie to Guzmán’s gentleman bandit image, but also introduces the new power on the scene. A parable for what has happened during those years in Mexico, and the rise of Guzmán’s principal enemy: the Zetas, which were formed as an enforcement wing of the Gulf cartel, and have become a new form of crime syndicate – a paramilitary army, and the next generation of mafia.

In her account of Guzmán’s years in prison, where he ruled the roost, Hernández tells the story of a girl, a fellow convict called Zulema, courted by Guzmán to become his special lover – until, two forced abortions later, he tired of her. After which she was “passed around his friends” and violated “like a piece of meat” until she became “El Chapo’s garbage dump”. Then, not long after Zulema was released from jail, her mutilated corpse was found in the boot of a car, bearing signs of rape and torture, with the letter Z carved into her buttocks, breasts and back, initial of Los Zetas.

The Gulf cartel was founded by an old whiskey bootlegger from the 1930s, Juan Nepomuceno Guerra and his nephew, Juan García Ábrego, who became the first drug trafficker to make the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. Ábrego was arrested and extradited to the US in 1996, leaving the leadership to Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who secured his position within the cartel and against its rivals by recruiting an enforcement wing trained by former members of special service military units, which Cárdenas named Los Zetas because their first commander, Arturo Guzmán, was a former federal cop (as was Cárdenas) whose radio code was “Z1”. After Cárdenas’s arrest, the Zetas became one of the most terrifying and formidable drug trafficking organisations in the world, under Heriberto Lazcano, “Z3”.



With ferocity on a level hitherto unknown, the Zetas became a cartel in their own right and forced a route down the Gulf coast and through Central America, affording direct access to the cocaine-producing countries of Colombia and new markets in Peru and Venezuela. The Zetas are now the cartel most internationally connected to Britain and Europe, aligned with their opposite numbers, “cousins” as it were, in the economic and social progression of crime syndicates in Italy, the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria. When, in September 2008, about 175 operatives for the Gulf cartel were arrested by US authorities, 10 were in Calabria.

There is a crucial difference, a generational one, between Guzmán’s pyramid of power and Los Zetas. The Sinaloa cartel operates like a vast family business, at once feudal and multinational, atop which was the man whose control was absolute and parochial, though his reach was global, operating on a system of patronage and loyalty. As a corporation like any other, it could be compared with old-school capitalist enterprises that cared for their loyal workers, maybe even built “model towns” for them to live in. But narco cartels are not adversaries of capitalism, nor even pastiches of the legal economy – they are integral to it and change with the markets. As capitalism changed so did the cartel corporations, adapting to the new brutalities of the market, the more brazen ruthlessness of laissez-faire, outsourcing and profit at all costs.

A helicopter crew member from the US Office of Air and Marine flies over the Rio Grande. The helicopters patrol day and night searching for drug and people smugglers. Photograph: John Moore/Getty

The Zetas are, accordingly, a brand new form of cartel – paramilitary, insurgent, ruthless and, unlike Guzmán, at war with the state rather than ready to do business with it. While Guzmán belongs to the old system of paternalistic capitalism, Los Zetas were born of the free market, with perfect understanding of the opportunist new forces that pertain in the supposedly “legal” economy. The Zetas operate hotels in Acapulco and Yucatan, they run prostitution and people-trafficking rackets, they run an oil exportation business into the energy hub of Houston, Texas.

They have all but taken over the smuggling of migrants from Central America into the US along the new crossing points of the Rio Grande valley. In October 2010 one of the worst massacres of the entire narco war had nothing to do with drugs. At a farm in the San Fernando region of Tamaulipas, the bodies of 72 people were found – all Central Americans aiming to cross into the US, who were summarily killed for, it seems, failing to pay extra extortion money.

While Guzmán nurtured his terrain and loyalty like a feudal lord beloved by his people, Los Zetas rule by brute, brazen terror. While the name of Guzmán is on everybody’s lips throughout Sinaloa and terrain under his control, sometimes in fear, often in praise, it is striking how in cities such as Ciudad Victoria and Veracruz – fortresses of the Zetas, entirely under their control – the cartel’s name is never breathed nor whispered.

During spring 2011, mass graves were found containing 167 bodies of those who had previously disappeared from all over Mexico, over weeks and sometimes months. Families of the missing were obliged to arrive at the morgue in Matamoros, on the border opposite Brownsville, Texas, give their DNA and hope in vain that they would not be matched to their lifeless loved ones. The authorities surmised that the victims were passengers on long-distance buses hijacked by the Zetas, and the people aboard press-ganged as part of a recruitment drive. The dead were, it was assumed, those who did not want to join as runners or whatever for the narco soldiers.

Most had been shot, but some were incinerated alive; women had been violated before being murdered. Most appalling and ominous, though, is that the vice-like grip of the Zetas on their territory means that these executions and mass burials had been carried out in open country, the byways heaving with bodies, without a word leaking out to police, authorities or military with a mind to investigate, nor any member of the public prepared to report them. Not even the bus companies, even though the unclaimed baggage of the dead was piling up at the terminus in Matamoros.

While Chapo will give generously to the church, mothers’ day, local schools, the Zetas are more brutal in their accounting. There’s an adage in Mexico that while Guzmán enjoys a good lunch with the politicians, and they come to an arrangement over what to do, the Zetas call the politicians and tell them what to do. The politicians obey, because they know the Zetas know where they live and their children go to school.

While the old-guard narcos might do business over lunch or in smart hotels, the new guard control the internet. The Zetas post their atrocities on YouTube, by way of recruitment posters; it is a matter of conjecture whether they got the idea from al-Qaida – recently inherited by Islamic State (Isis) – or the other way around. Patrick Cockburn, author of a recent book on Isis, reports that a recent video claiming to show a beheading by the jihadist group was in fact not their handiwork at all: it was shot in Mexico, an execution by the Zetas.

While the mafia old guard might hide a body in the concrete of a flyover, the new organisations make their brutality as public as possible. As the chief forensic examiner for the police in Tijuana, Hiram Muñoz, puts it so eloquently, as he searches for meanings and messages in the mode of mutilations: “The difference is this: in what I would call normal times, I kill you and make you disappear. Now, they are shouting it, turning it into a grotesque carousel around their territory. In normal conditions, the torture and killing is private, now it is a public execution using extreme violence, and this is significant.”

A member of an evangelical church dressed as angel holds a sign which reads, Chapo Guzman, Jesus Christ loves you during a demonstration against violence in the city of Ciudad Juarez. Photograph: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

No cartel silences the press quite like the Zetas: while atrocities in Sinaloa and Ciudad Juárez are reported by the press, with tacit cartel approval, in Tamaulipas, those of the Zetas are not. The editor of a newspaper in Nuevo Laredo, Heriberto Ramon Cantu, explains frankly how he was taken for a drive by the Zetas, who said they expected total silence on their affairs. When Cantu was considering one potential news report, he was told that his staff working on it would be kidnapped and executed if he did.

The Zetas also began a new phenomenon: “cleansing” entire communities from territory they claimed. In November 2010, they rampaged through the town of Ciudad Mier and expelled most of its population in a blaze of gunfire and explosions, so that the people had to flee to Ciudad Alemán on the border opposite Roma, Texas. Two months later, the Zetas stormed into Alemán on what seems to have been a punitive raid, shooting wildly at civilians.

By the time of Guzmán’s arrest, the cartel map had reached a point at which former sworn enemies had formed a loose alliance called Carteles Unidas, or Todos Contra Los Zetas – everyone against the Zetas.

Guzmán’s arrest earlier this year provoked fanfares of triumphal rhetoric from the governments of Mexico and the US (which seeks his extradition) and law enforcement agencies all over the world, heralding another blow against organised crime in their “war on drugs”. The US Department of Justice hailed a “landmark achievement”. But all Mexico has done, actually, was to capture the last, and key, man with whom it can do business in the underworld of narco-trafficking – indeed, the man it has been doing business with all along.

Mexico’s only strategy with any hope of bringing an end to the carnage is to re-establish the pax mafiosa of old. To engineer a deal in alliance with the Sinaloa cartel and its allies, based on the old system in which politicians, police, army and the cartel know their place – and the Zetas are defeated. This is the belief also of the makers of an extraordinary new film – shown at the South by South West festival in Texas and a documentary festival in Sheffield earlier this year, soon to screen more widely – by British director Angus MacQueen and his Peruvian colleague Guillermo Galdos. The two set out to find and interview Guzmán a year before his arrest, and very nearly did so. They did, at least, become the first reporters to penetrate his fiefdom, and come within his immediate ambit, family and inner circle. To make The Legend of Shorty, they began with the methamphetamine distribution network in Chicago, well under Chapo’s control, and negotiated their way, perilous step by perilous step to Sinaloa, via Guzmán’s cocaine and meth-packing operation in Tijuana. Eventually the directors were flown, by a Guzmán aide, into El Chapo’s heartland, months before his arrest.

The director of the US DEA, Anthony Placido, had told MacQueen and Galdos straight-faced that America and Mexico were together engaged in “the biggest manhunt ever” and “relentless pursuit” of Guzmán. The biggest manhunt ever, mounted over 13 years, had failed where two journalists succeeded in a matter of months.

Though they never met him, MacQueen and Galdos found Guzmán in exactly the place anyone would have guessed he was: his own terrain. They learned that actually, he is not that short - El Chapo was just a name his mother gave him when he was little, and yes: they even got to interview Guzmán’s mother. They visited the mountaintop terrace he calls Heaven, where he took his breakfast – and three times were so close to their prize interview that they were summoned to film it – but Guzmán did not show.

MacQueen and Galdo found people talking openly about Guzmán’s official stature in the region, about “governors who have lunch with him, politicians and police who work for him”. Tellingly, loyal peasants relate how Guzmán chartered aircraft to take their children to the state capital for medical treatment, like a good old-school mafia don. Even more cogently, as they drive through Guzmán’s heroin poppy fields, MacQueen and Galdos are waved through at police road blocks, once it is known that they are moving across ground on Guzmán’s authority. Members of Guzmán’s security team inform them: “The soldiers here are cool. They let us work, and they get their chequitos” – their little cheques.

Anabel Hernández believes Guzmán was arrested for show – to live in jail in comfort and help with the business from inside, as he did before. “He was too close to the present war,” MacQueen thinks. “I believe there was a deal, it would make sense for the new president [Enrique Peña Nieto] to bring Chapo in and work with him against the common enemy, the Zetas.”

But so far, says MacQueen: “The test of whether the arrest of Chapo Guzmán has made any difference is to say to the dealers and addicts in the US: ‘Has the price gone up?’ Unless it has, there’s no change. We asked – and it hasn’t. It’s business as usual.”







The Legend of Shorty will be shown on Film4 in November