![]() The area was under the protection-or the control-of El Chapo, to whom José and other growers paid a 30% tax in exchange for protection from the soldiers who might otherwise raid the area, burning crops and sending months of work up in smoke.įor several years after the escape from Puente Grande, José did not meet the man to whom he paid taxes. In the early 2000s, José was working an area of land roughly equal to the size of about five football fields. Like El Chapo, José and his neighbors learned how to grow weed and opium from their fathers, using tried-and-true methods to grow the crops on little plots of land in the hills above their village. Maria Consuelo Loera, El Chapo's mother, leaves the US embassy in Mexico City in 2019 after applying for a visa to visit her son. (Names marked with an asterisk are pseudonyms.) Who's going to turn on the guy who pays wholesale for their crops?Īmong the farmers El Chapo bought from in those days was a man named José,* an affable father of three, born, raised, and still living in a small town just off the highway. He was moving coke again, and marijuana and heroin as well-there was always more money to be made in cocaine, but the local economy of his sanctuary still relied heavily on the production of those two trusty cash crops, the hills dotted with red poppy flowers and redolent stalks of cannabis.īy purchasing these drugs from local farmers, he could make a handsome profit, prop up local business, and buy an enduring base of support. He was free, back in the mountains in which he had grown up and gotten his start, where much of the population loved and supported him, and where the remoteness and the rugged terrain provided a natural defense that allowed him to move about with relative ease. At one of the first meetings at a lieutenant's ranch, El Mayo made it clear that he was backing El Chapo to the hilt. Within days, he was holding a series of meetings with his partners, including the man who in the ensuing years would become his most steadfast ally, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada García. Regardless of whether El Chapo was rolled out, or walked out in a stolen guard uniform, it was his ability to buy the right people that allowed him to escape.Įl Chapo was back. federal court in Brooklyn, the laundry cart theory was retold repeatedly by multiple former accomplices.) (Years later, when El Chapo was finally put on trial at a U.S. ![]() Others have joined Hernandez in speculating that the laundry cart story was a fanciful tale ginned up to cover up a more mundane escape made possible by systemic corruption. In the book Narcoland, journalist Anabel Hernandez argues that the laundry cart story was a tall tale cooked up in the wake of the escape to hide the real story: that El Chapo had simply walked out the door. So the next day he left, smuggled out the door tucked into a laundry cart, rolled to freedom by a guard known as El Chito. His worst fear, an American prison cell, was suddenly much closer to reality.Ī vendor in Sinaloa state, El Chapo's birthplace in Mexico, shortly before he was sentenced in 2019. And on Janueverything changed for El Chapo when the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled that the United States could extradite Mexican prisoners such as El Chapo, as long as the death penalty was taken off the table. ![]() Unfortunately for El Chapo, Dámaso had left Puente Grande in the fall of 2000, under a cloud of suspicion amid drastically belated efforts by the government to investigate corruption there. ![]() "When I needed anything, I would ask and he would give it to me," Dámaso said years later. When one of Dámaso's children was injured in an accident, it was El Chapo who paid the child's medical bills. When Dámaso arrived, El Chapo immediately began to shower money and gifts on him: ten thousand dollars in cash here, a house there. ![]() Much of this was thanks to his patronage of Dámaso López Nuñez, who'd taken over as deputy director of security in 1999 and had proved even more pliant than his predecessor in seeing to it that all of El Chapo's needs were met. And he'd been doing alright at Puente Grande, had enjoyed many of the same creature comforts during his years in Puente Grande as he had on the outside-good food, women, volleyball-and unlike his life on the outside, he even got to sleep in the same place every night. In early 2001, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug trafficker better known as El Chapo, decided he didn't want to be in prison any longer.Įl Chapo had been at Puente Grande, the maximum-security prison outside of the city of Guadalajara since 1995, locked up for his role in a bloody shootout in 1993 at the Guadalajara airport. ![]()
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