The Untold Story of El Chapo's Rise and Fall w/ special guest Noah Hurowitz
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It's the late 1980s in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta, a border town just across from Douglas, Arizona. Quiet place, under 100,000 folks, not much beyond a few factories. And then cowboys arrive, dripping in wealth, dressed in expensive clothes and driving SUVs, with plates from Sinaloa, a state hundreds of miles south. Houses, stores and cinemas all pop up, and suddenly, sleepy little Agua Prieta is a boomtown.

Everybody knows who these guys are. They're the latest incarnation of a drug war that's destroyed lives all over Mexico for decades. But this is something different. When a lawyer named Rafael Camarena Macias said he's building a swimming pool at a pad right on the border, no one really bats an eyelid. Until the hole in the backyard is mysteriously filled back up.

But that house on the border, or more accurately, what's beneath it, is about to start fueling one of the biggest drug smuggling networks that has ever existed. And the guy who owns it is about to become public enemy number one. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

So, hey guys, I'm your host, Sean Williams, and I'm joined today not by Danny Gold, but journalist Noah Hurowitz, who's been submerged in the life of El Chapo for like three years now. I mean, you must be thrilled to spend another hour or so talking about him, Noah.

I'm always thrilled to talk about El Chapo, to be honest. Cool. Well, glad to hear it. Noah got first onto El Chapo reporting his trial for Rolling Stone in New York City in 2018, which ended like nine months later, was it? Or how long was the trial? It was like...

It was like three months of sort of daily hearings until it was like November 2018 to February 2019. He was found guilty February 12th. And then a few months later, like in January,

June or July, he was sentenced to life in prison. But it felt like nine months, I'll tell you that. Yeah, yeah. And you've got a book coming out, I think, when we're recording this. I think it's like this week. And the book's called El Chapo, The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord.

And you were out in Mexico a ton, spoke to loads of family members, associates, friends, agents. It's like really deeply reported. I had a blast reading it. Loved it. And I know a lot of our listeners already know a ton about El Chapo. So we're going to focus on one of the untold parts of his life that your book gets into in this pod, which is his early life and history.

how this boy from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere suddenly rose to become like the biggest narco in Mexico, one of the biggest in the world. So welcome to the show, Noah. And yeah, tell me a little bit more about how you kind of got involved in the trial, how it led to this book, because I mean, reading the book, reporting that trial sounds absolutely frantic. Like I'm surprised you survived it without going crazy.

I'm not sure I did. It still feels like it's still going. I had covered some domestic drug policy in the United States prior to the trial, but I really got lucky getting the gig covering the trial for Rolling Stone. It was just day in, day out madness. When you cover...

anything in federal court in the US. You can't have like a phone or laptop or anything, a recording device in the courtroom.

And so, you know, I was taking notes by hand for eight hours a day, which was, you know, I sort of reacquainted myself with my handwriting, which I look back at my notes sometimes. And like, luckily, I have pretty good recall. So I can kind of remember what the hell I meant by something. But like, yeah, it was it was a lot, you know, I, my hands were constantly cramping up. And it just felt like being in this little like spaceship almost, you know, just like,

like sort of like sealed off, like to, I mean, to get into the courthouse, you needed to get in line. You needed to go through metal detectors at the, like downstairs. And there was like a national guard unit there with like a Geiger counter for like radiation, just in case. Yeah. And there was like snipers on the roof. And, you know, then we would, you know, we would go up to the, the press room, drop off our stuff and,

And, uh, and then go upstairs and have to go through another metal detector where we would have to take off our shoes. You know, it was like going, going to the airport every day, at least like four times a day, you know? Um, and so, yeah, it, it really, it really was, uh, pretty wild by the end of it. Like, you know, around the jury, uh, the, when we were waiting for the jury verdict, we were, we were getting there like earlier and earlier in the morning to sort of get in line, uh, in

in hopes of actually getting into the courtroom and not just the overflow room for the eventual verdict. Cause we wanted to see the reaction or whatever. And, uh, after like two nights of getting there, like, you know, working until 11 PM, sleeping for two hours and then getting up and going to the courthouse at 4 AM. Uh, I just ended up like grabbing a, grabbing a sleeping bag and a piece of cardboard and, uh, just sleeping outside the courthouse one night. Yeah.

It was like, it was unreal. I mean, it's given me, it's bringing me out in cold sweats about doing court reporting. I can't even imagine how that was for you. Uh,

It was just before we get going, I should say to our listeners as well, all the usual stuff, subscribing and there's the Patreon still going. And I think we're going to be sticking some sort of bonus stuff up with Noah after this pod. And remember to rate us, guys, because that really helps. Actually, we're just figuring this all out. Me and Danny have no idea.

As one of the early Patreon subscribers, I'll tell you guys, it's been worth it. So you should sign up. That was unscripted as well, guys. So, I mean, I guess this pod's going to sound a little weird to you now, because basically it's going to be me reading some of your book back to you. But...

I guess before we get out to your experience in Mexico, let's start way, way back before the 19th century, even when Sinaloa, which is this like thin, long Mexican state that borders the Gulf of California. By already the mid 1800s, it's this place known for smuggling and banditry. And it even has its own kind of patron saint. I mean, would you call him that? This guy named Jesus or Jesus Malverde?

Yeah, so Jesus Malavere is this really interesting character from like late 19th century, early 20th century Mexico. He was... It's not entirely clear if he was a real person. He seems to be sort of a composite of several different bandits. But the legend is that his parents died of starvation and he sort of swore revenge against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. And he would, you know...

rob merchants and give to the poor. And he sort of had this, you know, he developed this sort of reputation as like a Robin Hood, right? And he was eventually, the legend goes that he was eventually caught and hanged and sort of just, you know, buried in a shallow grave. And that peasants who revered him started to sort of leave like little rocks on the side of his grave that became these cairns.

And it became this site of almost like pilgrimage. And there's now this shrine to Jesus Malverde in Culiacan, which is the capital city of Sinaloa. And people leave little offerings there for luck, you know, in crossing the border, in business, in drug smuggling as well. And he's often mentioned sort of in context with...

El Chapo because, you know, El Chapo is now the sort of like best known native son of Sinaloa. And I think that that's really interesting. And that's something that I sort of like tackle head on into the first part of my book is I wanted to sort of confront this idea of El Chapo and other drug traffickers as these sort of, um,

like the, the, the boy in academic term for it is like social bandits, you know, these, these sort of as sort of like rebels or, or outlaws. And what, what I found, you know, in, in my research, you know, and there's been a lot of really good scholarship on this is that,

Drug traffickers really weren't and aren't necessarily the outlaws that we might think of them to be, at least not in Mexico. They actually occupy this sort of curious and really important role in areas like Sinaloa, where they had this sort of constantly renegotiated relationship with the state, where they...

functioned as sort of a method of control over peasant communities. They meted out violence when need be, but they also, the largesse of drug trafficking provided sort of inflated wages for peasants and prevented agitation, prevented

turmoil that might otherwise have arisen. And so, you know, rather than being opposed to the state, I view drug traffickers as, you know, particularly in the 20th century in Mexico, as being sort of a really key pillar of support for the regime that ruled Mexico from, you know, 1930 to 2000. Right.

Yeah. Um, and, and, and we're going to get into a bunch of that later on as well in this show. Um, but it's like kind of incredible how this one state, um, more accurately, I guess it's like a bunch of towns and villages in the state's interior. Um, how this like tiny area is birthed some of the most brutal drug lords in history, really. Um, you've got El Azul, the brothers Beltran Lieber, uh,

I thought my Spanish would be better after like two weeks in Spain, but it's still shit. El Chapo and of course El Mayo, this current leader of the Sinaloa cartel. And by all accounts, the cartel seems to be going pretty strong even after the arrests, the battles, the escapes, the interviews with Sean Penn, the trial and conviction. I mean, they seem to be doing all right these days still, right?

Yeah, I mean, we'll get into my quibbles with the whole terminology of cartels and all that. But, you know, basically, yeah, you know, the arrest of El Chapo

it led to a certain shakeup in Sinaloa and there was a fair amount of pretty brutal violence in 2017, shortly after he was extradited. But for the most part, yeah, I mean, the organized crime in Sinaloa is still very strong. And actually, like, you know, Sinaloa is actually more calm than a lot of other areas of Mexico because, you know,

There's less infighting and there's less sort of, you know, there's fewer, you know, there's a lot of different factions of what we refer to as the Sinaloa cartel. But in general, there's less competition between sort of atomized, you know, organized crime groups like what we see in Guerrero or Guanajuato or Tamaulipas where there's like, you know, a lot of competition, a lot of fighting. And, you know, there's less competition between sort of atomized, you know, organized crime groups like what we see in Guerrero or Guanajuato or Tamaulipas where there's like, you know, a lot of competition, a lot of fighting.

and a lot of violence that is really inflicted on innocent people, extortion, kidnapping, disappearances. That all happens in Sinaloa, but to a lesser degree than what we see in other places. And the reason for that is just that the people who are running organized crime networks in Sinaloa, they have stronger connections with the state. They have more support.

among people. And, um, yeah. And, you know, the, the arrest and extradition of, of El Chapo didn't really change all that much. Yeah. I mean, that was something that I was really struck by reading your book. It actually is the kind of, you know, hand in glove situation with the state and Narcos, but, um,

Yeah, as for El Chapo, Joaquin Alquivado Guzman Loera is born in 1957 and he grows up with four brothers and two sisters in the tiny little village of Latuna, which is really in the middle of nowhere. Like this place is a half day's drive from the Sinaloa state capital, Culiacán. Is that correct? I feel like that might be good. Yeah. Playing some games with me. I don't know.

Google Maps is not the most reliable up there. To get from Culiacan to La Tuna is, it takes a while. You know, you drive like an hour up the state highway and then you turn off onto a smaller state highway that you drive sort of an hour up the road into the mountains to this town called Barirawato, which is sort of the municipal seat up there, so the county seat. And then you drive through Barirawato and you...

And you go over this bridge. So as soon as you cross the bridge, you lose cell phone service. And then you drive another hour or so up that highway, and you finally get to a little turnoff. And then you run into the checkpoint. And there's armed guards. Maybe I can talk about that more in a bit, but it's another hour or so.

off that road on like a dirt track that, you know, is often impassable in the rainy season. And in the dry season, you can get through pretty easy. And you, you know, up and down, you really, the first time I did it, actually, my fixer, for some reason, had a car that didn't have four-wheel drive. And it was not easy, I'll tell you that. So yeah, it is quite a hike to get

Yeah, I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was even, you know, in the during the during El Chapo's childhood. I'm sure it was, you know, even more difficult. Yeah. I mean, you you describe this little place. It's like little horseshoe shaped town with this pretty red.

pagoda that El Chapo built for his mother and this blue and white church that was also bought with his cash. Did you have permission from the guys? Did you have to sort of, you know, call it in when you went to La Tuna? Like, how did that all go down?

So I worked with a fixer named Miguel Angel Vega. He's the best. We became good friends. And he has sort of a standing agreement with a resident of Latuna who is related in one way or another to El Chapo's brother, this guy named El Juano, who currently controls that area. And so...

you know, he, Miguel will, we'll text his contact up there, uh, and say, Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm bringing another good and go up there. And, uh, when we got to that turnoff that I mentioned, um, the, the first time, you know, we were stopped by like three or four young armed men, you know, carrying like eight Ks and I think one, one, uh, AR 15. Cool. And they, yeah. Uh,

Um, yeah, I mean, it was that this was my first like experience with sort of like armed non-state actors, if you will. And so I was like, I was, uh, I was a little bit nervous and it was like, you know, they, they came up to the passenger side window and,

And they, they, we roll down the window and they say to me like, Hey, do you speak Spanish? And I do, but I was just like, I didn't really want him asking me questions. I wanted him talking to Miguel. So I was like, uh, no, I don't. And so then, so they're talking and, you know, uh, Miguel says, you know, we're here to see so-and-so. Um, and the guy says like, are you journalists? And he says, yes, but we're just here to see people.

so-and-so. And, you know, it wasn't quite a lie necessarily, but he wasn't, you know, I didn't have like a full camera get up. So he, we, we didn't have to be as like as forthright necessarily about, yeah, we're here to do this. Um, and so, you know, they, they radioed up ahead and it came back like, yep, Miguel's good. And so the guy, the guy turns to me and he's, he, he, uh, he, he like,

I forget what it was. He said, he said like something to me. He's like, he's like, you know, what's your name? And I, and I sort of like perked up, you know, as if like, this is my sort of like, uh, you know, one, one semester of Spanish or something. Hey, I know how to answer that. And I'm like, my name's Noah. And, uh, and he sort of gives me this, uh, he sort of gives me this squint that I only really like later I realized that it was like, um, very,

Very similar to this thing that Larry David does in Kirby Enthusiasm, where he sort of, like, squints at someone for a while to see if they're lying and then goes, okay. Like, he gives me this fucking Larry David squint, and he says, okay, and then let us go. And, you know, after that, I got more... It got to be pretty routine. You know, I would... We would roll up to a checkpoint, and I would, like, hand them cigarettes, and, you know, it got to be pretty...

I was less nervous after that. But yeah, it was, that was a real, I wouldn't necessarily call it a trial by fire, but it was a real introduction to that life. Yeah. You know, cigarettes and alcohol are always the great equalizers in those situations. And a shout out to Miguel, right? Because I think we have an ongoing mission to try and

Sing the praises of fixers who are the heroes of journalism. Yeah, well, so Miguel is the best. I met him through my friend Keegan Hamilton, who works for Vice. I know Vice is a public enemy on this podcast. Oh, I love Vice. I love Vice. I think they're all great. Yeah, and I think Danny would agree with that. Keegan is the best. And Keegan worked with Miguel on the Vice podcast about El Chapo.

And so he, he connected me with, um, with Miguel and Miguel actually has a book coming out, um, this year, uh, in Spanish called El Fixer. And it's about his life as a fixer. And, um, I'm actually, I'm actually, a friend and I are trying to, are sort of working with him to try to get it published in, in English. So if there's any, um, you know, agents or, uh, publishing people on here who are interested in sort of a memoir about the life of a fixer in Mexico, uh, give,

get at me because I would, you know. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So Latuna...

pretty much a scratch even today. So I'm guessing like in the 60s when El Chapo's growing up, there's pretty much nothing at all. And his family's pretty poor with little other than a few heads of cattle, but they're okay enough to survive. And you say in the book, that's a bit, it's a bit tough to prize fact from fiction when it comes to El Chapo's early years, right? Because so much of it is shrouded in legend.

the narco corridos and so on. Like who did you manage to actually meet in Latuna and sort of what legends of El Chapo's did you manage to sort of chip away at while you were there? Well, so I, I managed to speak to an older, an aunt or something. Um, and also like an old, like a cousin of El Chapo who, um, was, I think like a little bit, uh,

older than him. But they grew up very close together. And so speaking with this cousin, I was... He...

He gave me sort of the standard script. El Chapo was a hardworking boy. He loved his mother. He was industrious. He would walk down the valley selling oranges and tortillas. He always had sort of a head for business from a young age, which like –

You know, it's fucking PR, you know, and I get it. But in my book, what I, you know, I quoted that part of what the guy told me. But I also mentioned, like, you know, I don't know if any of this is true. And, you know, I wasn't so interested necessarily in that sort of script about what El Chapo was like as a boy. I was much more interested in...

You know, in trying to understand this place and what it was like to grow up there and sort of how someone like El Chapo, how it influenced his later life and how it influenced who he became. So, you know, I...

I, you know, for me going there, it was more important to me to get a sense of the place than to necessarily get sort of the same thing that they tell every good and good and go journalist about what El Chapo was like as a boy. Yeah. But, you know, there was, and there was, you know, there's, there's some debate about like, you know, was his dad abusive or just lazy? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, it was, I mean, it was, of course, really interesting to talk to these people about this. You know, imagine just this kid you grew up with becomes this, like, world historical figure, right? So that was interesting. But I wasn't too, you know, I wasn't too interested in the sort of what was El Chapo like as a boy discussion because I knew that they were going to sort of give me the same line that they give everybody. And I get it. I'm not mad at them, but...

Yeah, I mean, you say that one of his cousins told you that, like, his dad didn't like to work too much, but he was pretty much a good person. But, like, whatever his dad was like, the young Joaquin, he seems to be pretty ambitious, driven. He's, like, holding bits of paper made to look like banknotes and selling oranges to folks on the main highway. It's a pretty hardscrabble life. And according to his sister, El Chapo goes around wearing these

big fake gold chains that stain his skin green and he boasts about stuff to his neighbors. Yeah, I mean, the most interesting thing I think to me that I was told and that I've heard mentioned elsewhere is that...

It seems like El Chapo might have had sort of some bad experiences with the military when he was a young man. And that, you know, that sort of lines up with what was happening in the region at the time. I think we're going to get into this in a bit, but there was a lot of military activity in Sinaloa in the 1970s. And

I was told that he got beaten up. I think his sister told the Vice podcast that he had been beaten up by the military. And so I think that that, to me, is the most instructive because it tells us about sort of the relationship that, you know,

not necessarily the relationship that like powerful drug traffickers had with the state, but the relationship that just these poor peasant communities who were involved in the drug trade, you know, they were growing opium, they were growing marijuana, but they were at the bottom of the food chain. And so they were the ones on whom the state would come down when they had to make it look like they were fighting the drug trade. Right. And so that was, that was to me, I think one of the most interesting parts was having this understanding of, of El Chapo's understanding of, um,

his relationship with the state. Yeah, for sure. I mean, so much of this stuff is absolutely fascinating. Like his story doesn't start with Coke, obviously. At first he gets involved in weed and opium. And these things have been the region's staple exports for over a century since Mexican Chinese gangs sneaked under prohibition authorities' noses in the early 20th century.

And actually, just like we learned in our Sister Ping episode a few weeks ago, there's this moral, like giant moral panic about the Chinese around this time. And just like it hit up North, Mexico went hard against its Chinese population. It prints all these nationalist newspapers warning about a threat and this right-wing stuff actually turns into violence in the 1920s. By 1940, there's barely a fifth of the number of Chinese Mexicans than there was in 1926. So what do the local guys do? Well, they

well they take over the Chinese smuggling routes of course and they get into the opium business themselves and in the book you lean on this as the foundation of the Mexican cartels kind of so how important was this ethnic cleansing of Chinese and creating the model and creating the modern drug trade we see today and you know how did the Mexican drug industry look back then was it tiered and what role did the state play in it?

Yeah, so that was actually one of the most interesting things that I learned in sort of... It's so interesting. One of the first books I read...

when I was preparing for the trial was, uh, Johan Gurios, um, a narco, you know, Johan is, is the best. He's just, he's just the man, you know, he was, and he was very helpful to me in sort of the early days of trying to understand this stuff, both reading his book and, and, and talking to him. And yeah, that really, I didn't know about that, you know? And, and so the, the drug trade in, uh,

Mexico, legal and illegal, developed in part

In relation to Chinese communities in Mexico, they would sometimes grow opium for personal use. As we may know, opium was sort of forced on the Chinese by the British. So it's not fair to say that they were responsible for it. But by this point, opium has taken root in Chinese communities and it sort of came with them.

when they came to Sinaloa and areas of the western United States to build the railroads. And so by the 1920s, some of the more organized drug smuggling was being done by these sort of Chinese syndicates, many of which were related to these organizations called Tongs, which I think you talked about on this. Yeah, the sort of merchant guilds kind of things. Exactly, exactly. And so...

The reason that I find this so important, this sort of ethnic cleansing episode, is that it wasn't just about the drug trade. It was about the formation of modern Mexico. Mexico came out of the revolution really...

bruised and fractured and many areas of the country were sort of run by these warlords and there wasn't really a unified Mexican identity and so there was a sort of a group of intellectuals in the 20s and 30s some of them who were like kind of fascist actually

who were trying to sort of synthesize this Mexican identity. They understood that to have a sort of a republic with many different regions and, you know, various sort of inaccessible rural areas, they needed to forge this identity. And they came up with this idea of sort of the cosmic race of the mestizo, you know, this mix of Spanish and indigenous blood. And there was no room in that for Mexico.

And so they, you know, as good nationalists always do, they found a scapegoat and the scapegoat was the Chinese. And they, you know, they blamed the Chinese for corrupting Mexican youth with their opium and their marijuana. And so this ethnic cleansing was pretty foundational to the sort of creation of a, you know, it was a big part of this, you know, forging of a new Mexico. And, you know,

It also was useful for Mexican gangsters who wanted to get in on the drug trade. And so we see this sort of, you know, from the beginning, this union between the interests of drug traffickers and gangsters and the interests of the Mexican state.

Yeah, I mean, and we rattle all the way up through to the 1970s when El Chapo is kind of a young, young kid. And, you know, this relationship is really cozy, entrenched and

I mean, it seems like the state pretty much picked and chose who they wanted to get big and they could destroy plantations or, you know, levy taxes on some people. They're pretty much just like king-making, right? Well, it was essentially a state-run protection racket, you know? It was like in, you know, the way that the mafia developed in immigrant neighborhoods in the United States was that they would do protection rackets, right? They would say, hey, you know, we'll protect you if you give us some money. And really that's just...

It's not real protection. But the way that it worked in Mexico is that the local authorities would have sort of a designated trafficker that they would work with, someone who was discreet and understood politics and knew how to keep people under control. And so that drug trafficker would sort of collect cash

from people operating in his area, and he would pay the state. And so anyone who didn't pay taxes would be subject to the law, essentially. Because the drug trade was illegal, it allowed this greater control by the state because they could...

They had an excuse to arrest you or kill you or confiscate your drugs if you weren't playing ball with them. And so through the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, this sort of state-run protection racket, which was known as the plaza system, a designated area was known as a plaza, that developed and that was sort of the way things were done

pretty much up until El Chapo was entering the drug trade. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned this episode in 1975, so he's, what, 18, 17 or whatever, and it shows this kind of capricious hand of the state, I guess, where...

This team of state troopers emerges from three helicopters in a town next to Latuna, looking for young men involved in one of the cartels. And when these guys can't find anybody, they open fire on some young boys, two young boys, and they injure them both. And then they claim the boys are actually fired first because, of course, and El Chapo's sister actually refers to this episode in a later documentary saying, quote, they didn't allow us to say anything.

So I guess you have this general lawlessness or this general kind of arbitrary idea of law and the country doesn't really function on justice or fairness. It's like more a place of case of who has the most clout or who's shaking the most hands wins.

So that's the world that El Chapo grows up in. And he's strutting around in gold chains and he's keeping fake banknotes, wanting to be rich. He leaves school after elementary and he's said to be illiterate. Although, I mean, is that actually the case? I don't know. I think he's, I think he's like, I think he's like somewhat literate, you know, during the, during the trial, he would often be writing notes. And, you know, we know that he did sometimes text literates.

like on, you know, later on, way later, he would, uh, he, he used Blackberries to, to, um, communicate with his, with his lovers and associates. He thought they were, um, they were more secure. It turned out they were not. But so, so the point being that yes, El Chapo was not fully illiterate. I don't think he was necessarily a big reader. Um, but you know, I think he had, uh, he had other kinds of, uh, kinds of street smarts. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, at some point when he's really young, El Chapo gets in with the brothers Beltran and Leiva, who aren't far from Latuna, right? I mean, how did that all happen? Yeah. Yeah.

So the Beltran Leyva brothers grew up in this little village called La Palma, which is on that, you know, I mentioned that little dirt track to La Tuna. La Palma is on the way. You know, a lot of, as you mentioned, really well-known drug traffickers are from this really small little area. You know, the Beltran Leyvas are from La Palma. This guy named El Azul is from, I think, this nearby town called Huixiopa. Like, it's, you know...

All of these very well-known people are from this area. And so he was like... It's unclear what his relationship was with them. They might have been cousins. I mean, everyone's cousins up there. But... So they were sort of entering the drug trade together. And they were entering the drug trade around this time where... All right. I'm going to talk about Operation Condor. So...

Around the time that El Chapo and the Beltran-Lever brothers were getting involved with the drug trade,

the the the status quo was sort of starting to break down a bit in sinaloa and a big reason for that was um this uh this military operation which is known as operation condor not to be confused with the um you know sort of state terror operation in in south america against leftists uh it

So Operation Condor was basically the Mexican government was under great pressure from the Nixon administration to...

to confront the production of drugs in Mexico. You know, as I'm sure our listeners will know, like, you know, the war on drugs is often used as sort of a cudgel by the United States to get other, you know, Latin American governments in line. And the U.S. sort of decides when it does and does not care about drugs.

But in this in this moment, you know, they wanted to sort of get Mexico City under control. And they were saying, hey, look, you need to take care of this. You know, all of this all of this heroin is being grown in and produced in western Mexico. You need to get a handle on that. And so the the the federal government was like, OK, cool, we'll do that.

And they send in this huge military operation. In Culiacan, there's military trucks rumbling around the city. I spoke with people who lived there at the time, and they remember it as just a state of siege, really. And in the mountains, it was much worse. Troops were going in. They were destroying drug crops. They were spraying these really toxic herbicides

or besides that, you know, killed anything, really. And so there's still this sort of level of, I think, sort of collective trauma and memory of this era as one of just, you know, basically outright war with the state. And it wasn't really... I mean...

Operation Conduit did manage to depress production of opium and marijuana in

the mountains of Sinaloa and Durango for a period of time. But what it really did was reorganize the drug trade. Many traffickers actually left the state and sort of moved to different areas of Mexico. And the drug producing regions moved as well. You know, they expanded into the state of Zacatecas, into Guerrero, and even, you know, as far south as like Oaxaca and Chiapas.

But in Sinaloa, what happened was it had always been this state protection racket that I spoke about had been run really by local authorities. And essentially what Operation Condor was, was a power grab by federal authorities, you know, the Attorney General's Office, which is known as the PGR office.

there was a secret police agency called the Federal Security Directorate, the DFS. And so the PGR and the Federal Judicial Police and the DFS really sort of took over the control of the drug trade from state and local authorities and

And, you know, I think we see this again and again, that these sort of stated goals of an anti-drug campaign are, you know, we're going to destroy the drug trade. And that never happens. But what does happen is these ulterior motives of sort of, you know, rearranging control. And so that was around the time as well that El Chapo...

And others sort of were forced to leave Sinaloa so that they could work elsewhere. Yeah. I mean, I guess the like broader war on drugs, wherever it is, is kind of like the biggest Petri dish for kind of disingenuous state bullshit. Yes. And Mexico is no different.

I just want to take a quick diversion at this point because I want to mention women in El Chapo's life as well. So he marries his first wife, Alejandrina Maria Salazar, in 1977. And he's barely 20 and they have three kids together. But he soon moves on to another woman, a bank teller he's said to have kidnapped so he could marry her. Is that true? I...

I don't know enough about that episode to really comment on it. But that, that is what, that is what, that is what they say. Yeah. And, and he marries a third woman, Griselda Lopez Perez, and he has four kids with her. And you write that it's unclear whether he even divorced any of these women at all. I mean, this all sounds exhausting to be honest. But like, I guess he's definitely a narco by that point, albeit like a pretty small time one in the, in the grand context.

And I'm just mentioning all of this because, like, some of the grimmest stuff to come out of the trial was actually to do with his actions against women. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because it really sort of smashes the romantic idea of this Robin Hood narco legend sort of into the long grass a little bit. Yeah, I think that the...

The sort of darkest stuff that we know about El Chapo personally is his treatment of women. And, you know, I think even in the more...

you know, even in the less like evil aspects of it, he probably wasn't the best husband. You know, you say like, this sounds exhausting, but I doubt that he was spending much time thinking about his relationships as like partnerships, you know? So it's probably, it's probably less exhausting when you, when you don't, you know, have any desire to treat your wife well. But so, you know,

Later on, when El Chapo was in prison for the first time in the 1990s, he would bribe the guards to bring in sex workers and allow conjugal visits with his wives.

And one of the women that he had a relationship with at this time was this woman named Zulima Hernandez, who was a prisoner at this prison, Puente Grande. She was one of the only women prisoners there. And from what we can tell, they had a fairly consensual relationship. You know, they would have, she said later that they would have long chats about his childhood and how he was, you know, he never, he was never going to be poor again and

Um, but, but you know, that, that sort of description, even by her clashes a little bit with some other reporting, um, notably by the Mexican journalist, Annabelle Hernandez, who wrote that, uh, Zulima Hernandez was really, really badly mistreated. You know, she, she got pregnant by possibly by El Chapo and she was forced to have an abortion. And, you know, after he escaped in 2001, she was sort of just, you know, passed around, um,

by the guards. And so we begin to see a picture of El Chapo as a sort of womanizer, right? And you mentioned sort of, you know, grim stuff coming out of trial. One of the sort of, you know,

One of the things that came out, not at trial, because it was actually in court documents that were suppressed during the trial. It wasn't allowed to come out in evidence, but it was these court documents were unsealed actually just after the final sort of the closing arguments. And there was a sort of associate of El Chapo, this Colombian trafficker named Alex C. Fuentes, who said that they would...

when they were hiding out in the mountains, this was like 2008, 2009, 2010, they would fly sex workers in to entertain them. And these, I mean, they were often children. They were often very young girls, as young as 14. And that is unverified. And Alex Cifuentes is not the most reliable narrator, but

I, I encourage you to, to, you know, read, read the book to find out more about him. Um, so, so, you know, whether or not that's like everything that he said was true, I think it's pretty believable that El Chapo, um, was not the strongest feminist. Right. That's very diplomatically put. Yeah. Um,

So, yeah, so we get to the formation of the Sinaloa cartel, I guess, with Condor. Yeah.

And we've got this plaza system that you mentioned before that's kind of keeping everything pretty rigidly sort of structured, I guess. And then we get to this guy called Pedro Aviles Perez. And he's called the Mountain Lion. And he's kind of the proto-narco, right? He comes through the ranks in Siloam in the 60s, pioneers the use of

to smuggle opium and marijuana to the US during the hippie years. Um, that's right, by the way, free lovers, your love of weed and smack was fueling the drug war south of the border, just like Coke sniffing school and geckos of the eighties. Um, yeah. And that's, that's a really good point. Actually, Sean is like the, um,

I talk about the place and time that El Chapo came from and how I was interested in that almost more than his personal behavior as a teenager or young man. And the hippie boom really turbocharged the drug trade in Sinaloa. There was this

radically augmented demand because everyone in the U.S. was suddenly smoking a shit ton of weed. And it had a really huge effect on Sinaloa. Everyone and their mother was becoming a drug trafficker. Uliakhan was becoming... Everyone was rich and reckless and shooting their guns off in the air. And so...

Pedro Aviles was really one of the big guys around at the time. Him and this other guy named Lalo Fernandez, they sort of were the most, I wouldn't call them high ranking necessarily because I don't really think that there was that kind of hierarchy necessarily, but they were the most sort of stable and like,

connected to the state. And so Aviles is, you know, he's from sort of around the same area as El Chapo, and he's often...

Again, there's all of these legends about how El Chapo entered the drug trade, and one of the stories is that he was closely working with Pedro Aviles. I've never been able to confirm that, and honestly, I'm not sure that I fully trust that, because I think that there's a tendency sometimes to take a few people whose names we know and say, oh, El Chapo was working with Pedro Aviles. I'm sure that they came into contact with him.

But I was never able to confirm that he was his driver or his bodyguard. I was actually told that by a DEA agent who was working in Sinaloa at the time. But honestly...

I think that sometimes we sort of retrofit these histories. I think of these DEA agents. I don't know if his recollection is from the 1970s or if it was sort of recreated later on. Oh yeah, El Chapo worked with Pedro Aviles. But regardless, Pedro Aviles was sort of the big dog around then. And I mentioned Condor and

Really, the biggest impact of Operation Condor was on peasant communities, and many of the big traffickers were able to

survive that. Pedro Aviles did not survive Operation Condor. Right, yeah, I mean, we get into the end of the 1970s, right, and Condor is reaching its conclusion, and I guess this is a good time to quote from your book, so here's a bit of it. By the end of Condor, everything had changed. While the local cops still took bribes and worked on behalf of drug traffickers, they no longer ran the show. The operation wiped many of the old generation of drug traffickers off the map.

particularly those who had begun attracting attention from the United States, including Pedro Aviles, whose name came up in scores of DEA investigations and was becoming a potential embarrassment to the politicos in Mexico City. Aviles and several of his henchmen died in a hail of gunfire in a northern area of Culiacán, an ambush that looked a lot like a massacre.

So yeah, he definitely does not survive Condor. And into Áviles' shoes steps Félix Gallardo. And this guy is going to transform everything. He's the head of the Guadalajara cartel, which precedes the Sinaloa cartel. And he basically draws Mexico and Colombia, where cocaine is produced, closer together.

And he makes connections across Central America, including Honduras, and creates this like super highway of coke, basically, whose demand is going to go through the roof in the 1980s, as we know. Gallardo is known to be a techie, and he spends tens of thousands of dollars on the latest radio equipment and other stuff, really professionalizing the drug industry.

And he's also an expert politician, and he forges ties with leaders across the region, making sure nobody dares to go after his cartel. And because he's so powerful, his connections pretty much determine who the DEA and DFS go after, picking off a bunch of narcos but never touching the big man himself. And I mean, if you've watched Narcos Mexico on Netflix, you know Gallardo, right? He's Diego Luna's character. Intelligent, ruthless, helping back the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Yeah.

Helping back the Contras. Oh, the Contras. Oh my God, of course. The Contras. See, I'm getting my Condors wrong as well. Yeah, so he's getting wound up in a round Contra. I mean, he's like just a huge character in the drug war. I'm guessing you've watched the show, right? Is there anything in there you thought was particularly bullshit, given all your research? I have watched the show, and it's interesting. There are...

There are portions of that show that are clearly very well researched. And one thing that was funny, you know, by the time I watched it,

I think by the time I watched Narcos Mexico, I'd done enough research that I was able to tell which anecdotes came from which sources. I was like, oh, this is from Drug Lord by Terrence Papa, and this is from that. That's great. This is the one thing I'll give to Narcos, is that they really did do their research. But...

It's fiction. It's a fictional portrayal of this time period. And in fiction, you need a main character. And in nonfiction, honestly, you need a main character. And the result is that this focus on Felix Gallardo really sort of...

smooths out this very not smooth, very complex picture. And so, you know, there were a lot of drug traffickers operating at the time. I think Felix Gallardo was probably the sort of best connected. And I think people were probably kicking up a lot to him in order to, you know, get the protection that he was able to offer. But, you know, the depiction of this sort of like

monolithic, hierarchical Guadalajara cartel was not so accurate. It's funny, people in Sinaloa connected to the drug trade watch Narcos, much the same as the mobsters in The Sopranos love mobster movies. Like,

Fucking like real Narcos in Mexico love watching Narcos. And I had this one really funny experience where I was, I was interviewing this guy who was in a prison somewhere in Northern Mexico. I can't specify where, but you know, I was, I got into the prison and,

and we went to the, the sort of like, I would call it a cell block, but it's really just like a, an open area, um, with some, with some buildings in it. Um, and he was, you know, he had guys who were, you know, cooking like barbecuing ribs and, and sort of serving him. They, they, they were even wearing aprons and, um, you know, we were talking there eating ribs and then he, he brings me into his like air conditioned cell with like a, a King size bed in it and, uh,

a flat screen TV and he turns on the TV and he's got Netflix and he turns on Narcos Mexico, um, on the first episode and he starts sort of pointing stuff out. He's like that, that's accurate. That's accurate. Nah, that's kind of bullshit. That's kind of bullshit. So I got this sort of like this sort of Narco tour of Narcos Mexico from this sort of pretty, uh, pretty heavy, heavyweight, uh,

who was sort of running the show in this prison. And I guess, you know, I think like my biggest problem with shows like Narcos Mexico is that I just, you know, I think Narcos Mexico does a pretty good job of sort of,

describing the entanglement that traffickers have with the state but it also it just it simplifies things to a degree where people think that they understand everything about you know about Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo about you know the DFS about of Chapo who is apparently going to be the star of the of the new season and you know but it actually really isn't that

realistic of a picture. And so when I was, when I started this book, I would, you know, a lot of people ask me like, you know, on, on, on Twitter or even, you know, one time this, um, I was going through customs at JFK and I, I had to mention I was in Mexico for work. What kind of work journalism, what kind of journalism El Chapo, this fucking guy is like, uh, you know, Hey, I, how are you going to, how are you going to get anything new? You know, I already watched Narcos, um,

I was like, man. This stuff becomes canon, right? That's the kind of danger. Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, I did watch Narcos Mexico. I actually have never watched the, there's a Netflix series just about El Chapo, and I never watched it because I didn't want to, you know, there's enough information out there already that I had to be careful about not sort of just writing into the book, that I had to be careful about sort of, you know,

not coloring my perception. And so I actually, I avoided that show El Chapo, even though I've heard that the first couple of seasons actually quite well researched. But I just, I didn't want to get sort of influenced by that at all because I know that, you know, people watch those shows and they think they understand the drug trade and they

it's not you know it's not a documentary how many times have you sat in a bar shitting on netflix shows since you started doing a fair amount yeah um so yeah i mean gallardo whatever the truth of his kind of character is um i mean he definitely blurs the lines between narcos states rebels

Guerrilla fighters. I mean, creating this gigantic drug war mess, I guess we're currently in. And the rise of the Guadalajara cartel coincides with the cocaine and heroin boom. It's not only Gallardo's international connects that are driving this. Over in Southeast Asia, heroin is going wild. And we'll get into that a bunch in a later episode. I really want to do about Kunsa. I mean, you

we've got stuff about that stuff, East Asia heroin. Yeah. I mean, you, you, you see a lot of this like very similar dynamics, right. Of sort of these, these like local power brokers, these local warlords involved in the drug trade, but also involved in,

as sort of almost like mini clients of the, of the governments of the countries that they, that they operate in as the, you know, they help control the areas, um, which would otherwise be, be hard to access and, and hard to control. And, you know, you mentioned the, the contras, like,

We've never been able to make a firm link between Felix Gallardo or any of his sort of his partners and the CIA. There's been rumors. But as far as I can tell, you know, they had, if not the direct backing of the CIA, they had, they worked hand in glove with that secret police agency. I mentioned the DFS and the DFS was, was,

closely allied with the CIA during this time. You know, Mexico City was sort of almost like a Casablanca of spies and, you know, there was a Soviet embassy there and the U.S. was very invested in sort of

keeping Mexico within its sphere of influence as much as possible. And the DFS was a fairly useful asset for the CIA. And that actually pitted the CIA against the DEA because the DEA was investigating Felix Gallardo and his partners while the CIA was working closely with his partners in the DFS.

And so I think it's just, you know, that really shows us like how sort of contradictory U.S. foreign policy can be and how ultimately, you know, ultimately notions of security and sort of, you know, security and security.

political control, big precedents over anti-drug operations, unless anti-drug operations can be used for that purpose. You know? Yeah. Sicario was a documentary, right? No. Um, Sicario was actually pretty good. Sicario too. I love that film. Sicario was terrible. Sicario was, was pretty on the money about, you know, the way in which, um, in which the U S sort of, uh,

choose a side in the drug war yeah and i think one of those the things that those kind of shows get really right is the fact that these agencies just fucking hate each other right i mean they've all got different plans there's so much privado going around as well um yeah it's a mess i mean i i've kind of witnessed it in reporting about like the nigerian gangs and stuff in southeast asia it's

Yeah, it's a pretty massive dumpster fire. But anyway, like at this time in this kind of like in Gallardo's era, I guess, like the profitability of coke or heroin is just like many, many times more than weed, which is pretty labor intensive.

And Americans are really starting to take over the marijuana industry domestically. So why have guys flying crop dusters full of weed across the border when you can just start producing cocaine and make like 10 times as much cash?

And this comes at pretty much the same time the French Connection heroin route was getting busted for good by the feds. So there's a pretty huge gap in the market for South American smack. And I'm going to quote your book here again. Quote, the smugglers in Colombia needed to move coke and in Mexican traffickers, they found willing partners with well-established smuggling routes.

This pattern became known as the Mexican trampoline, as bricks of coke flew in from Colombia, landed in Mexico, and, with a great and satisfying boing, continued on to the United States. For producers, traffickers, and street dealers, coke just made sense.

And yeah, I mean, that just shows this massive wave that's about to happen in the Mexican drug trade. And I think that's probably a good way to end part one of our chat. Um,

um if you want to listen to more we're going to continue chatting now uh and we're going to stick the rest of this conversation up on our patreon so yeah let's listen to noah when he tells you how great that is because uh that'll be that'll be really useful but uh

Yeah, thanks for chatting to us for now, Noah. It's going to be weird because I'm just about to start talking to you again and just put it on Patreon. I'll see you very soon, Charles. Yeah, it's going to be a ride. And yeah, for everyone else, like I said, give us good ratings. We've got the Patreon, we've got the merch, we've got everything going on. You know how to find us online. And yeah, see you later. Bye.