How the world’s most notorious drug lord was captured.
One afternoon last December, an
assassin on board a K.L.M. flight from Mexico City arrived at
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. This was not a business trip: the killer,
who was thirty-three, liked to travel, and often documented his journeys
around Europe on Instagram. He wore designer clothes and a heavy silver
ring in the shape of a grimacing skull. His passport was an expensive
fake, and he had used it successfully many times. But, moments after he
presented his documents to Dutch customs, he was arrested. The U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration had filed a Red Notice with Interpol—an
international arrest warrant—and knew that he was coming. Only after the
Dutch authorities had the man in custody did they learn his real
identity: José Rodrigo Arechiga, the chief enforcer for the biggest
drug-trafficking organization in history, Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
To
work in the Mexican drug trade is to have a nickname, and Arechiga went
by the whimsically malevolent handle El Chino Ántrax. He supervised the
armed wing of the Sinaloa—a cadre of executioners known as Los
Ántrax—and coördinated drug shipments for the cartel’s leader, Joaquín
Guzmán Loera, who was known as El Chapo, or Shorty. Arechiga was a narcotraficante
of the digital age, bantering with other criminals on Twitter and
posting snapshots of himself guzzling Cristal, posing with exotic pets,
and fondling a gold-plated AK-47. Guzmán, who is fifty-seven, typified
an older generation. Obsessively secretive, he ran his
multibillion-dollar drug enterprise from hiding in Sinaloa, the remote
western state where he was born, and from which the cartel takes its
name. The Sinaloa cartel exports industrial volumes of cocaine,
marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamine to America; it is thought to be
responsible for as much as half the illegal narcotics that cross the
border every year. Guzmán has been characterized by the U.S. Treasury
Department as “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” and after the
killing of Osama bin Laden, three years ago, he became perhaps the most
wanted fugitive on the planet. Mexican politicians promised to bring
him to justice, and the U.S. offered a five-million-dollar reward for
information leading to his capture. But part of Guzmán’s fame stemmed
from the perception that he was uncatchable, and he continued to thrive,
consolidating control of key smuggling routes and extending his
operation into new markets in Europe, Asia, and Australia. According to
one study, the Sinaloa cartel is now active in more than fifty
countries.On several occasions, authorities had come close to catching Guzmán. In 2004, the Mexican Army descended on a dusty ranch in Sinaloa where he was holed up, but he had advance warning and fled along a rutted mountain track in an all-terrain vehicle. Three years later, Guzmán married a teen-age beauty queen named Emma Coronel and invited half the criminal underworld of Mexico to attend the ceremony. The Army mobilized several Bell helicopters to crash the party; the troops arrived, guns drawn, to discover that Guzmán had just departed. American authorities have no jurisdiction to make arrests in Mexico, so whenever D.E.A. agents developed fresh intelligence about Guzmán’s whereabouts all they could do was feed the leads to their Mexican counterparts and hope for the best. In Washington, concerns about the competence of Mexican forces mingled with deeper fears about corruption. A former senior Mexican intelligence official told me that the cartel has “penetrated most Mexican agencies.” Was Guzmán being tipped off by an insider? After a series of near-misses in which Chapo foiled his pursuers by sneaking out of buildings through back doors, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City took to joking, bitterly, that there is no word in Spanish for “surround.”
Yet Guzmán himself remained maddeningly obscure. Only a few photographs of him circulated publicly. A famous series taken after an arrest in 1993 shows a stocky, dark-eyed, square-jawed young man standing awkwardly in a prison yard; he gazes at the camera with a shyness that seems at odds with his fearsome reputation. Chapo escaped eight years later, and had been on the run ever since. Because he might have had plastic surgery to alter his appearance, the authorities could no longer be sure what he looked like. One narcocorrido captured the predicament: “Only he knows who he is / So go looking for someone / Who looks just like him / Because the real Chapo / You’ll never see again.”
The authorities tried to track Guzmán by monitoring telephone lines. Narcotics smuggling necessitates regular phone communication between farmers and packers, truckers and pilots, accountants and enforcers, street dealers and suppliers. But traffickers at the top of the hierarchy maintain operational security by rarely making calls or sending e-mails. Guzmán was known to use sophisticated encryption and to limit the number of people he communicated with, keeping his organization compartmentalized and allowing subordinates a degree of autonomy, as long as the shipments kept running on time. “I never spoke to him directly,” one former Sinaloa lieutenant told me. “But I knew what he wanted us to do.”