'Narcos: Mexico': The true story of Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera aka El Chapo, the most powerful drug lord
'Narcos: Mexico' delves deep into the era of the 1980s when the Mexican drug trafficking business was at its peak. The series puts the spotlight on the partnership of co-founders of the Guadalajara cartel — Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (Diego Luna), Rafael Caro Quintero (Tenoch Huerta Mejia) and Don Neto aka Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (Joaquín Cosio). As the series progresses in season one, did you notice the driver introducing himself as Chapo in episode two? Yes, that is El Chapo, who steps into the shoes of Felix and starts his own cartel after the drug lord is arrested.
In the show, Alejandro Edda essays the role of Chapo. It is speculated that the actor will become a major player in season two as he founds his own drug cartel after Felix's arrest. As the three partners were tracked down by special agents following DEA agent Kiki Camarena's death, there was no option for El Chapo but to start a new cartel altogether. Slowly, he rose to power with the help of his violent streak and opportunistic measures. What is the real story behind his rise in Mexico? Will the show portray his character as closely as it happened or will they tweak it? Well, those are some questions that are waiting to be answered.
Born in 1957, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera was fondly called El Chapo, owing to his short height. Raised in a poor family in Sinaloa, Mexico, he suffered physical abuse at the hands of his father, used to sell oranges after dropping out of home and would flee away to his maternal grandmother's house to be spared from being beaten up. While it is said his father was a cattle rancher, there are theories that he might have been an opium poppy farmer or a gomero and it is through him that Chapo learned how to grow marijuana for local dealers when he was an adolescent.
He first worked with Mexican drug trafficker Héctor Luis Palma Salazar and supervised logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in the mid-1980s. Once Félix was arrested, El Chapo took the responsibility on his shoulders and established the Sinaloa Cartel. It was a whole new ball game with him in the drug scene. Not just wealth and power, he also got much recognition as Forbes ranked him as one of the most powerful people in the world between 2009 and 2013, while the DEA compared his influence to Pablo Escobar.
First captured in 1993 in Guatemala, he was arrested for 20 years. However, he fled from the jail. The kingpin was seized twice again, out of which he escaped the second time from a maximum-security jail in Almoloya. In a shoot-out, he was finally caught and extradited to the United States in 2017. The Mexican drug lord was recently found guilty of running a criminal enterprise that smuggled tons of drugs into the US over three decades and was sentenced by a US judge on to spend the rest of his life in prison. Recently, his former partner Ismael Zambada Garcia, better known as El Mayo, has threatened to kill all the sons of notorious drug lord to take over the Sinaloa Cartel's multi-billion-dollar empire.