Joaquín Archivaldo Guzman Loera is known as El Chapo. He is a Mexican drug lord and former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, an international crime syndicate. He is considered to have been the most powerful drug trafficker in the world.
Joaquín is famous for a drug lord. He entered the drug trade through his father, helping him grow marijuana for local dealers during his early adulthood. He began working with Hector Luis Palma Salazar by the late 1970s, one of the nation's rising drug lords. He helped Salazar map routes to move drugs through Sinaloa and into the United States. Later, he supervised logistics for Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, one of the nation's leading kingpins in the mid-1980s, but he founded his own cartel in 1988 after Gallardo's arrest. He oversaw operations whereby mass cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin were produced, smuggled into, and distributed throughout the United States and Europe, the world's largest users. His leadership of the cartel also brought immense wealth and power, Forbes ranked him as one of the most powerful people in the world between 2009 and 2013, while the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimated that he matched the influence and wealth of Pablo Escobar. He was first captured in 1993 in Guatemala and was extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder and drug trafficking. He bribed prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum-security prison in 2001. His status as a fugitive resulted in an $8.8 million combined reward from Mexico and the U.S. for information leading to his capture and he was arrested in Mexico in 2014. He escaped prior to formal sentencing in 2015, through a tunnel under his jail cell. Mexican authorities recaptured him following a shoot-out in 2016 and extradited him to the U.S. a year later, where he was found guilty of a number of criminal charges related to his leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel. He was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison and within days, had started to serve his term at the Federal Correctional Complex, Florence, Colorado.
Joaquín was born on April 4, 1957, in La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico. He holds Mexican nationality and belongs to white ethnicity. His birth sign is Aries. He was born to a father named Emilio Guzman Bustillos and a mother named Maria Consuelo Loera Perez. His father was officially a cattle rancher, as were most in the area where he grew up. He has two younger sisters named Armida and Bernarda and four younger brothers named Miguel Angel, Aureliano, Arturo, and Emilio. He had three unnamed older brothers who reportedly died of natural causes when he was very young. As a child, he sold oranges and dropped out of school in the third grade to work with his father.
Joaquín height of 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) tall and body weight of 91 kg. He has black hair and brown eyes. There is no information about his body measurements.
Joaquín is a married man. He married Alejandrina Maria Salazar Hernandez in a small ceremony in the town of Jesus Maria, Sinaloa. The couple had at least three children, Cesar, Ivan Archivaldo, and Jesus Alfredo. At the age of 30, he fell in love with a bank clerk, Estela Pena of Nayarit, whom he kidnapped and had sexual relations and later, they married. In the 1980s, he married once more, to Griselda Lopez Perez, was arrested in 2010, in Culiacan. In November 2007, he married an 18-year-old American beauty queen, Emma Coronel Aispuro, the daughter of one of his top deputies, Ines Coronel Barreras, in Canelas, Durango. She gave birth to twin girls, Maria Joaquina and Emali Guadalupe, in Los Angeles County Hospital, in California.
1. His father kicked him out of the house, and Joaquín went to live with his grandfather.
2. He gained the nickname "El Chapo" Mexican slang for Shorty for his height and stocky physique.
3. His uncle, Pedro Aviles Perez is one of the pioneers of Mexican drug trafficking.