The most famous is certainly Joaquin Archibald Guzman Loera, known by the nickname of El Chapo (the bass). His daring escapes from Mexican maximum security institutions, the flashy shirts, the photos with Sean Penn have made people talk a lot and for a long time. Without forgetting the Forbes ranking which for some years saw the head of the Sinaloa cartel in the list of the richest men in the world with an estimated assets of between 8 and 14 billion dollars, naturally deriving from drug trafficking (mainly , cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines) in every corner of the planet. Now Guzman is in an American super prison in Colorado where he is serving a life sentence. It will have to compensate the US with 12.6 billion dollars.

Before him, the Mexican crime scene was all about Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as El Senor del los cielos (the lord of the skies), named after the air fleet deployed to transport cocaine from Colombia to the United States ( dozens of twin-engines, jets and some Boeing 727s purchased in the bankruptcy auction of an African company). A great corrupter, he held high officials of the federal police and the army, as well as prominent politicians. The boss of the Juarez cartel was in danger of falling out of favor after the killing of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo at the Guadalajara airport in 1993 during a shooting. death of the prelate (in reality, Posadas Ocampo's car was mistaken for Guzman's and riddled with gunshots by the assassins of the Beltran Leyva brothers' cartel). Carrillo Fuentes in one fell swoop got rid of his main competitor (El Chapo), who was arrested shortly after, and forged an alliance with the Beltran Leyvas. The boss died in 1997 following the complications of yet another cosmetic surgery that had to change his appearance.

Even before the Senor de los cielos and El Chapo, the master of drug trafficking in Mexico was unquestionably Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the man who created the "Federacion", the organization that included all the local gangs, so as to control the border cities to allow the rivers of cocaine and marijuana to flow smoothly without clashes over the territory. El Padrino, we are in the eighties, earned good offices in the United States because it provided logistics, and also financial resources, to the Nicaraguan contras. In practice, the trucks loaded with drugs that entered the United States with impunity returned to Mexico with weapons and money to be handed over to the rebels who were trying to oust the Sandinistas in power. The agreement with the CIA and the American government allowed Felix Gallardo to make his business prosper. It was he who imposed on the Colombians the agreement that will change the hierarchies in the world of international drug trafficking since then: half of the product arriving in Mexico would have been from the Mexicans who would then have thought of retail. A revolution. The next step, that is to create a drug dealer network in American cities, was almost a game thanks to the presence of Mexicans practically everywhere, especially in California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. It seemed that the "godfather" empire knew no obstacles. The leaders of the “Federacion”, Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Pablo Acosta Villareal, just to name a few, literally sailed in gold. Villas for a thousand and one nights, sports car collections, an exaggerated ostentation of luxury. The police closed both eyes in exchange for bribes, the governors and the army did the same, in short, everything went smoothly. Until a stubborn agent of the Goddess, Guadalajara office, a certain Enrique "Kiki" Camarena Salazar, who neither accepted money nor was willing to turn a blind eye, discovered the existence of the "Buffalo Ranch" in the state of Jalisco, a maxi marijuana plantation of over 1,000 hectares that yielded about $ 8 billion a year. The Mexican army destroyed the crop causing enormous damage to the traffickers. Who retaliated by kidnapping Kiki Camarena and torturing him for long hours before leaving the body near a road, where it was found almost a month later.

The reaction of the United States was not long in coming. With targeted operations in Mexican territory agents of the Goddess and the FBI arrested all those responsible. Including Ruben Zuno Arce, grandson of a powerful Mexico City politician, owner of the villa where the hostage was hidden and killed, and the doctor who injected amphetamines in Camarena to keep him awake and prolong his agony. This happened in 1985. Felix Gallardo was free for another four years then he too had to surrender. Sentenced to 40 years, he is still being held at the Altiplano, a Mexican maximum security prison.

Three bosses, or jefe as they call them in those parts, with a single common denominator: Sinaloa. From there, the modernization of drug trafficking began and it is still here, in this state on the Pacific side, that it continues. The Sinaloensi have conquered Mexico, resisted the various attacks of the many groups or cartels that wanted to replace them, and they are always the ones who dictate the law. The “jefe de jefes” today is Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, 73 years old and never a day in prison behind him. He too, needless to say, Sinaloense, has never liked to appear, on the contrary, he preferred to keep a low profile as opposed to El Chapo. American and Mexican observers believe that he was always the leader, the real point of reference of the Sinaloa Cartel and that Guzman was its second. Surely on his head hangs a $ 15 million bounty, just tripled by the US government. Getting someone to collect it is rather difficult. There are very few photos of El Mayo, which moreover date back to a few decades ago, and, according to some informants, he would also have undergone facial plastic surgery. Just to complicate the searches that, in truth, have never been easy.

© Riproduzione riservata