El Chapo Guzmán and Pablo Escobar: this is how the two biggest drug traffickers in history were

Joaquin ‘Chapo’ Guzman He has been one of the most important drug traffickers in the American continent, but not the only one, but he shares with PEscobar spoke the title of drug lord most powerful and dangerous since the late 70s, is stated in a post on the website of Business Insider.

Pablo Escobar, son of a farmer from rural Colombia, and Joaquín ‘Chapo’ Guzmán, originally from the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, distributed large amounts of cocaine and other drugs around the world before they ended their operations.

The reign of Escobar ended up in 1993 on a dirty roof in Medellín and Guzmán in 2017, when he was extradited to the United States. after being arrested in Mexico. Guzmán will have to spend the rest of his life in one of the harshest prisons in the United States.

The differences between ‘Chapo’ Guzmán and Pablo Escobar, the largest drug traffickers in the world

They both accumulated huge amounts of money and they subjected many in the world to dreadful horrors.

Escobar’s Medellín cartel and Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, to which each belonged, they trafficked in different products, they faced different competitors and worked in different markets.

Its power and scope was different, as shown in an infographic from Business Insider:

Pablo Escobar

He started out in the criminal world with minor offenses, but soon made the leap to smuggling and eventually began transporting shipments of marijuana.

Later, in the late 1970s, he and his associates began trafficking cocaine outside of Colombia, which remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine. In the early 1980s, his Medellín cartel, which featured a Hitler-obsessed megalomaniac and an American pilot, shipped millions of dollars worth of cocaine to the United States

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It is difficult to measure Escobar’s income, but it was estimated at about $ 420 million a week in the mid-1980s, which means about 22,000 million dollars a year. At the end of that decade, it sold 80% of the world’s cocaine and introduced 15 tons a day into the United States.

Escobar became popular and around him an image of a simple and generous man was created, due to various of his actions. He spent a lot of money on himself and his family, and he also financed local causes, building houses and soccer fields and giving money to the poorest.

“Pablo earned so much every year that we recorded 10% as losses because rats ate it when stored, it suffered water damage or was lost ”, A brother of Escobar assured about the saved tickets in a book he published in 2009.

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The Colombian government at that time put its attention on him and tried to end his empire. These clashes between the government and drug traffickers unleashed a year-long wave of violence in Colombia.

With the assistance of the United States, Colombia placed a special group to finish off Escobar, who suffered significant casualties in his first encounter with the cartel. In mid-1991, the government plan forced Escobar to negotiate an agreement that allowed him lock himself up in La Catedral, a jail designed by himself in the mountains near Medellín.

In mid-1992, evidence emerged that Escobar carried out drug trafficking activities from prison, so the authorities tried to stop him, however, he fled from prison.

From that moment, Escobar took his family from hide to hide; they did not stay in one place for more than two days. One of the stories that have emerged is that Escobar burned 2 million dollars in wads of bills to create fire and warm his family, because the cold of the place was excessive.

He then decided to leave his family in a specific place and flee alone. He did it on December 2, 1993, when the Colombian security forces, who were supposedly working with Los Pepes, a paramilitary group that was also tracking Escobar, gathered at the house in Medellín where he was staying.

When he saw that they were entering, Escobar tried to flee through the roof. Like many details in his life, it is unclear who fired the gun that killed the most powerful and dangerous drug lord in the world.

Escobar’s death caused the dissolution of his cartel, But his criminal empire has had a lasting impact on Colombia. Its main rival, the Cali cartel, took control in the years that followed. But the Cali cartel fell in the mid-1990s, leading to a kind of evolution in this country’s crime scene.

Joaquin ‘Chapo’ Guzman

Guzmán, as head of the Sinaloa cartel, oversaw the cultivation of marijuana and poppy throughout Mexico and turned to South American suppliers to meet demand in the United States, Europe and Asia. At its peak, the cartel had a presence in 24 of the 32 states of Mexico and in up to 50 countries, including an extensive network in the United States.

In a certain moment, it was published that the cartel controlled 35% of the cocaine produced in Colombia and, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, it supplied 80% of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine that reaches the Chicago region each year.

The Sinaloa cartel is also believed to have an immense international presence. The activity of the cartel has been detected in Australia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. The cartel or people linked to it have been located in West and North Africa.

In 1993, after reaching the highest positions of the Sinaloa cartel, Guzmán fled to Guatemala after a shootout with rivals in Guadalajara, Mexico, in which a cardinal died. He was arrested in the Central American country and locked up in a Mexican prison.

In 2001, supposedly hidden in a laundry cart he managed to escape. That escape was reportedly organized through state security personnel working for Guzmán, which revealed his supposed close ties with the Government. A high-ranking security official at the prison was from Sinaloa and later became Guzman’s right-hand man in the Mexican cartel.

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For 13 years he was on the run and then was arrested in Mazatlán, Mexico, on the Sinaloa coast, in February 2014. After a 17-month period in jail, during which he continued to run the cartel, escaped again in spectacular fashion.

One report states that the cartel’s henchmen dug a tunnel under the prison but they were in the wrong area. Undetected or discouraged, they dug another tunnel, and this is how Guzmán was able to slide and ride a modified motorcycle for half a kilometer to a partially built house near the prison.

After 6 months of escape, Guzmán was recaptured in early January 2016 in Los Mochis, a city in Sinaloa, not far from where he was born. He returned to the same jail from which he had escaped 6 months earlier and Guzmán’s lawyers filed multiple appeals. He himself allegedly made plans to close a deal with the US authorities. His wife questioned Guzmán’s treatment in prison.

Concerns remained about another escape, which allegedly led authorities to transfer him to another prison closer to the US border. Then, in the last hours of President Barack Obama’s term, Guzmán was taken to jail. near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and flown to Long Island, where US authorities They took him to Manhattan and locked him up in one of their most secure jails.

Guzmán was convicted of all charges in mid-February 2019 and has just been sentenced to life in prison at ADX Florence, a maximum security prison in Colorado called “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”

Guzmán has proven to be tough and cunning, But his conviction in the US marks the end of this trafficker’s long career, and US officials are turning their attention to the $ 14 billion they say he hid.

Recently, the US government imposed sanctions against international drug trafficking networks in Brazil, Mexico and China, offered millionaire rewards for numerous individuals, including the sons of drug lord Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán. (I)