DRUGS 25
1-3dw Personal life and family involvement into criminal activities
Guzmán’s family is heavily involved in drug trafficking, with several members killed by Sinaloa’s
archrival cartels Los Zetas and the Beltrán Leyva Organization, including his brother and one of
his sons.
In 1977, Guzmán married Alejandrina María Salazar Hernández in a small ceremony in the town of
Jesús María, Sinaloa. They had at least three children: César, Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo.
He set them up in a ranch home in Jesús María. When he was 30 years old, El Chapo had fallen in
love with a bank clerk Estela Peńa of Nayarit whom he kidnapped and had sexual relations with.
They eventually married each other. In the mid-1980s, Guzmán remarried, this time to Griselda
López Pérez, with whom he had four more children: Édgar, Joaquín, Ovidio and Griselda Guadalupe.
Guzmán’s sons would follow him into the drug business. López Pérez was arrested in 2010 in Culiacán.
In November 2007, Guzmán married 18-year-old beauty queen Emma Coronel Aispuro the daughter
of one of his top deputies, Inés Coronel Barreras, in Canelas, Durango. In August 2011, she gave
birth to twin girls, Maria Joaquina and Emali Guadalupe, in a Los Angeles (California) County Hospital.
On 1 May 2013, Guzmán’s father-in-law Inés Coronel Barreras was captured by Mexican authorities
in Agua Prieta, Sonora, with no gunfire exchanged. U.S. authorities believe that Coronel Barreras
was a “key operative” of the Sinaloa Cartel who grew and smuggled marijuana through the Arizona
border area.
On 15 February 2005, his son Iván Archivaldo, known as “El Chapito”, was arrested in Guadalajara
on money laundering charges. He was sentenced to five years in a federal prison, but released in
April 2008 after a Mexican federal judge, Jesús Guadalupe Luna, ruled that there was no proof his
cash came from drugs other than that he was a drug lord’s son. Luna and another judge were later
suspended on suspicion of unspecified irregularities in their decisions, including Luna’s decision
to release “El Chapito”.
Guzmán’s son Édgar Guzmán López died after a 2008 ambush in a shopping center parking lot in
Culiacán in Sinaloa. Afterwards, police found more than 500 AK-47 bullet casings (7.62×39mm) at
the scene. His brother Arturo, or “El Pollo”, was killed in prison in 2004
Another of Guzmán’s sons, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as “El Gordo” (“The Fat One”),
then 23 years old, was suspected of being a member of the cartel and was indicted on federal charges
of drug trafficking in 2009 with Guzmán by the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois, which oversees
Chicago. With authorities describing Guzmán Salazar as a growing force within his father’s organization
and directly responsible for Sinaloa’s drug trade between the U.S. and Mexico and managing his
billionaire father’s growing list of properties, Guzmán Salazar and his mother, Guzmán’s former wife
María Alejandrina Salazar Hernández, were both described as key operatives in the Sinaloa Cartel and
added to the U.S.’s financial sanction list under the Kingpin Act on 7 June 2012.
The Treasury Department described Salazar as Guzmán’s wife in its sanction against her, and described
Guzmán as her husband. The month before, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against
Guzmán’s sons Iván Guzmán Salazar and Ovidio Guzmán López under the Kingpin Act, which prohibits
people and corporations in the U.S. from conducting businesses with them and freezes their U.S. assets.
Guzmán’s second wife, Griselda López Pérez, was also sanctioned by the U.S. under the Kingpin Act
and also described as Guzmán’s wife.
Jesús Guzmán Salazar was reported to have been detained by Mexican Marines in an early morning raid
in the western state of Jalisco on 21 June 2012. Months later, however, the Mexican Attorney General’s
Office announced the Marines had arrested the wrong man and that the man captured was actually Félix
Beltrán León, who said he was a used-car dealer, not the drug lord’s son. U.S. and Mexican authorities
blamed each other for providing the inaccurate information that led to the arrest.
In 2012, Alejandrina Gisselle Guzmán Salazar, a 31-year-old pregnant physician and Mexican citizen from
Guadalajara, was said to have claimed she was Guzmán’s daughter as she crossed the U.S. border into
San Diego. She was arrested on fraud charges for entering the country with a false visa. Unnamed officials
said the woman was the daughter of María Alejandrina Salazar Hernández but did not appear to be a major
figure in the cartel. She had planned to meet the father of her child in Los Angeles and give birth in the
United States.
On the night of 17 June 2012, Obied Cano Zepeda, a nephew of Guzmán, was gunned down by unknown
assailants at his home in the state capital of Culiacán while hosting a Father’s Day celebration. The gunmen,
who were reportedly carrying AK-47 rifles, also killed two other guests and left one seriously injured. Obied
was a brother of Luis Alberto Cano Zepeda (alias “El Blanco”), a nephew of Guzmán who worked as a pilot
drug transporter for the Sinaloa cartel. Nonetheless, he was arrested by the Mexican military in August 2006.
InSight Crime notes that the murder of Obied may have been a retaliation attack by Los Zetas for Guzmán’s
incursions into their territory or a brutal campaign heralding Los Zetas’ presence in Sinaloa.
Sean Penn interview helped catch notorious Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo’
An interview the Hollywood actor Sean Penn had with Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman helped authorities
re-capture the Mexican drug kingpin, it has emerged.
In the talk, published in Rolling Stone on Saturday, Guzman said he had sent tunnel engineers to Germany for
training before his truly movie-like escape through a 1.5-kilometer underground tunnel.
The engineers had to learn how to dig safely next to “the low-lying water table” beneath the prison facility.
The interview also features footage of Guzman wearing a colorful shirt and a black cap against a rural scene.
Penn called it “the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room,” as quoted by Reuters.
The drug lord didn’t hesitate to tell Penn that he “supplies more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and
marijuana than anybody else in the world,” and runs “a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”
The talk was brokered by Mexican actress Kate Del Castillo, who played a drug queen in a popular local TV
soap opera.
The Mexican authorities caught wind of the interview and monitored it. Now Mexican authorities want to question
Penn as well as Castillo over the interview.
“That is correct, of course, it’s to determine responsibilities,” an unnamed official said without going into further
details, The Telegraph reported.
Penn also fell under fire in the US with a White House spokesman saying that the “so-called interview” was
“maddening” and Republican Marco Rubio regarding it as “grotesque”.
Guzman was caught in his home state of Sinaloa on Friday, six months after he escaped from a maximum-
security prison near Mexico City.
On Wednesday and Thursday, after a month of surveillance, authorities determined the drug kingpin was
inside the house they had been staking out.
Early on Friday, the marines started an operation to capture ‘El Chapo’. They were met with gunfire, with five
suspects killed and six others detained. One marine was wounded in the operation, AP reported.
Guzman fled via storm drains and used a manhole to get to the street, but was later caught in a vehicle on the
highway and arrested.
Mexican authorities are now looking to extradite the notorious drug lord – who escaped twice from the same
Mexican jail – to the US. Guzman faces drug and murder charges there.
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