Tim Padgett: Will Arrest Of World's Most Wanted Drug Lord Bring Change? Tim Padgett - WLRN
go to original February 23, 2014

Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, Mexico Most-Wanted Drug Lord, Captured in Mazatlan (Sky News/Roberto Tachinardi)

Mexico's nightmarish, decade-long drug war seemed to start in 2001, when Joaquín Guzmán escaped from a Guadalajara prison inside a laundry truck.

So could this weekend's long overdue capture of Guzmán - the world's most wanted drug lord - mark the ebb of that violence?

Don't count on it - at least not until Mexico addresses more seriously the deep police and judicial flaws that helped make it so hard to collar Guzmán in the first place.

In his 2011 book, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, journalist Ioan Grillo examined the factors that kept Guzmán - a.k.a. El Chapo, or “Shorty” - a free man for so long.

First there was the terrain: Guzmán’s native surroundings were the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico’s northwestern Sinaloa state - the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking - the sort of difficult turf where a kingpin can dart and hide like a billy goat to elude cops and soldiers.

Second, the locals: Guzmán, as head of Mexico’s - and arguably the world’s - most powerful drug mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel, could count on a vast network of people, from village campesinos to yuppies in cities like Culiacán, to keep his whereabouts secret and tip him off whenever heat approached. He could eat at ease at any popular restaurant simply by picking up the check for every patron in the joint.

But the most important reason was the heat itself: Mexico’s notoriously corrupt police, who often moonlight for drug cartels, were even more valuable to Guzmán. They regularly notified his lieutenants or obstructed law enforcement when they caught wind of upcoming operations to encircle him.

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