El Chapo
Mexican drug lord (born 1957)
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (Spanish: [xoaˈkin aɾtʃiˈβaldo ɣusˈman loˈeɾa]; born 4 April 1957), commonly known as "El Chapo" (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈt͡ʃapo]), is a Mexican former drug lord and the former top leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán is believed to be responsible for the deaths of over 34,000 people, and was considered to be the most powerful drug trafficker in the world until he was extradited to the United States and sentenced to life in prison.
Guzmán was born in Sinaloa and raised in a poor farming family. He endured much physical abuse at the hands of his father, through whom he also entered the drug trade. During his early adulthood, his father helped him grow marijuana for local dealers. By the late 1970s, Guzmán had begun working with Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, one of the nation's rising drug lords. He helped Salazar map routes to move drugs through Sinaloa and into the United States. He supervised logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, one of the nation's leading kingpins, in the mid-1980s, but founded his own cartel in 1988 after Félix's arrest.
Guzmán oversaw operations whereby cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin were mass-produced, smuggled into, and distributed throughout the United States and Europe, the world's largest users. He pioneered the use of distribution cells and long-range tunnels near borders, which enabled him to export more drugs to the United States than any other trafficker in history.
The public source identifies “El Chapo” as mexican drug lord (born 1957). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chapo, Mexican and drug.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q456321. VIAF identifies the subject as 141139693. The Library of Congress control number is no2010126693. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957 and 1988.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “El Chapo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.