The diminutive Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known universally by his nickname of 'El Chapo' ('Shorty' in Spanish), is the highest-profile narco-terrorist since the demise of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s. Loera began work at the age of nine as a gomero - a farmhand harvesting opium - and as he grew up he shot and murdered his way to the top. In 2009, he made the Forbes annual billionaires list and, before his capture by Mexican marines in 2016, the Sinaloa cartel which he commanded was turning over more than $11 billion in annual sales to North America, supplying more than 10 per cent of all illegal narcotics used on that continent. This made him Public Enemy Number One in the USA.


El Chapo was among the most powerful individuals in the world. In Sinaloa, he was a folk hero and the subject of popular songs known as 'narcocorridos'. Meanwhile, America's Drug Enforcement Agency (the DEA) had sworn to hunt him down. Featuring the remarkable tale of El Chapo's arrest in Guatemala in 1993, how he continued to run his cartel from his cell in a Mexican jail and his subsequent escape in a prison laundry cart, along with his recapture in 2014, and ultimate extradition to the US for the Trial of the Century, this book gives you the inside track on the dog-eat-dog world of international drugs trafficking.