Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán

Born 4 April 1957 in Sinaloa to a poor farming family, Guzmán endured physical abuse from his father, who brought him into the drug trade growing marijuana for local dealers. By the late 1970s he was mapping smuggling routes with rising kingpin Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, then supervising logistics for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo until founding his own cartel in 1988. He pioneered distribution cells and cross-border tunnels to push cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin into the U.S. and Europe at unprecedented scale; Forbes listed him among the world's most powerful people from 2009 to 2013, and the DEA compared his reach to Pablo Escobar's. First captured in Guatemala in 1993 and sentenced to twenty years in Mexico, he bribed guards and escaped in 2001, triggering an $8.8 million combined U.S.-Mexico bounty. Arrested again in 2014, he escaped through a tunnel dug into his cell in 2015 before recapture following a January 2016 shootout, extradition in 2017, and a life sentence handed down in 2019 at ADX Florence, Colorado.