Free ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano Page A

very scale was alarming. The American authorities looked the Sinaloa cartel in the eye, and what they saw was a multinational corporation withconnections and branches all over the world, on whose boards sat supermanagers handling relations in every corner of the planet. Narco executives on Sinaloa salaries acted as contact points in numerous South American countries. And El Chapo was well along in conquering western Africa and making inroads in Spain.
    For El Chapo, total domination over the 370 or so miles of border between Mexico and Arizona was the flywheel of his personal economy. He followed the market: When the demand for
hielo
—crystal meth—surged, he was there. A terrible drug—it costs less than coke and eats you up sooner. When you overdo it you start feeling the parasite effect: worms crawling under your skin. So you scratch yourself raw trying to cut open your flesh to get rid of them. It’s the side effect of a drug that otherwise has the same effect as coke, only bigger and worse. Request for it was on the rise, but there was no boss, no one who knew how to transform an opportunity into a river of money. El Chapo saw the opportunity; the Sinaloa cartel was ready. And he had the right man to manage the new business: Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, who became the King of Crystal. All you need to produce methamphetamine are clandestine labs and the right chemical substances. If you have good contacts on the Pacific coast, it’s not hard to get precursor shipments from China, Thailand, and Vietnam. And it’s very profitable: For every dollar you invest in raw materials, you’ll earn ten on the street.
    That is Sinaloa’s great gift: the speed with which it sniffs out every new business opportunity. Sinaloa colonizes. Sinaloa wants to rule. Only Sinaloa.
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    El Chapo has a clear vision of today’s world: The West is in trouble; its ideals are in conflict with the market’s iron logic, so it needs lands without laws, lands without rights. Mexico has cocaine and the United States has cocaine users. Mexico has the cheap labor the United States needs. Mexico has soldiers and the United States has weapons. The world’s drowning in unhappiness? Mexico has the solution: cocaine. ElChapo grasped all this. He became the king of the narcos, the Steve Jobs of cocaine, with the mystical authority of the pope. Which is why February 22, 2014, will go down in history, for Mexico and the entire world. On that day, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, the most wanted narco on the planet, was arrested. At 6:40 A.M. in a hotel in the center of Mazatlán, in Sinaloa state. A maxi operation by Mexican marines and in collaboration with the DEA: two helicopters and six land artillery units. But not a single shot was fired. The most dangerous fugitive in Mexico, with a price of $5 million on his head, was hiding out in Sinaloa. Maybe that’s where he’d been for the past thirteen years, hiding in the region that made him what he was, that offered him protection.
    The military operation had been launched about ten days before: Law enforcement officers had managed to identify several residences in Culiacán, El Chapo’s stronghold, where he usually stayed. The man who had been a master at digging tunnels to get drugs into the United States relied on them for his own getaways too: Several of his residences were connected by underground passageways. The military nearly caught him more than once, but he always managed to escape. Several members of the Sinaloa cartel had been arrested, though; El Chapo’s inner circle was shrinking. Earlier that week a raid of his ex-wife Griselda López’s house turned up some weapons and a tunnel that fed to the sewers. Mexico’s drug lord would clamber through the sewers to get from one hiding place to another.
    What’s most extraordinary is that El Chapo was caught by surprise in Mazatlán, a tourist town. He wasn’t hiding up in the Sierra mountains, as most people thought. And