Nothing can be understood in our time, of modern capitalism and what will be, if not fixed in the face of Mexico, currently the most important narcodemocrazia the world. Mexico is often impossible to tell. Prohibited. Killed, tortured, beheaded for having done their job: so many journalists who end up there decide to deal with drug trafficking.
Being a journalist in Mexico is a dangerous profession, perhaps the most dangerous that we can choose to do in that land. Knows that the American journalist Malcolm Beith, at the time of research in Sinaloa, one night he came to his motel to a group of armed young men, feel them enter the next room and decides to stay in the bathroom, which, perhaps naively, makes him feel safer.
If you shoot toward the bed directly from outside the door, must have thought, at least saved me sleeping in the bathtub. Beith goes to Mexico with one goal: to tell the Number One. The man who changed the destiny of that country, responsible for an enormous number of murders: El Chapo.
The narco who managed to make Mexico the center from which radiates the world market for coca. Son of Gomer, a cultivator of opium poppy, the little Chapo - nickname which means "low and stocky" - growing in a remote corner of Mexico where the drug seems the only way out of poverty. He has not yet twenty when the growing demands of post-Vietnam drug are becoming the nerve center of Sinaloa a market that reached the U.S.
from Colombia through Mexico. The Colombians, at first, Mexicans pay for the transportation of goods. Then they ask for payment as part of the cargo. So the Mexican cartels are becoming more powerful than the Colombians who remain mere producers. In those years, El Chapo learn the craft from the best of all: Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, known as El Padrino.
The efficiency, reliability, a desire for redemption are a student of El Chapo perfect, so much so that he will just replace the Godfather when it stopped. Because he has learned a lot, inflexibility and cruelty, but above all as you survive in the drug trade: never show off, never to be conspicuous.
Just so you can get really big. And it becomes El Chapo by creating a web of corruption unprecedented in politics he supports, the police and army. A crowd of assassins at his service and a small group of trusted men. His drug empire becomes the largest in Mexico and he was one of the richest men in the world, so much so that Forbes magazine has included the famous Billionaires'List and among the most powerful people in the world.
After Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates, El Chapo won the forty-first place. "I really want to meet El Chapo? Everyone wants to meet him. I could not you, and they will not succeed." Thus begins the journey of Beith in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental: in the words of Carlos, the narco that acts as a guide on the trail boss of the world's most wanted.
Joaquin Guzman Loera Archivaldo, better known as El Chapo, the head of Mexico's most powerful cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the drug trafficker, Mexican authorities and U.S. want to live or dead, and over whose head hangs a bounty of five million dollars. El Chapo said his power because he was a chief creative officer.
The Sinaloa Cartel, to transfer the Colombian cocaine in the United States, has used any means previously known and has improved others. From classic or simple air truck with double bottoms, tunnel dug to a depth of twenty meters under the border between Mexico and the United States that allowed it to evade any type of control, to the cans of jalapeño peppers stuffed with white powder sent to companies and accomplices United States.
Arrested in 1993 in Guatemala, perhaps thanks to a tip, El Chapo is locked up in maximum security prison in Puente Grande and immediately establishes his law also there. Mexican prisons have never been famous for its level of security, but Puente Grande in the nineties had become a farce.
Knowing that money can buy people, and where there's money there's certainly no threats, El Chapo not only can continue to run his organization from prison, but transforms his detention in a luxurious stay: holidays, shows, films and prostitute cheer his stay in prison. And while psychologists to believe the prison to be changed, having learned from their mistakes and want to make a change in their lives, plan escape.
He stages an escape worthy of Hollywood, tucked inside a basket of dirty laundry on the laundry room, pushed by a corrupt guard, through the corridors of the prison to the exit, unnoticed. From that day Puente Grande was ironically dubbed "Puerta Grande" and El Chapo, who had been sentenced to twenty years and nine months, has not discounted even eight.
His escape was an affront to all efforts that Mexico and the U.S. had done until then against drug trafficking. From then on January 19, 2001, Chapo not be found. While hiding even marries for the fourth time in the mountains of Durango with the granddaughter of one of its eighteen members, won a local beauty contest.
Does not give up even at the wedding feast, but when the soldiers arrive on site after a tip-off, El Chapo and his young wife are on their way to their honeymoon. If you already before his capture El Chapo aroused so much admiration and respect have earned the nickname El Señor, after his spectacular escape turns into a folk hero and media that managed to fool a government deeply despised.
Faced with a state away guiltily, that fails to meet basic needs such as health care and education, the drug traffickers to help build schools and hospitals end up being seen by many of the most patron saints. That's why young people want to be like El Chapo. They want money, power, women and weapons.
But on average survive three and a half in the world of drug trafficking, and then end up in jail or killed. Yet they prefer to live according to a characteristic of the area said: "Maybe five years from the king that the life of a bull." What happens in Mexico is difficult to tell. That is why it is really worth reading the last narco Malcolm Beith (Basic Books, 373 pages, 17 €), the incredible biography of El Chapo result of three years of investigation into the drug war in Mexico that only the last four years has caused more than thirty thousand deaths, but in Italy continues to be underestimated as a story that occupies the margins of a Central American country.
The Mexican cartels and Italian (but also Russians) are united today in business and win the U.S. and Europe, especially Spain, France and Britain. Two years ago I met the Spanish Interior Minister Gonzalo Rubalcaba and discussing the flow of cocaine to his country, came out the phrase: "We must prevent that Spain colonized by Mexican cartels." Beith reconstructs the history of El Chapo but put them inside the Mexican crime scene, through interviews with DEA agents, police officers, Mexican politicians and drug traffickers.
A world difficult to decipher - especially for a foreigner - and hard to tell, especially for Mexican journalists. As mentioned in the book, since 2000, forty-five journalists died in Mexico for having gone too far in their investigations into organized crime and its cover. Now that El Chapo is a fugitive, the Sierra de Sinaloa has become a militarized zone: the soldiers are always present.
But that has not stopped drug traffickers to continue their trade, nor has reduced violence. Indeed. The tension in the region has the highest level and often end up the soldiers open fire on innocent people, mistaking them for criminals. Some say - and who is my land this thing has often heard repeated references to the great old families of the Neapolitan Camorra - that when there was only El Chapo to rule things were better, the kids had respect for the boss, he made them toe the line.
Now the armed conflicts are daily and young drug traffickers do not respect the law even more El Chapo. After the death and the arrest of the other big bosses in Mexico, El Chapo is the latest example of the older generation of drug traffickers, those who followed a "code of organized crime" which no longer exists.
The Mafia defeats always generate the mythic aura of being better than what you say. Because the mechanism triggers the dynamics mafia everywhere. Groups to expand or maintain power must play the upside. It is easily the rise of violence is an exponential increase in ferocity and ruthlessness.
So what comes after is always worse than what was there before. Although over the years has lost many loved ones (including his son and brother), El Chapo not collapse. Protected by his people, protected perhaps by some of those who would capture him, continues to run from one place to another, leaving behind the failure of Mexican authorities.
Is said to live in the hills of Durango and there are many stories - true, sometimes only plausible - running on his behalf. One day is captured by surveillance cameras while driving an SUV in a small village in the mountains. The next day is spotted in a restaurant, eat in the comfort of frightened eyes and admired the Mexicans who recognize him.
In the spring of 2009, the Archbishop Hector Gonzalez Martinez expressed his outrage at the fact that Chapo was still at large. Thundered: "He lives in the hills of Durango. Everybody knows it except the authorities." Indeed, even the authorities knew and had in fact intensified the research in that area.
But a few days after the criticism of the archbishop, two military intelligence officers working undercover as campesinos in the Sierra of marijuana plantations were found dead on a country road in Durango. Next to the bodies of a message: "Never El Chapo". So for now, this story ends. And the prophecy that Carlos, who had led the narco Malcolm Beith in his last journey to find narcotics, so far has been fulfilled.
(© 2011 Roberto Saviano) 
Being a journalist in Mexico is a dangerous profession, perhaps the most dangerous that we can choose to do in that land. Knows that the American journalist Malcolm Beith, at the time of research in Sinaloa, one night he came to his motel to a group of armed young men, feel them enter the next room and decides to stay in the bathroom, which, perhaps naively, makes him feel safer.
If you shoot toward the bed directly from outside the door, must have thought, at least saved me sleeping in the bathtub. Beith goes to Mexico with one goal: to tell the Number One. The man who changed the destiny of that country, responsible for an enormous number of murders: El Chapo.
The narco who managed to make Mexico the center from which radiates the world market for coca. Son of Gomer, a cultivator of opium poppy, the little Chapo - nickname which means "low and stocky" - growing in a remote corner of Mexico where the drug seems the only way out of poverty. He has not yet twenty when the growing demands of post-Vietnam drug are becoming the nerve center of Sinaloa a market that reached the U.S.
from Colombia through Mexico. The Colombians, at first, Mexicans pay for the transportation of goods. Then they ask for payment as part of the cargo. So the Mexican cartels are becoming more powerful than the Colombians who remain mere producers. In those years, El Chapo learn the craft from the best of all: Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, known as El Padrino.
The efficiency, reliability, a desire for redemption are a student of El Chapo perfect, so much so that he will just replace the Godfather when it stopped. Because he has learned a lot, inflexibility and cruelty, but above all as you survive in the drug trade: never show off, never to be conspicuous.
Just so you can get really big. And it becomes El Chapo by creating a web of corruption unprecedented in politics he supports, the police and army. A crowd of assassins at his service and a small group of trusted men. His drug empire becomes the largest in Mexico and he was one of the richest men in the world, so much so that Forbes magazine has included the famous Billionaires'List and among the most powerful people in the world.
After Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates, El Chapo won the forty-first place. "I really want to meet El Chapo? Everyone wants to meet him. I could not you, and they will not succeed." Thus begins the journey of Beith in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental: in the words of Carlos, the narco that acts as a guide on the trail boss of the world's most wanted.
Joaquin Guzman Loera Archivaldo, better known as El Chapo, the head of Mexico's most powerful cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the drug trafficker, Mexican authorities and U.S. want to live or dead, and over whose head hangs a bounty of five million dollars. El Chapo said his power because he was a chief creative officer.
The Sinaloa Cartel, to transfer the Colombian cocaine in the United States, has used any means previously known and has improved others. From classic or simple air truck with double bottoms, tunnel dug to a depth of twenty meters under the border between Mexico and the United States that allowed it to evade any type of control, to the cans of jalapeño peppers stuffed with white powder sent to companies and accomplices United States.
Arrested in 1993 in Guatemala, perhaps thanks to a tip, El Chapo is locked up in maximum security prison in Puente Grande and immediately establishes his law also there. Mexican prisons have never been famous for its level of security, but Puente Grande in the nineties had become a farce.
Knowing that money can buy people, and where there's money there's certainly no threats, El Chapo not only can continue to run his organization from prison, but transforms his detention in a luxurious stay: holidays, shows, films and prostitute cheer his stay in prison. And while psychologists to believe the prison to be changed, having learned from their mistakes and want to make a change in their lives, plan escape.
He stages an escape worthy of Hollywood, tucked inside a basket of dirty laundry on the laundry room, pushed by a corrupt guard, through the corridors of the prison to the exit, unnoticed. From that day Puente Grande was ironically dubbed "Puerta Grande" and El Chapo, who had been sentenced to twenty years and nine months, has not discounted even eight.
His escape was an affront to all efforts that Mexico and the U.S. had done until then against drug trafficking. From then on January 19, 2001, Chapo not be found. While hiding even marries for the fourth time in the mountains of Durango with the granddaughter of one of its eighteen members, won a local beauty contest.
Does not give up even at the wedding feast, but when the soldiers arrive on site after a tip-off, El Chapo and his young wife are on their way to their honeymoon. If you already before his capture El Chapo aroused so much admiration and respect have earned the nickname El Señor, after his spectacular escape turns into a folk hero and media that managed to fool a government deeply despised.
Faced with a state away guiltily, that fails to meet basic needs such as health care and education, the drug traffickers to help build schools and hospitals end up being seen by many of the most patron saints. That's why young people want to be like El Chapo. They want money, power, women and weapons.
But on average survive three and a half in the world of drug trafficking, and then end up in jail or killed. Yet they prefer to live according to a characteristic of the area said: "Maybe five years from the king that the life of a bull." What happens in Mexico is difficult to tell. That is why it is really worth reading the last narco Malcolm Beith (Basic Books, 373 pages, 17 €), the incredible biography of El Chapo result of three years of investigation into the drug war in Mexico that only the last four years has caused more than thirty thousand deaths, but in Italy continues to be underestimated as a story that occupies the margins of a Central American country.
The Mexican cartels and Italian (but also Russians) are united today in business and win the U.S. and Europe, especially Spain, France and Britain. Two years ago I met the Spanish Interior Minister Gonzalo Rubalcaba and discussing the flow of cocaine to his country, came out the phrase: "We must prevent that Spain colonized by Mexican cartels." Beith reconstructs the history of El Chapo but put them inside the Mexican crime scene, through interviews with DEA agents, police officers, Mexican politicians and drug traffickers.
A world difficult to decipher - especially for a foreigner - and hard to tell, especially for Mexican journalists. As mentioned in the book, since 2000, forty-five journalists died in Mexico for having gone too far in their investigations into organized crime and its cover. Now that El Chapo is a fugitive, the Sierra de Sinaloa has become a militarized zone: the soldiers are always present.
But that has not stopped drug traffickers to continue their trade, nor has reduced violence. Indeed. The tension in the region has the highest level and often end up the soldiers open fire on innocent people, mistaking them for criminals. Some say - and who is my land this thing has often heard repeated references to the great old families of the Neapolitan Camorra - that when there was only El Chapo to rule things were better, the kids had respect for the boss, he made them toe the line.
Now the armed conflicts are daily and young drug traffickers do not respect the law even more El Chapo. After the death and the arrest of the other big bosses in Mexico, El Chapo is the latest example of the older generation of drug traffickers, those who followed a "code of organized crime" which no longer exists.
The Mafia defeats always generate the mythic aura of being better than what you say. Because the mechanism triggers the dynamics mafia everywhere. Groups to expand or maintain power must play the upside. It is easily the rise of violence is an exponential increase in ferocity and ruthlessness.
So what comes after is always worse than what was there before. Although over the years has lost many loved ones (including his son and brother), El Chapo not collapse. Protected by his people, protected perhaps by some of those who would capture him, continues to run from one place to another, leaving behind the failure of Mexican authorities.
Is said to live in the hills of Durango and there are many stories - true, sometimes only plausible - running on his behalf. One day is captured by surveillance cameras while driving an SUV in a small village in the mountains. The next day is spotted in a restaurant, eat in the comfort of frightened eyes and admired the Mexicans who recognize him.
In the spring of 2009, the Archbishop Hector Gonzalez Martinez expressed his outrage at the fact that Chapo was still at large. Thundered: "He lives in the hills of Durango. Everybody knows it except the authorities." Indeed, even the authorities knew and had in fact intensified the research in that area.
But a few days after the criticism of the archbishop, two military intelligence officers working undercover as campesinos in the Sierra of marijuana plantations were found dead on a country road in Durango. Next to the bodies of a message: "Never El Chapo". So for now, this story ends. And the prophecy that Carlos, who had led the narco Malcolm Beith in his last journey to find narcotics, so far has been fulfilled.
(© 2011 Roberto Saviano)
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