The Daily Beast Podcast - El Chapo’s Arrest Made the Drug War Worse w/ Noah Hurowiz

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

In this episode of The New Abnormal, Noah Hurowitz, author of El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord, tells Molly Jong-Fast how Chapo was found naked, the reason he and his wife had matching jackets during his trial, and why he believes the Kingpin isn’t as evil as people assume. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to The New Abnormal. I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and this week Molly and I are taking a little bit of a break. So we have some pre-taped interviews on some really interesting subjects that we're going to be rolling out throughout the week. First up is Noah Hurwitz, who covered the El Chapo trial for Rolling Stone, and has now written a new book called El Chapo, the untold story of the world's most infamous drug lord. And we're going to talk to him all about that. Welcome to the new abnormal, Noah. Thank you so much for having me. We're super excited to have you. Talk to us about this book, because it's very exciting to encounter a book that is not about Donald Trump or American politics,

but has also really important American political, you know, implications. Can you talk to us about this? Yeah. So this book is the product of two and a half years of work. I started covering the sort of El Chapo saga in November of 2018. Prior to that, I had done some, you know, coverage. of domestic drug policy in the United States, but I got a gig covering the trial of El Chapo for Rolling Stone. And so I was in the courthouse every day for basically three months straight.

Out of that grew this. And so I spent the next year, 2019, in Mexico, sort of bouncing between Mexico City and Sinaloa and northern Mexico along the border. You know, it's really exciting to finally be putting it out. The book is, it's about El Chapo, obviously. It's so much more than that. You know, from the very beginning, I had very little interest, honestly, in sort of a straight, just like biography of a, like, famous criminal, you know? For one thing, there's a lot of media out there already about El Chapo.

And for another thing, I just, I don't think that an overly narrow focus on one person is a great way to understand an issue. But I do think that the story of El Chapo offers. us a lot of ways to understand the sort of trajectory of the drug war. You know, the war on drugs essentially made Al Chapo who he was. You know, he grew as powerful and as wealthy and as well-known as he did because it had a lot to do with time and place. He was coming of age in Sinaloa when the sort of like hippie marijuana boom was basically causing the drug trade in Sinaloa to expand dramatically. And he, you know, the sort of reaction to that was a lot of sort of militarized

anti-drug operations by the Mexican government under pressure from the Nixon administration. And that really shook things up, sort of, you know, wiped out some of the old guard, allowed newer guys to start getting big. And so again and again, you know, we see that again in the 80s with the advent of cocaine, Mexican traffickers started to move Colombian cocaine, and this caused their profits to just grow exponentially, and that gave them more power and more sort of, you know, more buying power in terms of corruption in Mexico. They were able to burrow their way more sort of into the fabric of the Mexican state.

And so just, you know, again and again, you know, and then in the 2000s, with sort of the rise of the open, opioid epidemic in the United States, the demand for heroin and then for fentanyl grew dramatically. And again, El Chapo was able to sort of exploit that and be, you know, profit from that. And so this book follows the life of El Chapo, but each sort of episode of his life is, to me, instructive about a certain era of the war on drugs. And so what I really want readers to come away with is, you know, yes, this really engaging, dramatic story of a really fascinating, brutal man, but also the much larger sort of structural forces, historical forces that made him who he was. I know that that's very important and serious stuff.

Can we talk about the mistress and the wife? Sure, yeah. Because that is a story that has absolutely captured my imagination. And you must have seen that play out in the course. courtroom, right? Yeah. So for those who were not following the sort of day and day out of the trial of El Chapo, towards the end of the trial, there was this witness who testified against El Chapo. Her name was Lucero Sanchez-Lopez. And she was, among other things, a former state deputy in the state of Sinaloa for the former ruling party, the Party of Institutional Revolution, which has long had a lot of

drug ties. So she was sort of like a congressman there? Yes, so like a state senator. Okay. And so she was also a mistress of El Chapo. But of course. Yes. She became a state deputy after her involvement with El Chapo, which, you know, tells you a little bit about how politics work in Sinaloa. Yeah. Yeah. But so she, you know, gave this really wild testimony. She was, you know, in 2014, February of 2014, there was this, um, this joint operation between the DEA and the Mexican Marines in Kulia Khan, the capital of Sinaloa, looking for El Chapo. They ended up catching him two days later, but there was this one really dramatic raid

where they were essentially banging on the door of his safe house, and he was escaping through a tunnel in the bathroom. All of his safe houses had sort of these hydraulic bathtub shells that could rise up and reveal a tunnel. And so Lucero, it turned out, was with him. for that and gave this really wild story about, you know, while the Marines are banging on the door having to, like, run through this tunnel and escape with El Chapo, who was naked, by the way. Important detail. Yes.

She was kind of shaking in her boots on the stand. You know, she was really nervous. She wouldn't look at El Chapo. They asked her, like, you know, what was the status of her relationship with him? And she's like, to this day, I don't really know. You know, she said, I think I. You know, it can be hard to disentangle yourself from a drug lawyer. So she, her first day of testimony was on a Thursday.

The trial was Monday through Thursday, and then we had Friday off, thankfully. And the next Monday, to back up, El Chapo's wife, Emma Coronel, who is this young, she's my age, she's like 31. The mistress and the wife look not all that dissimilar. They look very similar, just to paint you a picture. Emma Coronel is often referred to as Kardashian. She has had a lot of plastic surgery. She has this sort of, there's this term in Sinaloa and in Mexico, Buchona, which refers to these sort of like narco wives who have had like a ton of plastic surgery and have these

really sort of like. I read an amazing article about this. Yeah, they sort of all, they all look like Kardashians. Yeah. Emma Coronel, who by the way has now recently just pleaded guilty to helping El Chapo with some of his endeavors, including his 2015 escape. At any rate, Emma Codonell was in the courtroom every day, you know, sort of supporting her husband.

And so she was there for all of this testimony of Bailucerro talking about her, you know, extra marital relationship with El Chapo. And on the next day of testimony, which was a Monday, Emma comes into the courtroom and she's wearing this sort of like splendid, like, like velvet smoking jacket almost. And we didn't think too much of it because she was always wearing kind of wild outfits. But then when, you know, when the court is called to order, El Chapo comes in and he's wearing a matching jacket. And, you know, the sort of common read of that was that Emma and El Chapo were sending a message of, you know, we're in this together despite what this, you know, what this lady is saying up there on the stand. Wow.

I mean, just a crazy story. So now El Chapo is in jail now. El Chapo is in prison now. He was found guilty, unsurprisingly, in February of 2019. In July of 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison. And he is currently in a very small solitary cell at this really nasty prison called ADX Florence. It's like a super, supermax prison on sort of the high desert of. Colorado that is where they put a lot of, you know, terrorists and big-time drug traffickers.

You know, I think, like, Jaharsanayev is there, El Chapo is there. Some of El Chapo's enemies are there. It's not a nice place. I spoke with, you know, someone sort of, you know, familiar with his case recently who told me that he's, he's not doing too well. You know, he's miserable. And whatever one thinks about what El Chapo deserves, and I think he deserves a lot, it's hard not to It's hard not to feel bad for him

Yeah, that fate I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone And actually like during the trial So right after the trial There was this really interesting episode Where a jury member spoke to Keegan Hamilton who's a reporter at Vice Yeah

Who had been sort of live tweeting the trial Or not live tweeting Because in federal court you can't have your phone in the room But he would go down to the break room During every break and sort of tweet where it happened So people were really following his Twitter during this It turned out the jurors were following it too. That seems...

Yeah, not great. Yeah. I mean, it's like, are you allowed to do that? I mean, it feels like mistrial. You are not allowed to do that. Yeah. You are in my... Like, the judge at every juncture would say, you know, do not follow the news.

Do not talk to anybody about this. So, yeah, they would not... Do not follow the Twitter of a journalist covering this. Right. Yeah. Right. So anyways, but one of the things that the juror said was that it really weighed on them that they knew that they were, you know, sending Al Chapo to this really hideous fate.

And that sort of makes me, you know, when I talk about, you know, where Alchapo is now and what he deserves, I've thought a lot about who he is as a person and the sort of, you know, the moral weight of his, of his actions. And my conclusion by the end of it is that I think that he's a bad guy, but I think that he's a bad guy, in the way that, like, many legal businessmen are bad guys. A lot of times we talk about these sort of contradictions of he was responsible for acts of brutal violence. He was, you know, pumping deadly drugs into the United States, thanks to, you know, high demand in the United States. You know, there was all, there's so much death and misery and violence associated with the drug trade that El Chapo is often blamed for. In some cases, I think rightfully, and in some cases, I think, you know,

individuals are often blamed for larger structural problems. But people talk about this contradiction of, you know, we know that he has a certain, you know, he's a family man in his own way. You know, he's very fond of his children. He seems to be very fond of his current wife. One would hope. I don't know if he was the best partner. No, I don't know that he was the best husband, but I just, one of the questions I have when it comes to things like this is, has someone come in and filled the void since. El Chapo has been in jail.

That's a good question. You know, it's great if it stops the drug trafficking, but again, if it just gives over the cartel to someone else, then what, you know... Nothing's changed. The week of the jury verdict, in February of 2019, you know, there was news that the DEA had made,

you know, the biggest yet seizure of fentanyl in Arizona, you know? Clearly, 93,000 people have done. of overdoses in the United States last year. Mexico has an ever-increasing number of murders each year. Last year was, I think, around 36,000. Drugs are moving across the border with the same clip. And so, you know, in Sinaloa, there was a bit of a, you know,

there was a power struggle directly after his extradition between his sons, who was sort of collectively referred to as Los Chapitos or the Little Chapos, and this lieutenant of El Chapo, Damaso Lopez. And so there was a brief power struggle. Los Chapitos won. Damaso was arrested. His son fled and turned himself in. There was some violence there.

But overall, in Sinaloa, there is sort of a fairly, like, shaky piece between the sort of the various factions of what we sort of, I would say, erroneously referred to as the Sinaloa cartel. Right. When we talk about cartels, it's really just sort of a group of smugglers and traffickers who sometimes work together and sometimes work against one another and sort of, you know, work together to collude with certain parts of the state, you know, for protection and the ability to operate. So in Sinaloa, people do sort of talk about him nostalgically. I think that he was seen as this sort of old school, more respectful guy than some of the younger. the younger people involved in the drug trade today. But I think that's also like slightly like wishful thinking. But overall, I mean, no, it hasn't made any dent in the amount of drugs coming over the border. It hasn't made any dent in really in any meaningful way that's good.

The arrest of El Chapo was an extension of what we refer to as the kingpin strategy, which was this effort by both the DEA and the Mexican security forces under President Felipe Bay Calderón and his successor, Enrique Pinedanietto, to combat the drug trade by sort of picking off the heads of smuggling networks or cartels. And they were fairly successful at, you know, arresting the big guys. Almost all of the sort of big-name traffickers that President Calderon set out to capture when he launched his war on drugs in late 2006, early to the... 2007, almost all of the big-name traffickers that he wanted to get are now dead or in prison, and that now includes El Chapo.

But the real effect of that was not to, like, in any way, diminish the drug trade. It just made it exponentially more violent. Yeah. There's a power vacuum and sort of factions and groups that were formally somewhat stable or had sort of existing pacts or existing, like, on a number. negotiations with one another, suddenly begin competing, and they break up and they sort of atomize. Right. And it gets more violent. Exactly. And it gets more violent. We're seeing that right now in the state of Sonora. We're seeing that a lot in the state of Guerrero, where there's really been this hyper sort of like splintering of trafficking organizations. And the only effect that the arrest

of people like El Chapo has is on the people of Mexico. I mean, it's on El Chapo. Sure, yes. But It comes down most of all and worst of all on the people of Mexico. Noah, thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome. Hey, thank you so much for having me. You were great. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the New Abnormal from the Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond

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