The early morning hours in Los Mochis still smell of gunpowder and dampness in the collective memory of Sinaloa. It was January 8, 2016, when the net closed in on Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera in his own land. The news traveled across Mexico and the world with the speed of lightning: the man who for decades had defied the state, escaped from prisons considered impregnable, and whose name had become a global symbol of organized crime, had fallen again.
This time, in an operation called “Black Swan,” which combined patience, intelligence, and a palpable tension in every corner of that northwestern city, located in the state of Sinaloa and the seat of the municipality of Ahome, carried out by the Special Forces of the Mexican Navy, culminating in the third capture of Joaquín Guzmán.
There were gunshots, chases, streets blocked off by fear, and deaths. There was also the echo of a pursuit that ended deep within the city, in the damp subsoil of the sewers where El Chapo attempted one last escape. He didn’t make it. They brought him to the surface in handcuffs, surrounded by police uniforms, while the world once again wondered how he had gotten so far and how much of his story was myth and how much was reality.
Several of his henchmen fell in the attack. He miraculously survived. This time, the tunnels he designed to escape from prison and infiltrate the United States like a mole weren’t enough, nor did they yield the expected results. Like every drug lord, he had built his tunnel from his own home in anticipation of an unexpected raid, but in this case, it led to his extradition to the United States in January 2017.
