Californian, businesswoman, 'narco junior': El Chapo's American daughter

‘My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,’ says Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, whose drug lord father is awaiting extradition from Mexico to the US

José Luis Montenegro

Friday 4 March 2016 12.00 GMT

Theguardian.com

A balmy southern California afternoon, tourists and locals mingling in the coffee shop, and at first glance there was little to distinguish the 39-year-old American from other regulars.

Dressed casually in a black and white dress with black leggings and boots, she sipped her coffee and talked about work, kids and the importance of staying in touch with family. Her small chain of carwashes, beauty salons and cafes was going well, she said.

Very well, judging by the Rolex on her wrist, the Louis Vuitton bag at her feet and the Mercedes Benz parked outside.

There was another hint of a life less ordinary. Her features bore a distinct resemblance to a man whose face had long gazed from newspapers and televisions – a man hated and feared and admired for creating the world’s biggest and richest criminal syndicate.

She was Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, the eldest daughter of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and she was sitting down with the Guardian in the United States, her adopted home, to give her first ever media interview.

“Did you know he’s called Archivaldo and not Joaquín?” she said. “My dad isn’t a millionaire like Forbes says. The magazine said you could count all the millions my old man supposedly had. That’s not true, the Mexican government invented that.”

In the three-hour interview and subsequent telephone and Skype conversations, Guzmán Ortiz revealed her hitherto unreported life in the US and made striking claims about her father, including the allegation that he visited her in California. 

“He came twice,” she said. Asked how one of the world’s most wanted fugitives crossed the heavily guarded border she smiled. “I asked him the same, believe me.”

Guzmán Ortiz granted the interview in July 2015 on condition her exact location in California not be disclosed to protect her and her children’s privacy. Verification of certain details – and the hunt and recapture of her father, whom she consulted about the interview – delayed publication until now.

A taskforce of navy marines and police caught Chapo in Los Mochis, a town on Mexico’s Pacific coast, on 8 January after a wild gun battle and chase through sewers and streets. He is now in Altiplano, a maximum security jail north ofMexico City.

Earlier this week, the drug lord instructed his lawyers to stop fighting efforts to extradite him to the US, apparently in the hopes of a lighter sentence. But at 61, Guzmán may well end his days in a US prison cell, the final chapter to an extraordinary life which saw an impoverished orange-seller rise up the narco ranks to infamy and fortune.

El Chapo, which means Shorty, allegedly ran tonnes of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to the US from the wooded sierras of Sinaloa, a redoubt protected by corrupt officials, an army of gunmen and inhabitants who considered him a narco Robin Hood.

His organisation – the most powerful trafficking group in the Americas – has exerted its influence from New York to Buenos Aires, and while the Sinaloa cartel is broadly considered less sadistic than some of its rivals, El Chapo’s group is believed to be responsible for thousands of deaths.

In the interview Guzmán Ortiz ranged over cartel restructuring and betrayals, the alleged bribery of senior politicians, and El Chapo’s plan to retire. She also spoke of her friendships with a younger generation of “narco juniors” – the second generation of cartel families who have grown up enjoying extraordinary wealth and privilege.

Guzmán Ortiz showed private family photographs of her father, plus letters he sent from jail. The Guardian independently corroborated some details but could not verify her allegations against senior Mexican politicians or her accounts of her father’s business dealings.

The picture that emerged was of a family inhabiting a strange netherworld of notoriety and anonymity, proud and defiant yet also coy and – since Chapo’s capture – resentful. His illicit empire bonded them as social outcasts while at the same time separating them from the patriarch when he was in hiding or in jail.

Despite El Chapo’s fearsome reputation, Guzmán Ortiz depicted her father as a family man who built a successful business with Mexican government approval, only to be betrayed by rival cartel members and politicians.

“My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,” she said.

She did not confirm or deny her father smuggled drugs (something he admitted to Sean Penn in January’s Rolling Stone interview) but said he lived humbly and had retired from the family “business” in 2014 before being captured. “My dad had passed the torch to my brother Iván Archivaldo and planned to step down and rest.”

Her account cast new light on a story shadowed in rumour and myth.

The short, stocky young man known Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera was beginning to make a name as a courier and enforcer for the then dominant Guadalajara cartel when he had a relationship in the mid-1970s with a schoolteacher named María Luisa Ortiz, which produced their daughter Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz. She was born in Zapopan municipality in Jalisco state in November 1976.

The Guardian has viewed several identity documents including her birth certificate. Guzmán Ortiz’s identity was also confirmed by Francisco Villa Gurrola, an evangelical minister in El Chapo’s hometown of Badiraguato, who met El Chapo in 2012 and is a close friend of his 87-year-old mother Consuelo Loera.

Of Rosa, he said: “I know her and I can tell you she’s a good woman – she’s the first daughter that Joaquín had with a woman in Jalisco.” 

After her parents’ relationship ended Guzmán Ortiz was raised by her mother and a stepfather. He was abusive, she said, and at the age of 10 she stabbed him, landing her in a juvenile treatment centre in Tijuana.

Upon release she reconnected with her father. In 1992, aged 15, he sent her to Scripps Mercy, a private Catholic teaching hospital in San Diego, to be treated for potentially cancerous tumours on her back.

In a sign of the closed – and arguably feudal – narco world, Chapo told his daughter he wanted her to marry Vicente Zambada Niebla, also known as El Vicentillo, the 16-year-old son of another drug lord, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Both fathers were annoyed, however, when she became pregnant before the marriage. Guzmán Ortiz had a second child with El Vicentillo after they married.

In May 1993 her father’s profession almost cost both their lives. They were in a parking lot at Guadalajara airport, she said, when a group of hitmen dispatched by the rival Tijuana cartel targeted the wrong car, killing a Roman Catholic cardinal, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, and six other people.

“On the day of the assassination I was in a car with my father when they started shooting from every direction. We didn’t know who it was that got killed, but later we heard it was the cardinal. My father had nothing to do with it,” she said.

Amid national outrage over the massacre Chapo sent his daughter to live with an aunt in California, who she had visited regularly from an early age. He was caught a few weeks later and spent the next eight years directing his growing empire from behind bars.

When extradition to the US loomed in 2001 he broke out from Puente Grande prison near Guadalajara, reportedly in a laundry cart, and spent the next 13 years on the run, mostly in his Sinaloa heartland. From here he oversaw a complex business which flooded Chicago, Dallas and other US cities with narcotics and was repeatedly ranked by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful people in the world.

In contrast to her father’s dramas, Guzmán Ortiz said she spent two quiet decades across the border, becoming a US citizen and learning English, which she speaks fluently, though with an accent.

She said she studied computer science at the University of Phoenix, hairdressing and cosmetology at the Marinello Schools of Beauty in Riverside, and used money from her father to open several businesses.

This attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for suspected money laundering, resulting in 15 days’ detention and a $50,000 bond, she said. She insisted the funding and businesses were legitimate. “My businesses are all in order – the FBI could not prove anything,” she said, before adding: “The hair salons, the soda fountains, the carwashes aren’t in my name any more.”

Asked to confirm that Guzmán Ortiz had been apprehended and detained in San Diego in 2011, special agent Amy Roderick, an FBI spokeswoman, said: “The arresting agency on that case was US customs and border protection.” Ralph DeSio, a spokesman for US customs and border protection, said the agency could not discuss specific cases due to privacy laws.

Meanwhile, said Guzmán Ortiz, El Chapo was hoping to retire, and intended to hand the reins to her half-brother Iván Archivaldo. But, she said, the plan dismayed his cartel colleague El Mayo – one of the last surviving veterans of the Sinaloa cartel.

Chapo was supposed to meet him at a hotel in Mazatlán in February 2014 when authorities swooped and recaptured him.

“He had already retired, it was just a question of smoothing it with El Mayo, but it seems the old man didn’t much like the idea,” she said. “We’re completely sure El Mayo betrayed him. They used to always meet in private places and my dad found it strange that he had suggested that place.”

The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto trumpeted the capture as a triumph and flew Chapo to Altiplano high-security prison.

Guzmán Ortiz said she visited her father in the maximum security facility and that he expressed confidence about getting out – he vowed to attend a family reunion in November 2015 at his mother’s house in Sinaloa.

In July 2015 the drug lord escaped again – this time fleeing Altiplano near Mexico City through an elaborate tunnel. It was widely interpreted as a humiliating blow to the government but according to his daughter, senior officials had approved of the breakout. “My dad’s escape was an agreement,” she said. There was no way to verify that claim.

Guzmán Ortiz said that after the escape, her father visited the US in late 2015. The motive, she said, was family: in addition to her and her children, who live south of Los Angeles, he wished to see his own twin daughters and wife Emma Coronel, a former beauty queen, who live in LA.

Chapo also wished to view his gift to Guzmán Ortiz: a house with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a game room, a large garden and a garage with space for four cars. “My dad deposited the money in a bank account with a lawyer and a while after he came to see the house, his house.” She declined to elaborate, saying she did not have Chapo’s permission.

Breezy and cheerful at the interview in the coffee shop, Guzmán Ortiz presented herself as a loyal daughter and successful entrepreneur. When her phone buzzed she smiled. “Sorry, it’s my employees. They call me all the time.”

She is separated from El Vicentillo – who was arrested in Mexico City in 2009 and subsequently extradited to the US – and is now partnered with the nephew of another drug lord, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, with whom she has had two children, bringing her total to four.

Guzmán Ortiz said her father was generous – he told her to buy a Ford Explorer as a Christmas gift for her partner. She repeated that any funds she received were licit. Asked about her father’s drug fortune, she laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.”

But reached via Skype in January, after Chapo was recaptured and sent back to Altiplano, her tone was darker.

“The government broke its promise,” she complained. “If there’s a pact, they don’t respect it. Now that they catch him they say he’s a criminal, a killer. But they didn’t say that when they asked for money for their campaigns. They’re hypocrites!”

El Chapo now seems intent on negotiating a deal with US authorities in exchange for a lighter sentence, but with several cases against him and hundreds of individual charges, it seems likely that the orange seller who built an underworld empire will die in jail.

His daughter considered it a cruel twist. “In this business there are no friendships, only associates.” Guzmán Ortiz said her father was generous – he told her to buy a Ford Explorer as a Christmas gift for her partner. She repeated that any funds she received were licit.