Read part one on this profile of “El Chapito,” the son of El Chapo, here.
In the first minutes of Aug. 15, 2016, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán was celebrating his 33rd birthday with his brother Jesús Alfredo, four male friends and nine women, at the luxurious La Leche restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when a squad of gunmen stormed in. In the scene captured on security cameras, the assailants raise their rifles and go straight for Iván’s long mesa in the center of the eatery, letting the women hide under the table and marching the men out at gunpoint.
The kidnapping of Chapo’s two sons (or Chapitos, “the Little Chapos”) took place in the territory of El Mencho, who had originally worked with a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel but had broken off to forge his own kingdom. Yet Dámaso “Mini Lic” López, a friend-turned-enemy of the Chapitos, later claimed to journalist Luis Chaparro that various narcos were involved in the plot, and said he personally sent word that they would be in the restaurant with little security. After the gunmen had taken the Chapitos, he received a message: “The birds are now in the cage.”
Mini Lic claims that Iván had angered other narcos as he tried to take over the empire of his father, who was in prison, and they wanted to take him out. “They picked them up to kill them,” Mini Lic said. “It was not for money. It was not for a scare. It was to kill them.”
Sinaloa kingpins El Mayo and their father Chapo rushed to bargain for their lives though. To help these negotiations, Dámaso claims, Chapo organized the kidnapping of Mencho’s own son in prison. “He told El Mencho ‘If you give me my children, I will give you yours,’ ” Mini Lic said.
After four days, the Chapitos were released to go back to trafficking in Sinaloa. Yet for some veteran narcos, they had looked weak and vulnerable. They were seen as “juniors,” or young rich kids, who had been to private schools, posted on social media and loved Ferraris and Lamborghinis but lacked the grit and ruthlessness of their father, who had grown up wearing sandals, selling oranges at 11 and scraping gum from opium poppies at 15. Some of these players believed they could take the turf away.
Still, by 2020 Iván had consolidated power to become one of the richest and most feared narcos in Mexico. He controlled Sinaloa state capital Culiacán and much of the state’s police forces, business sector and increasingly its politicians. The Chapitos even rivaled the veteran Sinaloa capo Mayo in terms of power, leading to seething tension. This is the story of how Iván graduated from junior to kingpin, through violence, trafficking and corruption.
The Succession From Chapo
After Chapo was captured…
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