On January 19, 2017, less than twenty-four hours before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, a plane landed on Long Island carrying a prized cargo: Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel. After escaping from prison twice in Mexico, he'd been recaptured and extradited to the United States to face seventeen charges, including trafficking cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and crystal meth. If, as prosecutors claim, his operation netted $14 billion, he will be the biggest trafficker the Drug Enforcement Administration has helped bring before an American judge. His trial is set to begin the first week of November in federal district court in Brooklyn.
Back in Guzmán's home state of Sinaloa, in northwest Mexico, rival factions fought for control of his empire. Squads of sicarios, or hit men, shot at one another with AK-47's and AR-15's in the very heart of neighborhoods around the state capital, Culiacán, sending residents fleeing for cover. A group of local reporters, led by the weekly newsmagazine Ríodoce, braved the bullets to cover the mayhem.
Veteran journalists Javier Valdez and Ismael Bohórquez founded Ríodoce in 2003. Its name derives from the local geography: Sinaloa has eleven rivers, and "River Twelve" intended to be its current of information. The spirit of the magazine was set by Valdez, who wrote with a colorful and crazed pen, mixing street experiences with sparkling metaphors. His favored subjects were the unseen faces of the cartel wars: the members of brass bands who played ballads to men in crocodile-skin boots and women with diamond-studded fingernails; children on dirt roads who dreamed of being hit men; crying mothers whose sons had been murdered.
In the wake of El Chapo's arrest, most Sinaloan news outlets reported only the basic facts of each bloody development: how many people were killed in a given shoot-out, how many bullets were fired, who was arrested. But Ríodoce aimed to explain the power struggle driving the cartel's splintering: Two of Guzmán's sons, known as the Chapitos, led one faction, while Dámaso López, a prison warden who helped Guzmán escape the first time, in 2001, and became his right-hand man, led another.
As the fighting raged in February, a man phoned the offices of Ríodoce and asked to speak with Valdez. Declining to give his name, the caller claimed to have important information. Responding to such a call was risky in Sinaloa, home to dozens of kingpins besides El Chapo. But Valdez, rarely shaken, agreed to meet.
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