and I couldn’t find one lawman on either side of the border who was actively pursuing the man personally responsible for controlling more than half the global drug trade.
THEN, ON FEBRUARY 15, 2011, Jaime Zapata and Víctor Ávila, two US Department of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) special agents on assignment in Mexico City, were ambushed in the northern state of San Luis Potosí by masked members of the Zetas Cartel. One Zetas vehicle passed the agents’ armored Suburban, firing automatic rifles and ramming them off the road. The Zetas gunmen then pulled open the driver’s side door and tried to drag Zapata out, but he fought back, trying to reason with the Zetas as they surrounded the vehicle. “We’re Americans! We’re diplomats!” The response was a hail of automatic gunfire. Zapata was killed at the wheel and Ávila badly wounded.
The murder of Special Agent Zapata threw my life into sudden turmoil. I’d already been selected for the position in Mexico City—but now I had my young family to think about, too. Was it safe to move my wife and our young sons south of the border? The majority of DEA agents wouldn’t even consider putting in for a job in Mexico, due to the fear of being kidnapped or killed.
“Jesus, with Zapata getting murdered, I’m on the fence now,” I told Diego. “We’re happy and safe here in Phoenix, but, I dunno—this feels like the next step.” We were camped out at a table at Mariscos Navolato, ties loosened, drinking a couple of Pacificos after a long day of organizing evidence for the Team America prosecutions. I was practically hoarse from talking to Diego over the blaring banda playing on the stage in front of our table.
“You know what you’re getting yourself into,” Diego said. “At the end of the day, you gotta do what’s right for you and your family.”
The next morning, I sat down with my wife and laid it all out for her. There was nothing to hide; all the risks were evident. I had been prepping her for months, but the danger of life in Mexico still weighed heavily on my mind.
“What’s your gut telling you?” she asked. “I’ll support you, whatever you decide.”
I sat silent at the kitchen counter for a long time.
“Go,” I said finally. “My gut’s telling me go. Take the assignment in Mexico.”
Looking back to my sheltered life in Kansas, I would never have fathomed those words. But every time I’d been faced with a lifechanging decision, it felt uncomfortable, and I knew this was just another one of those moments. I paused and took a deep breath; my worries about any danger ahead began to lift: yes, it was natural career progression, after all—just furthering the investigations that Diego and I had started all those years ago.
Then it was off to six months of Spanish immersion at the DEA’s language school in Southern California and, later, several more weeks of intensive training back at Quantico.
Federal agents assigned to work in high-risk foreign posts were drilled in “personnel recovery” techniques: evasive driving maneuvers, including how to take over a moving car when your partner gets killed at the wheel and how to saw through plastic handcuffs using a piece of nylon string. This was followed by specialized training in handling heavy armored vehicles, which had become mandatory after the murder of Special Agent Zapata.
IN FEBRUARY 2012, while I was away at language school, Diego had flipped a member of Chapo’s inner circle traveling to the United States.
Diego called me—he was walking fast somewhere down the street, out in the wind—and he sounded breathless.
“Yo, I got his BlackBerry PIN.”
“Got whose PIN?”
“C.”
As always, we avoided saying the name Chapo whenever possible.
“C’s BlackBerry?”
“Yup. I have his personal PIN.”
“Holy fuck. Where’s it pinging?”
“Cabo,” Diego said.
“He’s in Cabo San Lucas?”
“Yep—but here’s the thing,” Diego said, frustrated. “No one fuckin’ believes me. They keep telling me it can’t possibly be his number. But I’m telling you: it’s him, brother.”
Diego had passed the PIN to DEA Mexico City, which began its standard deconfliction. Several hours later, Diego heard back from a special agent in Mexico who told him the FBI in New York had thousands of wire intercepts with that same PIN. But they were oblivious and had no idea it was actually Chapo using it.
“Shocking,” I said. “The Feebs have been secretly targeting Chapo and don’t even know which goddamn phone he’s using.”
The DEA agent in Mexico City told Diego they were already preparing an operation with the Mexican Federal Police and had brusquely pushed Diego to the side.
“They’re not going to let me in on the op,” Diego said. “Shit, I should be in Cabo running this thing.” I could tell Diego was feeling the strain of not having me by his side to iron out my own DEA agents in Mexico. I felt equally helpless sitting there in my Spanish immersion class, but I knew there was no stopping this runaway train—not with the Mexico City office having already involved the Mexican Federal Police.
CABO SAN LUCAS, at the tip of the Baja Peninsula, was long considered one of the safest locations in Mexico and a favorite vacation spot among Hollywood stars and thousands of American tourists. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in town at the same time as Chapo—at the Barceló Los Cabos Palace Deluxe, attending a G20 foreign ministers meeting, during which she signed the United States–Mexico Transboundary Agreement.
Chapo clearly felt safe, even untouchable. DEA Mexico City put together a rapid operation that included three hundred Mexican Federal Police and moved them all up to Cabo overnight.
But the mission turned into a debacle. The takedown team launched on an upscale neighborhood of beachfront mansions, raided twelve houses . . . and came away with nothing. All they managed to do was roust a bunch of wealthy American retirees, vacationers, and well-heeled Mexican families, pissing off the entire neighborhood.
After the first failure, the Federal Police, fed up with taking grief from the community, sent most of its personnel home. DEA coordinated a second capture op, but now they didn’t have enough manpower—only thirty PF officers. Nevertheless, they narrowed the pinging of Chapo’s phone down to one of three beautiful beachfront mansions in a cul-de-sac right outside Cabo. As they hit the first two houses, Chapo was waiting in the third and watching it all unfold. He had no heavy security detail—the only people with him were his most trusted bodyguard, who went by “Picudo,” a Cessna pilot, his cook, a gardener, and a girlfriend.
As the DEA and the PF descended on the cul-de-sac, Guzmán and Picudo slid out the back door and ran up the coast, narrowly escaping the dragnet. The two men somehow made it all the way up to La Paz and then were picked up on a clandestine airstrip—likely by Chapo’s favorite pilot, Araña— and flown by Cessna back to the mountains.
After the debacle, the Associated Press reported,
Mexican authorities nearly captured the man the U.S. calls the world’s most powerful drug lord, who like Osama bin Laden, has apparently been hiding in plain sight. Federal police nearly nabbed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in a coastal mansion in Los Cabos three weeks ago, barely a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with dozens of other foreign ministers in the same southern Baja peninsula resort town.6
Among the people of Mexico, the raid immediately became a running joke: The Federal Police could muster a small army to capture Chapo in his mansion, but they forgot to cover the back door.
No one on the ground from DEA Mexico had a clue how big this Cabo opportunity had been. There were technological failures in the first raid, and a poorly coordinated effort in the second. The Mexicans may not have had enough people to cover the back door, true, but