The Origin of El Chapo | Narco Wars

[music playing] It was find everybody involved. Find them now. We knew there was an individual that was responsible for all the logistical movement of marijuana and then cocaine, but we weren't sure who he was.

So we raided house, after house, after house. One name pops up, and he continued to pop up-- Chapo Guzmán. People called him Chapo, which is a shorty. He was a five-foot-six guy who started out as a little kid selling oranges on the side of the road, down in Sinaloa.

At that time, he was well down the ranks of the Sinaloa cartel. He was a border rat. He knew virtually every corner of the border-- where was the most highly-patrolled area, where were desolate areas, where was the most valuable part of it in terms of cocaine trafficking.

Cartel bosses recognized that he was extremely smart. He was years ahead of anybody else that ever came into the drug-smuggling scene. The flip side to that is he was also a ruthless, cold, calculated killer.

30 guys were used to dig this tunnel, night and day, for months and months. They kept them locked up in a house. And the cartel wanted to keep it secret so bad, and they were worried somebody would talk about it, so they executed them all and dumped them into a well.

So basically, all the tunnel diggers dug their own grave for the cartel. It was a gold mine for them. A kilo of cocaine, back in those days, about $24,000 a kilo. This tunnel probably would have ran, who knows, one truck a day, two trucks a day, three maybe.

Chapo went from the little guy over here in Douglas, to captain in the cartel. He was such a rising star. Chapo was nicknamed by the Colombians as [speaking spanish] because he was so fast in moving the cocaine. He didn't share his methods of transportation, but he was a genius and troublemaker.