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As a child living in poverty in Mexico, he peddled fruits only to eat them. A lifetime later, as the most wanted drug lord in the world, his empire was so vast that he ordered a fleet of submarines to move his goods.
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who will be on trial in New York on Monday, now faces life imprisonment for being convicted of charges of flooding the United States with tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine.
In prison for nearly two years, Guzman, 61, has lost much of the aura of feared fears and, for many in Mexico, loved drugs, which he once enjoyed.
He lost weight and says that he has health problems. Guzman's head is shaved and he wears a humble blue jail suit. His mustache is gone. During the hearings he attended in US federal court, the judge did not even allow him to speak.
"I have headaches every day, I vomit almost every day, I need to work on two molars and they hurt me a lot," Guzman said in his only direct communication with the Judge Brian Cogan in a letter sent in February.
He complained that his prison cell is still too cold or too hot. "It's a torture, 24 hours a day," wrote Guzman, whose nickname, El Chapo, translates to a shorty, because of his 1.5-meter frame (5 feet and two inches).
At its height, man dominated his rivals, casting a shadow over Mexico's criminal criminal world.
Under the reign of Guzman, the empire of his Sinaloa drug cartel spread across the world, its tentacles extending from the Americas to Europe and the US. Asia.
After two legendary imprisonments, Guzman was finally captured by Mexican navies in January 2016 and extradited to the United States in January 2017, ending his decades-long game of cat and mouse with the authorities.
While his cartel is synonymous with violence and drug addiction, Guzman has become a hero of the Mexican underworld, with musicians singing his praises in folk ballads known as "narcocorridos" – tributes to drugs.
He fooled the government with the technical prowess of his cartel, building tunnels to ship drugs under the US-Mexico border and helping him escape the authorities.
While harboring an image of Robin Hood, his cartel was waging bloody wars with rivals, contributing to drug-related conflicts in Mexico.
Guzman became so wealthy that he was on Forbes magazine's list of billionaires, but he gave up in 2013 after spending a large part of his fortune on protection.
– & # 39; Very poor & # 39; –
"I am supplying more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anyone else in the world." I have a fleet of submarines, of course. planes, trucks and boats, "Guzman told Sean Penn at a clandestine meeting they had and that the American actor wrote about Rolling Stone magazine in 2016.
Guzman said in a separate video message to Penn that his family was "very humble, very poor" and that his mother was baking bread in the village of La Tuna.
"I've sold oranges, soft drinks, sweets," he said, claiming he entered the drug trade at the age of 15 because he did not want to buy drugs. There was "no possibility of employment".
"The only way to have money to buy food, to survive, is to grow poppy, marijuana, and at that age, I started to grow it, cultivate it and sell it, "he said.
Guzman was born April 4, 1957 in Badiraguato, a city known for being the cradle of many drug lords.
He was recruited by the chief of the cartel of Guadalajara, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, nicknamed "the godfather" of the modern drug cartels of Mexico.
After the arrest of Felix Gallardo in 1989, the Sinaloa de Guzman cartel began its meteoric rise.
But he had enemies.
A shooting in May 1993 at the Guadalajara airport ended the life of the Archbishop of the West City, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, who allegedly mistaken for Guzman .
He was arrested in Guatemala City in June 1993. Eight years later, he made his first incursion into prison and sneaked inside a laundry cart in 2001.
– Capo Lovestruck –
In February 2014, the authorities took 13 years to capture him again in a condo located in the seaside resort of Sinaloa in Mazatlan, where he was hiding with his wife, Emma Coronel, and their binoculars born in the United States.
But 17 months later, Guzman again escaped, humiliating the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto.
This time, his henchmen had built a tunnel of a mile and a half that would open in the shower of his cell. He zoomed out hopping on a modified motorcycle mounted on rails.
But it took only six months for the marines to catch up with him in Los Mochis, a coastal town of Sinaloa.
Officials said that his crush on Mexican-American actress Kate del Castillo had led to his downfall.
Mexican officials leaked over the phone an intercepted message from her flirtatious text messages with the star, who had arranged Guzman's meeting with Penn.
Guzman is married at least three times. He has several children, including two sons accused by US authorities of having played an "important" role in the Sinaloa cartel. Another son, Edgar, was shot in 2008.
The drug king Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, photographed in January 2016 after his recovery, is being tried in New York on November 5, 2018, accused of leading the world's largest drug cartel.
"El Chapo," photographed with US anti-drug staff while he's extradited to the United States in 2017, has lost much of the aura of the dreaded pillar of drugs.
Hollywood star Sean Penn interviewed "El Chapo" for a 2016 article on Rolling Stone
Graphic on "El Chapo"
