Federal authorities say he was captured outside the state’s capital, Kulyakan, just after 6:00 a.m.
He was traveling in a vehicle with other gunmen when detained and quickly flown to Mexico City.
The most powerful drug lord in history, is rotting in a supermax prison cell, filing his own court papers.
And his sons, the men who inherited his empire, just handed themselves over to the same government their father spent his entire life outrunning.
El Chapo’s rise and fall is one of the most documented criminal stories in history.
And here is what really happened.
The king and his kingdom.
Waqin Guzman did not become the world’s most wanted drug lord overnight.
He came from Latuna, a small mountain town in Sinaloa, Mexico, a state that has been described as the cradle of cartel power in the country.
The Sinaloa cartel, which he co-founded alongside Ismael Elmyo Zambada, and a collection of regional crime families, was not a single organization with a clean chain of command.
It was a federation, a loose coalition of different criminal outfits, most of them family-based, operating under a shared banner.
At the height of its power, that federation controlled an estimated 80% of Chicago’s illegal drug supply, and its pipeline stretched across the United States.
What made the Sinaloa cartel different from its rivals was infrastructure.
Chapo was not just moving drugs.
He was building systems.
His organization used submarines, tunnels, trains, planes, and automobiles to push product across borders.
His engineers were so specialized that when he famously escaped from prison through a tunnel in 2015.
It later emerged that a team of his engineers had been sent to Germany for 3 months of training ahead of its construction.
That is not the operation of a drug dealer.
That is the operation of a logistics company.
His reach extended into places most people would not expect.
During his 2019 trial in Brooklyn, testimony from cooperating witnesses revealed that the head of public safety under former Mexican President Felipe Calderon had been on the Sinaloa payroll.
Chapo essentially had federal police protection.
He had a shield built into the government itself.
That kind of institutional cover is why he was able to escape twice from maximum security prisons in Mexico, why he could vanish for years at a time, and why capturing him felt to many observers more like theater than justice.
The men who ultimately helped bring him down were not DEA agents or Mexican commandos.
They were two brothers from the little village neighborhood of Chicago.
Pedro and Haqin Flores, also known as the Flores twins, who had risen from first generation crack dealers in the mid80s to become by their mid20s the primary distributors for the entire Sinaloa Federation inside the United States.
Their story intersects with Chapos in ways that speak to the core of how the cartel actually operated.
And it begins not with betrayal, but with a kidnapping.
Pedro Flores was seized by a man named Lupe Leiddesma, who was the twin’s own supplier and a trusted figure inside the cartel.
When Haqain Flores flew to Mexico to negotiate his brother’s release, he was brought on a small plane to meet the man himself, a figure he described as wearing a trucker hat, jeans, and a flannel shirt, looking like nothing special.
That man was El Chapo.
During that meeting, Chapo told the twins they owed him $10 million, a number he attributed to what Lupe had shorted him.
The twins pushed back, produced logs, showed receipts, and in the process discovered with Chapo’s own encouragement that Lupe had set the whole kidnapping up himself.
Chapo gave them the idea to record Lupe to prove it.
He planted the seed of recording conversations as evidence.
That irony would follow him all the way to a Brooklyn courtroom years later.
The twins paid the debt, recovered Peter from captivity, and became what people inside the cartel called the Golden Goose.
They were moving product in volumes that other distributors could not match.
They kept no bodies on their case and they ran their operation like a business using systems they had literally studied by working at McDonald’s to understand how compartmentalization kept an organization running without a single point of failure.
They sat at the table with Chapo with Elmo and with the Beltron Lea family when the federation was at the peak of its power and they were 21 22 years old.
Terry said when they first hooked up with the cartel is when things really started blowing up and that they didn’t even know what cartel they were working with at first.
The federation that Terry Fenery of BMF describes was the same one the Flores twins were plugged into.
The Sinaloa network had tentacles that went far beyond the southwest border.
It reached into Detroit.
It reached into Atlanta.
It reached into Chicago’s south and west sides.
And Chapo was the architect of all of it.
operating from the mountains of Sinaloa with the confidence of a man who believed he was untouchable.
For a long time, he was right.
Cracks in the foundation.
The Sinaloa Federation began to crack not because of outside pressure, but because of what happens when any organization grows powerful enough to think it is above the rules it once followed.
The first fracture came from inside.
Chapo and Elmo had been using cooperation with the DEA as a weapon against rival cartel leaders, feeding information to American agents through back channels that helped dismantle competing organizations while protecting their own roots.
It was snitching as strategy deployed at the highest level of organized crime, which makes every street level conversation about loyalty and rats look at minimum incomplete.
The Beltran Leva family was part of the original federation.
They were among the founding partners.
But when one of the Beltran Leva brothers known as Mo was arrested, the family believed Chapo had given him up to the DEA to eliminate competition and consolidate power.
Whether that is true or not, the belief was enough.
The Beltrons broke from the Federation, aligned with rival cartels, and declared war on Chapo.
The Federation that had once been described as a beautiful, happy family was now eating itself.
The Flores twins watched this happen in real time.
They were sitting close enough to the table to understand what was coming.
And what they saw was a world in which the definition of loyalty shifted depending on who held the most power that week.
They saw people they knew get disappeared over slights as trivial as failing to shake El Chapo’s hand.
They saw cartel commanders call out names on speakerphone while the name person sat in the same room.
And they understood that no amount of good performance protected you when the calculus changed.
At 25 years old, they made a decision that most people at that level never make voluntarily.
They reached out to the United States government.
It was not an arrest that triggered it.
The twins were fugitives on a Wisconsin case, but they were not being actively hunted.
They were living well, moving enormous loads through submarines and trains and whatever else the situation called for.
What drove them to cooperate was what they could see happening around them.
They had spent enough time watching the cartel operate to know that the cycle of betrayal had no floor.
The only exits were prison, death, or cooperation, and they chose the one that gave them the best chance of still being alive when it was over.
What followed was nine months of undercover work inside Mexico while a war between cartel factions was happening around them.
They were giving up shipments to the government, coming up short on payments they had never missed before and feeding recorded conversations to federal agents, all while maintaining the appearance of being fully operational.
One of those recorded conversations involved a distributor named Toppo or the mole and the twins had to engineer a scenario in which he talked numbers on the phone discussing a cocaine shipment so that prosecutors would have him on tape negotiating a deal.
They told him part of the product was bad that they needed a discount to make up the difference knowing none of it was true.
Knowing exactly what they were building toward snitching is in the toolbox of the cartel.
They look down upon it when you do it but it’s not a thing that they look down upon when they tell their sons that they’re allowed to do it.
That distinction matters.
The no snitching code that exists in street culture was never the code the cartel actually operated by.
At the top of the Sinaloa organization, cooperation with law enforcement was a tactical option used when it served the organization’s interests.
Elmo’s own son, Vicente Zambada, would eventually testify against Chapo at the Brooklyn trial, describing meetings, money movements, and internal decisions in detail.
He received a sentence reduction for it and after serving approximately 11 years, was placed into witness protection.
He was photographed years later at an airport.
Free and traveling openly in the United States.
When the Flores twins finally surfaced and were taken into custody, they spent 7 months debriefing federal agents, giving up everything they had.
Chapo was indicted in Chicago, New York, and several other jurisdictions.
His trial in Brooklyn began in 2018 and ended with a conviction on all counts.
He was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years and sent to the ADX Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, the most secure prison in the United States.
The fall of the king.
The arrest of El Chapo did not end the Sinaloa cartel.
It reorganized it.
Power passed to his sons.
Four of them who had been operating alongside their father for years and were known collectively as Los Chapitos.
Among them, Ovidio Guzman Lopez and Haqain Guzman Lopez became the public faces of the new leadership, inheriting both the infrastructure and the rivalries that came with it.
The first signal that the cartel’s power had not diminished came in October 2019 when Mexican authorities attempted to arrest Ovidio Guzman in the city of Kulakon.
What happened next was not a law enforcement operation.
It was a military confrontation.
Ovidio’s half-brother Archibaldo called in cartel reinforcements from surrounding towns and regions.
And within hours, Kuliaakan was flooded with armed men.
Cartel convoys with heavy-mounted weapons moved through the city.
Burning semi-truckss blocked roads leading in.
A failed prison break attempt unfolded at a nearby facility.
An Air Mexico plane sitting on the runway at the Koulakin airport was struck by gunfire with passengers seen ducking for cover.
A Mexican Air Force plane was also hit.
Today’s actions could be a violent show of power by the Sinaloa cartel faction led by El Chapo’s son.
The army unit sent into the city to reinforce security was surrounded by cartel members.
There is video of that encounter.
government soldiers in full gear, standing face-tof face with men in civilian clothes and tactical vests, shaking hands, talking it through, surrounded and outnumbered.
The cartel was also holding family members of military personnel as hostages in nearby communities, using them as bargaining chips.
The soldiers stood down.
The cartel essentially defeated the Mexican government in the field that day and the government released Ovidio Guzman to avoid mass casualties.
The official statement described it as a tactical decision.
People in Kuliaakan described it differently.
To them, there was no government decision.
The cartel held the city and the cartel let him go.
The distinction is not small.
That episode established something important about the post Chapo Sinaloa cartel.
It was not weakened by its founders imprisonment.
If anything, Los Chapitos had used the intervening years to consolidate power in ways that made confronting them militarily a calculation that no Mexican administration wanted to make.
They ran the dominant power in Klayakhan.
Their reach into fentinel production and distribution had made them extraordinarily wealthy.
And they had spent that wealth on firepower, on loyalty, and on the kind of cartel infrastructure that looks less like a criminal enterprise and more like a parallel government.
Ovido was eventually arrested again in January 2023.
This time in a joint operation between the Mexican military and federal authorities.
The violence that followed was severe.
Cartel gunmen reacted across the state.
Airports were shut down.
Roads were blocked.
But this time, the Mexican government held firm.
He was transferred rapidly to Mexico City before the cartel could mount a sustained response.
And in April 2023, he was extradited to the United States to face federal drug trafficking charges in Chicago.
Meanwhile, El Chapo himself, sitting in Florence, Colorado, filed a habius corpus petition in federal court asking to be freed or retried.
He signed it himself without an attorney.
The document argued that his extradition from Mexico had been unconstitutional, that his trial had been unfair, and that his rights had been violated throughout the process.
Legal analysts who reviewed the filing described it as a standard habius petition with limited prospects.
Former federal prosecutor Gil Sofur reviewed the filing and noted that Chapo had lost at trial and on appeal, and that this mechanism, while available to him, was a steep climb.
The man, once worth billions, was filing his own court papers.
The Suns make their move.
What happened next is the part of the story that nobody saw coming.
Though in retrospect, the pieces were all there.
Guzman Lopez, one of the Chapitos, contacted Ismael Elmayo Zambada in July 2024 and invited him to a meeting, telling him it was to resolve a local political dispute in Sinaloa.
Elmo, who had known Waqin since he was a young boy, trusted him enough to come with a light security detail.
What Elmo did not know was that he was walking into an ambush.
Mayo Sambbada, the 76-year-old co-founder and leader of the Sinaloa cartel, and Hain Guzman Lopez, son of convicted drug lord El Chapo Guusman, are now in US custody.
According to Elmo’s own account delivered through a letter released by his lawyer, he was brought into a dark room, roughed up, restrained with zip ties by Waqin Guzman Lopez personally, and driven to a remote airirstrip in the middle of cornfields outside Kolyakan.
The airirstrip was in the middle of nowhere, buzzing with cartel lookouts.
From there he was flown two and a half hours to El Paso, Texas, where US federal agents were waiting.
Both men were taken into custody.
Elmo Zambado was 76 years old at the time of his arrest.
He had evaded capture for over four decades while leading one of the most powerful drug empires on Earth.
Inside Mexico, he had always been seen as the true power behind the Sinaloa cartel, possibly even more powerful than Chapo himself, and many observers believed he would live out his years in the mountains of Sinaloa, unreachable and untouched.
His arrest in the way it happened, carrying the word betrayal in every sentence of the account he gave, sent a shock through the cartel world.
The obvious question, the one that every journalist covering the story asked, was whether Haqin Guzman Lopez had delivered Elmo to US authorities as part of a plea deal, a gift that would buy leniency for himself and for his brother, Ovido.
The attorney for the brothers denied any cooperation arrangement, but the timeline told its own story.
Oido was already in federal custody in Chicago.
17 members of the extended Guzman family crossed from Tijuana into Sanro, California weeks before Oido’s scheduled guilty plea, arriving with packed luggage and according to authorities thousands in US currency.
Law enforcement sources described that crossing as part of the plea arrangement, though the family’s attorney denied it.
Fentinel seizures at the southern border dropped by more than 50% in the months that followed.
The DEA reported that monthly seizures that had been running at around 1,700 pounds were now coming in at around 746 pounds.
Overdose deaths nationally fell by nearly 30,000 from the previous year, a drop of approximately 27%.
Whether that was directly connected to a deal with Lost Chapos or whether it reflected other factors is a matter of ongoing interpretation.
But the timing was not lost on anyone paying attention.
While the plea negotiations were playing out in Chicago, something else was taking shape in Sinaloa.
Elmo’s son, also named Ismael Zambada, began gathering forces.
He was pulling together alliances with different factions within the broader Sinaloa coalition, building toward a confrontation with Los Chaptos over what his father’s letter framed as betrayal.
On September 9th, 2024, the fighting started.
Cartel soldiers on buses moved through Kulakan.
Trucks with mounted weapons rolled through the streets.
Bodies appeared in the road every morning.
In 6 weeks, more than 200 people were dead and the count of the disappeared ran even higher, according to civil society groups.
What really happened? In May 2025, in a federal courtroom in Chicago, Ovido Guzman Lopez changed his plea from not guilty to guilty.
Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, he answered questions from Judge Sharon Coleman in Spanish, admitting to participation in an international conspiracy to move cocaine and other drugs into the United States.
His attorney, Jeffrey Lickman, confirmed the basic terms of the arrangement.
Ovido would plead guilty and cooperate with the government.
In return, prosecutors might at their discretion ask for a reduction in what would otherwise be a mandatory life sentence.
It’s up to the government.
Yeah, it’s not up to us.
It’s up to the government to decide to make such a motion, and they either will or they won’t.
There is no guarantee written into the deal.
The government retains the power to decide what, if anything, Ovido’s cooperation is worth at sentencing.
A status hearing was scheduled for 6 months after the plea, at which point prosecutors would indicate whether they plan to move for a reduction.
Nothing about the sentence was guaranteed.
Everything depended on what Ovido delivered.
That structure is familiar to anyone who has studied how these arrangements work at the highest levels of international drug trafficking.
The ooa family in Colombia among the primary architects of the Medelene cartel alongside Pablo Escobar navigated similar arrangements in the9s with two of the three brothers serving short sentences and retaining their wealth.
Vicente Zambada, Elmo’s son, spent approximately 11 years in custody and was photographed years later traveling freely in the United States.
The expectation built into cooperation at this level is not that the government will treat you generously.
It is that cooperation is the only option that preserves any future at all.
The question of what really happened to El Chapo is at its core the story of what happens when you build an empire large enough that its own internal logic eventually consumes you.
Chapo’s sons did not destroy their father’s organization out of incompetence.
They did exactly what their father did.
They used betrayal as a tool.
They fed rivals to the authorities when it served their interests and they made calculated decisions about who to deliver and when.
The difference is that by the time they were making those decisions, the US government was on the other side of the table and the price of cooperation was being set in a federal courthouse rather than on a mountain in Sinaloa.
El Chapo, meanwhile, remains in Florence, Colorado, filing court papers by hand.
His habius corpus petition asks for a new trial or release.
Legal analysts who reviewed it were not optimistic about its prospects.
He surrendered all of his illicit wealth to the government as part of the terms of his conviction, which means that the billions he once commanded are at least officially gone.
The man who once had the head of Mexico’s federal police on his payroll is representing himself.
What the research shows is that the Sinaloa cartel’s story did not end with El Chapo’s arrest or his conviction.
It entered a new phase.
His sons took over.
His empire restructured around fentinel production at a time when fentanyl was the most profitable and most deadly product the cartel had ever moved.
And then when the pressure of two brothers in federal custody in Chicago became impossible to manage, the Chapitos did what every generation before them had done.
They calculated the odds.
They decided what they could afford to give up and they sat down across from the US government to make a deal.
The Sinaloa cartel is now at war with itself.
The alliance between the remnants of the Chapitos faction and the Jalisco Nova generation cartel is confirmed.
Kulyakan, the city that has always been the cartel’s capital, is a place where people go inside at dark and musicians busk on sidewalks because the private functions have dried up.
A seafood restaurant owner who described his business to a journalist put it simply.
They were running at 15% of normal customers.
The city that once threw the best parties in Mexico is not throwing parties right now.
What really happened to El Chapo is the story of an empire that outlived its founders freedom and is now outliving its founders children.
The cartel did not fall when Chapo was arrested.
It did not fall when his sons were taken into custody.
It is fracturing now under the weight of a betrayal so deep that even a man who spent 40 years evading every law enforcement agency on Earth could not see it coming from someone he had watched grow up.
Whether that fracture is permanent or whether it simply reshuffles the deck the way it has every time before is the part of the story that is still being written.
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