El Cholo Iván, the violent bodyguard in the shadow of El Chapo Guzmán

The last escape of Joaquín Guzmán Loera,

, was through a sewer.

Almost six months after escaping from the high security prison of El Altiplano through a 1,500 meter tunnel;

After playing cat and mouse in the mountains while justice was on his heels, the boss of the Sinaloa Cartel had a moment of weakness.

He wanted to go to Los Mochis.

His security chief, Jorge Iván Gastélum, alias

He was opposed to the idea.

After embarrassing the Mexican government with his leaks, it was preferable for the drug trafficker to keep a low profile and avoid the cities.

But El Chapo did not listen to reason.

When that January 2016 the Navy operation surrounded the house where they were hiding, he and El Cholo dragged themselves through a kilometer and a half of sewers, "among the manure and rot," says Miguel Ángel Vega, an expert in the Sinaloa cartel.

A federal highway police checkpoint intercepted them in a stolen car and the two men were taken to the Hotel Doux, where the Navy took control of the situation.

“It was a movie chase.

When two patrol cars blocked the highway, El Chapo tried to bribe them, but the agents did not budge.

I believe that the federal police never knew that they were El Chapo and El Cholo,” continues Vega, one of the journalists with the most access to the Sinaloa Cartel.

There is a photograph of the arrest in which El Chapo is seen with a pensive expression, with his head reclining in the back seat of a car, presumably a police car, his left hand resting on his chin.

He is wearing a tank top with a trace of dirt left on it by the escape attempt.

Next to him, with his gaze fixed on the ground, a defeated gesture and a scar on his left shoulder, is El Cholo Iván.

Guzmán Loera was extradited to the United States in 2017. This weekend, Gastélum followed in his footsteps, the Attorney General's Office (FGR) confirmed this Sunday in a statement.

El Cholo Iván with his boss, El Chapo Guzmán, in a vehicle after his arrest in January 2016. SEGOB

El Cholo Iván, “accused of belonging to a criminal organization and one of the bosses of the Sinaloa plaza;

responsible for trafficking various amounts of drugs to the United States of America", according to the Public Ministry, will be tried by the Federal Court of the District of Columbia, in New York, for "criminal association crimes, against health and using , brandish and discharge a firearm”.

“El Cholo Iván, after El Chapo, I think he was the most important piece that the United States government wanted to seize.

It is perhaps the last piece on the chessboard that El Chapo handled.

He was the personal security coordinator for every movement of El Chapo, he was with him all the time, wherever he went, he knew everything.

That's why they had their eyes well on him, ”explains Vega.

After being arrested along with El Chapo in January 2016, El Cholo Iván went to prison.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs granted his extradition to be prosecuted in December 2020, but Gastélum had managed to hold out in Mexico until now based on legal protection.

The Columbia Prosecutor's Office, the same one that has claimed the drug trafficker, also wants to try Ovidio Guzmán, one of the sons of El Chapo, arrested last January.

Ovidio Guzmán was, along with his brothers Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo, ringleader of

, one of the factions of the Sinaloa Cartel that was formed after the arrest of El Chapo.

"El Cholo was a fundamental piece, it is possible that his extradition has to do with it being the preamble so that he can eventually testify against Ovidio, that they are preparing a trial against him and want all the necessary elements," Vega argues.

“Thanks to the FGR for the delivery of the defendant required by the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia for various crimes related to drug trafficking and crimes of use of weapons.

We are committed to our shared security," the US embassy in Mexico said on Twitter.

Vega, however, downplays the value of the capture: "You have to remember that El Cholo Iván was arrested in 2016. His extradition no longer has any weight within the structure [of the Cartel], the rearrangements occurred many years ago .

It is something that is now history, the United States took time to extradite”.

Elements of the FGR escort Jorge Iván Gastélum to extradite him, this Sunday. GENERAL ATTORNEY OF THE REPUBLIC OF MEXICO (GENERAL ATTORNEY OF THE REPUBLIC)

"El Cholo became a legend"

Cholo Iván was a violent, intelligent and strategist guy.

He became part of the Sinaloa Cartel around 2008, when the war against drugs unleashed by former President Felipe Calderón began to accumulate deaths throughout the country.

Gastélum began as a gunman and rose through the ranks of the criminal organization.

Before 2016, the police had already tried to catch him on several occasions.

During an operation in 2012, they came to kill his partner, the model Susana Flores.

He managed to escape.

By the time he was arrested, he was already a plaza chief in Guamúchil, a town north of Culiacán that El Chapo used as a watchtower to ensure that no other cartel entered his territory.

"They were in a constant war with other criminal groups, El Cholo became a legend: he is intelligent, determined and was not afraid, when there was a confrontation he went to the front," says Vega.

“He had a lot of people at his service, about 200 or 300 people.

When they moved in the mountains they were like an army, El Cholo was very good at coordinating, he almost had military strategies”.

The Mexican government placed him on its list of 122 priority targets to capture.

In a video released this Sunday by the Prosecutor's Office, the defendant is seen with a pixelated face and a cream-colored prison suit.

He walks down a corridor, guarded by at least five armed agents who put him in a white van with the Interpol emblem.

"The fugitive was handed over at the Mexico City International Airport to the US agents designated to transfer him to that country," the Public Ministry said.

Like El Chapo's or Felipe Calderón's former Secretary of Public Security, Genaro García Luna —convicted by a jury in Brooklyn, but pending the judge's sentence—, now the future of the Sinaloan hitman is in the hands of a New York court.

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