El Chapo’s Arrest Made the Drug War Worse
Noah Hurowitz, author of “El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord,” tells Molly Jong-Fast why he believes the kingpin isn’t as evil as people assume.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
You know about El Chapo—but not the way that investigative journalist Noah Hurowitz knows about him.
His book, El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord, dishes all the dirt, and he shared some of the fascinating and even hilarious details about the kingpin on this episode of The New Abnormal.
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To start, as Hurowitz tells Molly Jong-Fast, El Chapo is more than just a drug lord.
“The story of El Chapo offers us a lot of ways to understand the sort of trajectory of the drug war,” he says. “The war on drugs essentially made El Chapo who he was. He was coming of age when the sort of hippie marijuana boom was basically causing the drug trade in Sinaloa to expand dramatically. The reaction to that was a lot of militarized, anti-drug operations by the Mexican government under pressure from the Nixon administration.”
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Naturally, the United States’ involvement in the drug war fucked things up more. “[His arrest] hasn’t made any dent in the amount of drugs coming over the border,” says Hurowitz.
Plus! Hurowitz and Molly discuss El Chapo’s mistress, Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, and his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, and the reason he and his wife wore matching jackets in court one day.
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