That One Time El Chapo Reached Out to the DEA

“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat

In 1998, when Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera was imprisoned in Puente Grande, he contacted DEA agent Joe Bond and offered to inform him about places, people and key operations of his rivals (the Arellano Félix, the Beltrán Leyva and Héctor Palma). 

He asked in return for the charges against him to be dropped in the United States. In 2001, already at large, Guzmán reiterated the offer. 

In a book about the drug lord that will begin circulating in the United States next July, journalist Noah Hurowitz recounts both attempts and how the then newly appointed director of the AFI, Genaro García Luna, proved unreliable.

In March 1998 Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán Loera met secretly with DEA agents to offer them information about the Beltrán Leyva, El Güero Palma Salazar and Mexican politicians who protected the narco; all in exchange for being forgiven for his crimes in the United States, reveals the American journalist Noah Hurowitz in his book El Chapo, the untold story of the most infamous drug baron in the world.

He adds that in September 2001, in another meeting, El Chapo sent one of his brothers to arrange another meeting with the DEA, attended by Genaro García Luna, who betrayed a representative of the U.S. federal agency.

The author confirms, in an interview with Proceso, the 1998 meeting: “From documents of the Court I learned of that meeting. In 2019, on the outskirts of Washington DC, I met with Joe Bond (one of the agents who attended), who showed me and explained the internal report he wrote for the DEA after having met El Chapo.”

The work of the young reporter who covered the hearings of the trial against Guzmán Loera in 2018 and 2019 in the Federal Court of the Eastern District in Brooklyn, New York, will go on sale in the United States on July 20, under the Atria Books label, of Simon & Schuster publishing house.

In chapter 5, “I am Tito”, he describes Chapo urged to betray his enemies from the Felix Arellano Cartel as an argument not to be extradited and tried in the United States. Although there was a rumor, it had never been corroborated that Guzmán was one of the many informants who approached the DEA.

“On November 7, 1997, Joe Bond was in his office at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico when he received a call from one of the sailors who guarded the entrance doors to the building,” Hurowitz writes in the aforementioned chapter. 

“The sailor explained to him that a man wanted to pass a message to his boss.”

Bond, of American father and Mexican mother, born in Mexico City, went to the entrance of the diplomatic headquarters, where an individual who would later be assigned the code name Electra identified himself as Chapo’s brother-in-law.

“Really?” Bond replied, interested and suspicious.

“Yes,” Electra told him. El Chapo wanted to talk to the DEA.

The advance edition of Hurowitz’s work that Proceso received from the author and the publisher highlights the challenge that this petition meant for Bond. The drug trafficker was imprisoned in Puente Grande and that’s why the Mexican government had to be informed.

The DEA agent had to plan the meeting and find a reliable Mexican government official who would not leak the information. Bond elected the then deputy prosecutor José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos.

Proceso