New York Times: How A Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Joaqun Guzmn is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave.

When Pablo Escobar was Chapo?s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career.

To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America?s ?insatiable demand for illegal drugs? is what drives the clandestine industry.

t?s no accident that the world?s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world?s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. ?Poor Mexico,? its former president Porfirio Daz is said to have remarked. ?So far from God and so close to the United States.?

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