From Pablo Escobar to ‘El Mencho’: these have been the most famous ‘narcos’ in history
Here’s a look at the world’s most famous drug lords.
The news that El Mencho was killed by Mexican authorities sent shockwaves around the world, with the distressing footage later emerging of how the violence had spread across the streets of various regions within the country.
El Mencho’s real name was Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, and he was a notorious drug lord that founded and led the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Here’s a look at some of the most famous drug lords throughout history:
- Jesús Héctor Palma Salazar, “El Güero Palma”
Leader of the Sinaloa cartel alongside El Chapo Guzmán. In June 1995, Palma was arrested, accused of collaborating with the Juárez cartel, after the light aircraft he was travelling in to attend a wedding crashed. El Güero survived the accident and was subsequently detained by officers of the Mexican army. He was sentenced to 29 years in prison in the United States, but was released early for good behaviour. He was repatriated to Mexico, where he is currently held at El Altiplano prison, serving a custodial sentence for homicide.
- Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera
Joaquín Guzmán began in drug trafficking in the late 1970s, working for El Güero Palma and overseeing cocaine shipments to the United States. In 1993 he was arrested and, while serving his prison sentence, escaped from a prison in Jalisco in 1995. His ‘legend’ as a fugitive then began, managing to evade law enforcement authorities in both Mexico and the United States.
He was captured again in 2014 and escaped once more the following year. In 2015 he was recaptured and again managed to escape. In January 2016 he was captured yet again and transferred to the maximum security prison of El Altiplano. From there he was extradited to the United States, where in 2019 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for drug trafficking offences, plus 30 years for firearms-related violence and a further 20 years for money laundering.
- Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada
Co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel. He has just been arrested in the United States. ‘El Mayo’ was the organisation’s strategist. For decades, he had been wanted by US authorities. In fact, his name appears in at least five criminal cases filed between 2013 and 2016 in federal courts in the country.
As expected, in all of them he is accused of facilitating the trafficking of marijuana and cocaine into US territory and of inheriting the criminal empire once Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán was arrested and prosecuted. Guzmán has been serving a life sentence since 2019 in a maximum security prison in Colorado.
- Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
Known as the Boss of Bosses. In the 1980s he was referred to as the Drug Tsar. He was one of the founders of the Guadalajara Cartel and for a time controlled all illegal drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States.
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was arrested and charged on 8 April 1989 by Mexican and US authorities on drug trafficking and other offences. While in prison, he remained one of Mexico’s leading criminals, issuing orders to his organisation via mobile phone until he was transferred to a maximum security facility. During his imprisonment his health deteriorated significantly. He repeatedly requested, particularly from 2013 onwards when he turned 70, to serve the remainder of his sentence at home, and was granted house arrest in 2022.
- Amado Carrillo
Known as El Señor de los Cielos because of the fleet of aircraft he owned and the millions of dollars he amassed, he was a Mexican drug trafficker who became leader of the Juárez Cartel after Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was arrested.
In 1997 his name became the most wanted on the DEA’s list of fugitives. He fled to Chile, where he sought to continue his operations across South America, including Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. He later returned to Mexico to undergo cosmetic surgery, with tragic consequences, as Carrillo died in the operating theatre due to the anaesthesia administered to ease his pain. Various legends emerged about Carrillo following his death in such unusual circumstances.
- Vicente Carillo Fuentes
Known as El Viceroy, he led the Juárez Cartel after the death of his brother Amado Carrillo in 1997 until his capture in 2014. He was sentenced to 48 years in prison, effectively a life sentence, as he would be 108 years old upon release.
- Pablo Escobar
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug trafficker, criminal, terrorist and politician, founder and supreme leader of the bloody Medellín Cartel. In the mid 1970s he became a key figure in the international cocaine trade, at one point becoming the seventh richest man in the world. In the image he appears alongside his wife, Victoria Eugenia Henao.
In 1991, after orchestrating an aircraft bombing in which it was believed that presidential candidate César Gaviria was among the passengers, although he was not on board, 110 people were killed. The Colombian government sought assistance from the US DEA to bring an end to the cycle of terror imposed by Escobar.
On 2 December 1993 he was located by the Search Bloc, a paramilitary unit created to capture him, and was killed.
- Griselda Blanco
She was part of the leadership of the Medellín Cartel and a pioneer of cocaine trafficking and crime in Miami during the 1970s and 1980s. Her most well-known alias, “The Black Widow,” comes from having been married several times and being suspected of causing the deaths of her husbands. She was imprisoned in 1985 for the murder of two Cuban drug traffickers, regaining her freedom in the 2000s after making a deal with the FBI. She was later killed in Colombia in a revenge attack.
- Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela
Gilberto (born 1939) is the eldest of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, founders of the cartel in the mid-1970s. He was nicknamed ‘The Chess Player’ in a pompous display of monikers because he was said to anticipate his rivals’ moves.
Together with his brother and José Santacruz Londoño, he formed a group known as ‘Los Chemas,’ dedicated to extortion and bribery, which became the seed of the cartel. He was captured in 1995 and extradited to the United States in 2004.
He died on 31 May 2022 in a hospital, where he had been transferred a month earlier from the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, due to pancreatic and prostate cancer, but he ultimately passed away from a heart condition.
- Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela
Brother of Gilberto, Miguel Rodríguez (born 1943) was in charge of the logistical side of the drug business and is also associated with the cartel’s more violent wing, which led the conflict against Pablo Escobar’s faction in the mid-1980s.
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Miguel Rodríguez is currently serving a 30-year sentence at the Edgefield Federal Correctional Institution in South Carolina. While imprisoned in Colombia, he served his sentence in the prisons of Palmira, Cómbita, Modelo (Bogotá), and Palogordo in San Juan de Girón, from where he was transferred for extradition.
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