BADIRAGUATO, Mexico — People living in the hometown of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman have heard stories of his benevolence: gifts of medicine for the poor, deliveries of drinking water to storm-stricken towns. But finding anyone who’s actually received or even seen such a gift is another matter.
In Badiraguato, the small mountain town that is part of Guzman’s rags-to-crime-riches mythology, none of the two dozen people interviewed by The Associated Press could point out evidence of his legendary largesse.
“I don’t see a single building producing jobs, a single piece of public works, a soccer field, a sewer, a school, water systems, a clinic or hospital, not a single one that you can say was built by drug traffickers or their money,” Mayor Mario Valenzuela said.
If Guzman or his cartel had invested in their hometowns, he said, “they’d look different; they would have paved roads or drainage systems, but they don’t.”
Guzman’s July 11 escape from a prison near Mexico City has focused attention again on Badiraguato, the county seat of a township that includes the hamlet of La Tuna, where El Chapo’s mother still lives.
The roads to La Tuna are still washed-out dirt tracks, and Badiraguato itself has none of the flashy accoutrements of money — palatial mausoleums and fancy, gated communities of new homes — that are abundant in Culiacan, the state capital.
Tucked into the foothills where the coastal stretches of flat corn and tomato fields meet the imposing mountains of the Sierra Madre, Badiraguato remains mired in poverty, Valenzuela acknowledges that many of the township’s residents make a living growing marijuana or opium poppies.
Guzman grew up here, the son of a poor farmer. His rise as a crime boss has been surrounded by mythology, a Hollywood version of an old-school Mafioso — ruthless yet honorable. Songs have been written in his honor, and some locals extol him as a Robin Hood-type figure who is careful to leave innocents out of his deadly score-settlings.
“Chapo Guzman isn’t violent,” Valenzuela said about a man accused of hundreds of murders. “He doesn’t shoot it out with the government.”
That’s unlike the reputation of the Jalisco New Generation cartel to the south, which is alleged to have brought down a military helicopter May 1 with a rocket-propelled missile. Or the Zetas, who have fueled their notoriety in central Mexico with grisly beheadings and the hanging of bodies across public highways. Or Guerreros Unidos, the cartel alleged to have killed 43 college students last fall.
For many who live in the state that gives name to Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel, he is seen as a lesser evil.
Badiraguato is not immune to violence. The township of 30,000 reports a homicide rate at least five times the national average.
Violence, threats and fear in Sinaloa have displaced poor farming families, with hundreds fleeing the mountainous township of Sinaloa de Leyva during the past five years. Dozens of families left the village of Ocurahui after drug gangs, particularly the Sinaloa cartel, pressured farmers to plant opium poppies to counter falling prices for marijuana. Residents who didn’t want to grow drug crops faced kidnappings or even death.
Yet, the mythology surrounding Guzman lives on.
Lucero Uriarte, a high-school student in Badiraguato, said of the drug lord: “He has helped a lot of people — more than anyone else, the poor — because he knows what they’re going through.”
