Road-Tripping Through the Landscape That Spawned El Chapo
Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via GettyIt’s a hot and sunny day in mid-April 2019, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a borrowed Honda Pilot SUV driven by Miguel Ángel Vega, a jovial reporter born and raised in Culiacán. We’re on our way to La Tuna, the birthplace of El Chapo, and like many of the towns and villages in these parts, it is not an easy place to get to. For people who don’t want to be found, that’s what makes it such a good place to hide. Driving along the twists and turns of Highway 24 as it hugs the curves of the hillsides, I can see why Sinaloans pride themselves on autonomy: in a place this remote, you can’t look to the outside world for help.As I was about to find out, they take matters of security into their own hands out here.It’s an hour just to get from Culiacán to the municipal capital of Badiraguato, a town of about 3,700 people that spreads out on either side of the highway, which forms a main drag through town. Crossing the last bridge on the way out of Badiraguato, our cell phones lose service, and we drive for another hour up the highway before our next turn. Miguel Ángel and I pass the time chatting about the job, him quizzing me on my experience reporting on El Chapo’s trial and me asking him questions about the area, obscure figures in the drug trade, his life reporting on the violence in his hometown. It’s early afternoon now, and I’m forced to reapply sunscreen to my skin, still pale from winter in New York, and eventually I drape a spare shirt over my right arm to keep it from burning in the sun. Finally we come to the turnoff that will lead to La Tuna. This is where we hit the first checkpoint.Read more at The Daily Beast.
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