Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, the eldest daughter of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, lives in California, where her father visited twice.
In an interview with British newspaper The Guardian, the 39-year-old American daughter of "El Chapo" Guzmán spoke about family and her work, owning a small chain of carwashes, beauty salons and cafes.
Well dressed, and with a Rolex on her wrist, a Louis Vuitton bag at her feet and a Mercedes Benz parked outside, she spoke with the paper under the condition of being discrete about her location and family information, for security purposes.
“Did you know he’s called Archivaldo and not Joaquín?” she said. “My dad isn’t a millionaire like Forbes says. The magazine said you could count all the millions my old man supposedly had. That’s not true, the Mexican government invented that.”
In the three-hour interview and subsequent telephone and Skype conversations, Guzmán Ortiz revealed her hitherto unreported life in the US and made striking claims about her father, including the allegation that he visited her in California.
“He came twice,” she said. When The Guardian asked how one of the world’s most wanted fugitives crossed the heavily guarded border she smiled. “I asked him the same, believe me.”
Guzmán Ortiz granted the interview in July 2015 on condition her exact location in California not be disclosed to protect her and her children’s privacy.
In the interview, Guzmán Ortiz spoke about cartel restructuring and betrayals, the alleged bribery of senior politicians, "El Chapo"’s plan to retire, and her friendships with a younger generation of “narco juniors,” the second generation of cartel families.
The Guardian pointed out that it could not verify her allegations against senior Mexican politicians.
Guzmán Ortiz also depicted her father as a family man who built a successful business with Mexican government approval, only to be betrayed by rival cartel members and politicians.
“My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,” she said.
She added that he lived humbly and had retired from the family “business” in 2014 before being captured. “My dad had passed the torch to my (step) brother Iván Archivaldo and planned to step down and rest.”
She is the daughter of Guzmán Loera and schoolteacher María Luisa Ortiz, and was born in Zapopan, Jalisco, in November 1976.
After her parents’ relationship ended Guzmán Ortiz was raised by her mother and a stepfather. He was abusive, she said, and at the age of 10, she stabbed him, landing her in a juvenile treatment centre in Tijuana.
Upon release she reconnected with her father. In 1992, aged 15, he sent her to Scripps Mercy, a private Catholic teaching hospital in San Diego, to be treated for potentially cancerous tumours on her back.
Due to the family "business," her father told her that he wanted her to marry Vicente Zambada Niebla, the 16-year-old son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. She became pregnant before the marriage and had a second child Zambada Niebla after they married.
She said that in May 1993 she was with her father in a parking lot at Guadalajara airport, she said, when a group of hitmen dispatched by the rival Tijuana cartel targeted the wrong car, killing a Roman Catholic cardinal, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, and six other people.
In response, "El Chapo" sent her to live with an aunt in California and she became a US citizen. She said she studied computer science at the University of Phoenix, hairdressing and cosmetology at the Marinello Schools of Beauty in Riverside, and used money from her father to open several businesses.
She also pointed out to The Guardian that her businesses attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, resulting in 15 days’ detention and a US$50,000 bond. She insisted the funding and businesses were legitimate.
“My businesses are all in order – the FBI could not prove anything,” she said.
Currently, Guzmán Ortiz is separated from Zambada Niebla, who was arrested in Mexico City in 2009 and subsequently extradited to the US, and is now partnered with the nephew of another drug lord, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, with whom she has had two children, bringing her total to four.
Asked about her father’s drug fortune, she laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.”
But reached via Skype in January, after "El Chapo" was recaptured and sent back to Altiplano, her tone was darker.
“The government broke its promise,” she complained. “If there’s a pact they don’t respect it. Now that they catch him they say he’s a criminal, a killer. But they didn’t say that when they asked for money for their campaigns. They’re hypocrites!”
She also considered it a cruel twist. “In this business there are no friendships, only associates.”