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captured, Attorney General Carpizo announced a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Officially, it was Drug Control Center (Cendro) staff and authorities in El Salvador and Guatemala that supplied the information.
    Carrillo Olea proposed sending some of the money to the foreign authorities who had participated in the capture. In El Salvador, $300,000 in cash was delivered to the then president Alfredo Cristiani, to be shared out among those who had forced El Chapo to flee from there to Guatemala.
    General Carrillo himself took another $300,000 to the new president of Guatemala, Ramiro de León Carpio, and that young captain who had made such an impression on him.
    By 2010, the reward on Guzmán’s head had increased sevenfold. The US government was offering $5 million for information on his whereabouts, and since 2009 the Mexican government had been offering $2.5 million. El Chapo had ceased to be a two-bit trafficker and convenient fall guy, to become the CEO of a global business. Today he is the best-known face of Mexico’s crime industry.
    On that two-hour flight from Chiapas to the State of Mexico, El Chapo Guzmán learned the first big lesson of his prodigious criminal career. A few minutes after the 727 took off, the head of the military police and two other officers sat down beside him.
    “Well?” said General Álvarez to El Chapo.
    The time had come to confess.

CHAPTER TWO
Life or Death
    W hen General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the Military Judicial Police, joined the operation to capture El Chapo Guzmán, he had one precise brief: to interrogate him.
    At fifty-four years old, Álvarez was used to dealing with obdurate criminals. He would never have expected the reaction he got from the drug trafficker when he went to the back of the plane and sat down beside him to begin the session.
    “Do you mind if I question the prisoner?” Álvarez asked Carrillo Olea, soon after the plane took off from Tapachula on its way to Toluca.
    “Let’s see,” thought Carrillo to himself. “He’s expected to deliver a report. On what, on how the journey went? He deserves a bit of meat.” Even so, being formally responsible for the prisoner, Carrillo couldn’t ignore Álvarez’s past history and the methods he’d used in the 1970s to interrogate left-wing guerrillas.
    “Remember that whatever you say he can use as evidence,” warned Carrillo. “If he detects any sort of threat, the least mistreatment or bad language, he’ll use it to his advantage. He’ll say anything you want, but it could mean that tomorrow you have to resign. So take it easy.”
    “Thanks for the advice!”
    About an hour later, the military police chief returned to his seat next to Carrillo.
    “I’ve spoken to him.”
    “Good.”
    If he felt at all nervous, Carrillo never mentioned it. Nonetheless, he must have been pretty concerned over the amount of informationEl Chapo possessed about his protectors. Among them were senior officials in the PGR who were very close to Jorge Carrillo Olea.

The general of the White Brigade
    Guillermo Álvarez Nahara is from Mexico City. He’s a tough man, strongly built with dark skin and prominent cheeks. At first sight, his CV is misleading. He seems to have been just another bureaucrat in Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena).
    His last post, in 2004, was as Sedena’s head of human resources. Since then he’s been retired.
    But Álvarez is much more than this. In the 1970s he was part of the so-called White Brigade, which gained notoriety for its role in the Mexican government’s “dirty war” against left-wing opposition groups. The White Brigade was credited with exterminating several armed social movements of the day, such as the Revolutionary Armed Movement, the People’s Armed Revolutionary Front, and the Peasants’ Brigade Against Injustice.
    At the time of the White Brigade, Álvarez was a colonel in the Federal Military Judicial Police. By the time he