Bad Reporting

Newsweek's recent profile of Chapo Guzmán is one of the most error-riddled Mexico pieces I've ever seen in the American media. Among the mistakes:

El Chapo's top enforcer, a man named Santiago Meza Lopez...

Santiago Meza, el Pozolero del Teo, is not el Chapo's top enforcer. Indeed, it's not clear that he was anyone's enforcer; his thing was dissolving dead bodies, not killing them himself. He worked primarily in Tijuana, where el Chapo's presence is small, for Teodoro García.

From this point, steep dirt trails wound through mountains and canyons, navigable only by all-terrain vehicles known here as quatromotos.

The word in Spanish for ATV is cuatrimotos, not quatromotos.

He'd gone underground, thanks in part to President Felipe Calderón's all-out war on the drug cartels—2,500 troops were now based in Culiacán and carrying out daily raids—but also because of a bloody feud with a former close ally and boyhood friend, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, nicknamed Mochomo ("Redhead").

This isn't really wrong, but the standard explanation is that Chapo is at war with Arturo Beltrán, who is the chief of his group. Alfredo has been in jail since January 2008. Also, "Mochomo" is usually translated as "fire ant", not "redhead". Indeed, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva doesn't have red hair, at least not in this photo.

Calderón has made the arrest of El Chapo and other top drug figures a priority...

Actually, Calderón has made this goal secondary to undercutting kingpins' key operators and financial networks.

All told, drug violence in Mexico last year killed 7,500 people.

The PGR count is 5,600 dead in 2008 (unless it's been surreptitiously revised upward, which I suppose is possible). Some informal counts rise to about 6,500. I've never seen any number, reliable or otherwise, placing the number of those killed in 2008 at 7,500.

The boy was a troublemaker who, like Escobar, fell into petty crime. In his 20s he reached out to the powerful Guadalajara cartel, then run by Miguel (El Padrino) Félix Gallardo, and was made a lieutenant in the organization. Unschooled but a natural administrator, Guzman was soon supervising the movement of tons of cocaine and marijuana each month across a network of rural airstrips inside Mexico. After Gallardo was captured and extradited to the United States in 1989, Guzman started his own organization, known as the Federación, with a tight circle of associates who had grown up together in the hills.

First of all, Félix is Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo's primary last name, not Gallardo. That's a bit like referring to LBJ as Baines. Second, in comparison to the standard version, the author oversells Guzmán's role in the immediate post-Félix landscape. The organizations that came out of his arrest are usually attributed to Félix himself, not Chapo, who was barely into his 30s at that point. Third, the comparison between Chapo and Escobar is flimsy, flimsy, flimsy. Lastly, Félix Gallardo was never extradited! Don't just take my word for it: in the second paragraph of the front page of the website his family set up for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, it makes reference to his stay in CEFERESO 1, a Mexican prison. Fact-checkers?

Then, in January 2001, shortly before he was to be extradited to the United States to face a 50-year sentence for murder and drug trafficking...

The extradition was a rumor, not an imminent event. As it happens, Fox never extradited anyone of Chapo's stature to the US.

"These guys have been protecting Guzman," says Manuel Clouthier Carrillo, leader of the main opposition party in Sinaloa, the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI).

In fact, Manuel Clouthier Carrillo is a member of the PAN, and the son of one of the most significant panistas of the twentieth century.