Christian Rodriguez, the Colombian IT specialist who built the encrypted communications system for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and then secretly handed its keys to the FBI, testified against the Sinaloa cartel leader in January 2019. He had been 21 years old when he was recruited to build the cartel’s private communications network, a system specifically designed to keep El Chapo’s voice off any channels law enforcement could intercept. In early 2008, Rodriguez was a Colombian systems engineering dropout building a cybersecurity startup. Through the Sifuentes-Villa family, Colombian traffickers with deep ties to the Sinaloa cartel, he was introduced to the organization.
He was flown on a private aircraft to a hidden airstrip in the mountains of Sinaloa, where he was brought before El Chapo himself. Rodriguez testified he was frightened when he realized who he was meeting, and he was hired on the spot for approximately $500,000 to build a secure encrypted communications network. The system he built functioned like a private corporate phone network. Modified BlackBerry and Nokia devices connected through private servers rather than commercial telephone networks, and cartel members communicated through internal extension codes that existed only within the system.
When El Chapo placed a call, it appeared as unknown on the recipient’s device. The system worked as intended, allowing the cartel to conduct business without generating the kind of phone records investigators rely on. El Chapo then gave Rodriguez a second task. He directed him to install commercial spyware, specifically FlexiSpy, on more than 50 phones belonging to people in his inner circle, including his wife, mistresses, and close associates.
The spyware could read messages, track locations, and remotely activate microphones to listen to conversations near the devices, even when no call was being made. El Chapo was building a surveillance apparatus aimed at the people closest to him. In 2010, a cooperating witness working with the FBI lured Rodriguez to a meeting in Manhattan, telling him a Russian organized crime figure wanted to purchase a version of the system. The meeting was recorded, giving the FBI evidence connecting Rodriguez to the cartel’s criminal enterprise.
In February 2011, federal agents confronted him in Bogotá, Colombia. Facing catastrophic legal exposure, Rodriguez agreed to cooperate. Over the next several years, Rodriguez provided the FBI with unprecedented access to the cartel’s network. He persuaded the organization to relocate its servers from Canada to the Netherlands, placing the infrastructure in a jurisdiction where American and Dutch cooperation made interception more practical.
He then modified the system so that calls recorded during the day were automatically copied and forwarded at midnight to a server the FBI had administrator access to. According to trial testimony, investigators obtained more than 800 calls and text messages connected to the network, with roughly 100 to 200 containing El Chapo’s own voice. Agents heard him directing what he called “the company’s operations” and responding to incidents like Mexican police interference, telling an associate to “just reprimand them, don’t beat them up. ” Rodriguez also provided the FBI with access to the FlexiSpy account El Chapo used to monitor his inner circle, meaning investigators could see the surveillance data he had collected on his own people.
In 2012, the danger became concrete. Rodriguez testified that he intercepted communications in which members of the network said it had been “confirmed 100%” that he was cooperating with US authorities. Federal authorities extracted Rodriguez and his immediate family to the United States. In 2013, he suffered what he described as a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized, at one point undergoing electroconvulsive therapy.
At trial in January 2019, Rodriguez testified over multiple days. The court took unusual protective measures, instructing courtroom artists not to sketch his face. Now 32 years old, he sat across from El Chapo and described how the system worked, how he was recruited, how the spyware operated, and how the streaming of communications to the FBI was set up. He also testified that during the cooperation period he had provided real-time GPS information from El Chapo’s phones.
The defense challenged his credibility, pointing out that Rodriguez had received $480,000 from the FBI for expenses and technology services, in addition to being allowed to keep the $500,000 he had earned from El Chapo, and that he had admitted neglecting to pay taxes on the government payments. El Chapo was convicted on all major counts in February 2019 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. He is serving that sentence at ADX Florence in Colorado under severe restrictions. FBI agent Steven Marston described Rodriguez as the source of the largest publicly known trove of hard evidence against the defendant, though the prosecution also relied on testimony from dozens of other cooperating witnesses, financial records, and documentary evidence.
Rodriguez’s cooperation carried lasting consequences: he entered the witness protection program under a new identity, and the cartel he once served continues to operate in various forms, with El Chapo’s sons maintaining significant power within the organization. The Rodriguez story illustrates a fundamental vulnerability of modern criminal organizations: the more sophisticated and centralized the technology, the more dangerous it becomes when the person who maintains it changes sides. El Chapo paid half a million dollars to make his communications invisible, but the very system he trusted, and the man he trusted to build it, became the most comprehensive record of his own crimes ever collected.