The most powerful drug trafficker on the planet answered his phone with a cheerful, sing-songy greeting: “Olo olo hola. ” That voice, later described by an FBI agent as high-pitched with a nasal undertone, would help put Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in prison for life. The Sinaloa cartel leader had paid a young Colombian IT specialist named Christian Rodriguez to build an encrypted communications network so his leadership could talk freely. Rodriguez built the system, routing calls through cartel-controlled servers.
He also installed spyware on phones Guzmán handed to close associates, allowing the boss to read their messages, track their locations, and even activate their microphones. Then the FBI approached Rodriguez in a Manhattan hotel, and he agreed to cooperate. When the cartel moved its servers to the Netherlands, U. S.
authorities worked with Dutch officials. Between April 2011 and January 2012, they intercepted around 1,500 calls, roughly 200 of them made by Guzmán himself from mountain hideouts. Investigators also gathered more than a million intercepted text messages between cartel members. At trial, FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Marston explained how they identified Guzmán’s voice, comparing it to other recordings, including a 2015 video interview he gave to Rolling Stone.
In one intercepted call, Guzmán warned an enforcer not to provoke police because attention was bad for business. Another intercept captured a conversation between Guzmán and a federal police commander identified in the call log by the nickname “El Yankee. ” A man hunted by the Mexican government had its commanders in his contacts. A second tape was not an interception at all, but a setup.
Pedro Flores and his twin brother Margarito ran one of the largest drug distribution operations in the United States out of Chicago, moving cocaine and heroin for the Sinaloa cartel. In 2008, they agreed to cooperate with the DEA. Pedro Flores, then a fugitive in Mexico, called Guzmán and recorded their conversation. “Amigo,” Guzmán said at the start of the call, according to the government’s translation.
Flores asked the boss to knock $5,000 off the per-kilo price, bringing it down to $50,000. Guzmán sounded happy to help. That exchange was devastating in court because it countered the defense argument that Guzmán was a myth built by cooperating witnesses. On that tape, the myth negotiated a price personally, in his own voice.
The third piece of evidence was text messages captured through Rodriguez’s spyware. On January 9, 2019, prosecutors displayed them on screens in a Brooklyn courtroom. Emma Coronel Aispuro, Guzmán’s wife, sat stone-faced in the gallery while her private messages to her husband were shown to the jury and the world. The messages with his wife were surprisingly normal.
They fussed over their twin daughters and handled family logistics. Then the tone changed. In February 2012, after Mexican authorities raided a mansion where Guzmán was staying and he escaped, he messaged his wife. He said he needed new clothes, shampoo, and black dye for his mustache.
Prosecutors also showed a conversation about getting an AK-47 for one of his daughters and arranging surgery for one of his mistresses. Other messages involved a woman Guzmán called “Fiera,” meaning wild beast. The exchanges mixed romance with logistics. He asked, “How are the sales?
” She answered, “Nonstop, my love. ” In a separate message to a friend, she referred to Guzmán as “the jerk. ” The irony was that Guzmán built the spyware system to control everyone around him, but the FBI collected every message too. The fourth recording came from a different cartel and a different kind of man.
Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, led the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the fastest growing and most violent criminal organization in Mexico. The DEA placed a $10 million bounty on him. In September 2022, Mexican media published an audio recording from 2016 that showed how his power worked on the ground. The magazine Proceso reported that it authenticated the two-and-a-half-minute call.
In it, El Mencho calls a Jalisco State Police commander directly on a radio-style channel. He identifies himself by name and tells the commander to get his officers to back off. He says he has 30 of the officers identified and threatens to go after the commander, his mother, and even his dogs if they do not fall back. The commander does not argue.
He agrees, says he will call them off right now, and addresses the cartel boss with respect. El Mencho then says the line that explains the relationship: they all happily take his money, so if they want things to stay friendly, they should act friendly. The officer was later removed from his post after the recording went public. According to reporting in February 2026, El Mencho was wounded during a government operation in Talpa, Jalisco, and died afterward in custody.
In the hours that followed, Jalisco saw vehicles burned and highways blocked. The 2016 audio went viral again. And then there is Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, who ran it for decades. Through the 1990s, through Chapo’s arrests and prison escapes, through the fentanyl era, he was never arrested in Mexico.
He avoided the technology that destroyed everyone around him. On July 25, 2024, Zambada was taken into U. S. custody after landing at an airfield near El Paso, Texas.
His lawyer said he was kidnapped and delivered to American authorities by Joaquín Guzmán López, one of El Chapo’s sons, who denied it. On August 25, 2025, in the same Brooklyn federal courthouse where El Chapo was convicted, the 75-year-old stood up and said one word: “Culpable. ” Guilty. He then spoke for eight minutes.
Through a translator, he traced his life in the drug trade back to 1969, when he left school with a sixth-grade education and planted marijuana for the first time. He admitted paying bribes in Mexico for 45 years to police, soldiers, and politicians. He acknowledged that he directed people under his control to kill others for the cartel, and he said many innocent people were also killed. Prosecutors said his organization smuggled at least 1.
5 million kilograms of cocaine into the United States. As part of the plea, he agreed to forfeit $15 billion in assets. His lawyer, Frank Perez, emphasized that the plea agreement did not obligate Zambada to cooperate with government investigators. His sentencing, originally set for January 2026, was pushed to April 13, 2026.
El Chapo was sentenced to life in a U. S. prison in 2019. El Mencho died in custody.
El Mayo, who said nothing and trusted nothing for decades, faced the same life sentence in the same Brooklyn courtroom. The thread running through all of these recordings is not the threats or the drug prices. It is the ordinary moments: a man asking his wife for hair dye while fleeing a raid, a man greeting a customer with “amigo,” a police commander saying “Yes, sir. ”
The voices on these recordings are in prison or dead.
The phone calls they were making are still happening on somebody else’s line. The system they exposed remains.