Joaquín Guzmán, Surname “El Chapo” – the “squat”, the “dwarf” – will probably never see “his” museum. One of the world’s most notorious drug traffickers, once the powerful leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, is serving a life sentence in the United States.
El Chapo was born sixty-five years ago in a poor hamlet in the municipality of Badiraguato, in the state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico.
To develop tourism, José Paz López, the mayor of Badiraguato, recently proposed the creation of a museum dedicated to drug trafficking in a video that made the rounds on social networks, included in particular on the site of the magazine Mirror, from Culiacán, the state capital:
“We can’t turn our backs on our history, we have to face it.”
Defeat a stigma
However, in the mind of the mayor, it is not a question of praising the drug trade, a fortiori of El Chapo, but on the contrary of showing that “using drugs is harmful”.
His idea : “The municipality must develop economically”, through tourism, and “overcome the stigma of drug trafficking”, which marks both the municipality and the state of Sinaloa.
Nevertheless, this project – which has not yet been definitively approved – has caused a lot of ink to flow in Mexico, and the declarations of José Paz López have triggered a political turmoil.
On the same side as the mayor, a member of the ruling party Morena (National Regeneration Movement) of left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the governor of Sinaloa rejected the initiative. Rubén Rocha Moya launched, taken up by the site of the weekly Riotwelve, specialized in drug trafficking investigations:
“As long as I am governor, I will not allow [un tel musée] in Sinaloa. Let them put it somewhere else.”
In the USA ?
He added : “Yes, it is part of our history [mais] we do not want this symbol passed on to us.”
He even suggested that such a museum be set up in the United States, “where the drug addicts are”.
The case even went up to the Senate, in Mexico City, in particular to the Education Committee. Mario Zamora Gastélum, opposition senator from Sinaloa, defended the project, as reported by the site Nevertheless :
“It may seem like a strange, controversial or half-crazy idea but also a valuable one.”