12 Times Cartel Bosses Survived Assassination Attempts D

May 24, 1993. El Chapo crawls across an airport parking lot while bullets shred the Buick he escaped from. Seven dead, including a Catholic cardinal in full clerical robes. The world’s most wanted drug lord just walked away from a hit that should have killed him. These are 12 times cartel bosses survived assassination attempts.

May 24th, 1993 in Guadalajara International Airport at 3:45 in the afternoon. El Chapo Guzman steps out of his green armored Buick ready to board an Aeromeico flight. He has no idea that a kill team led personally by Rammon Arilano Felix is already sweeping the parking lot looking for him.

A corrupt judicial police agent had sold him out. The Tijuana cartel knew exactly when and where to find him. The gunmen were Logan Heights gang members from San Diego, killers trained by the Ariano Felix brothers. They moved through the lot with machine guns hidden under their coats.

El Chapo’s bodyguard spotted them first. Run, run. There are people with guns. El Chapo hit the ground and started crawling. What happened next was a catastrophe. Parked a few feet from El Chapo’s Buick was an identical looking white Grand Marquee. Inside that car sat Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Okmpo of Guadalajara in full clerical robes and with his driver.

Unfortunately, the gunman opened fire on the wrong car. They riddled the Grand Marquee with at least 38 bullets at point blank range. 14 struck the cardinal and 11 hit his driver. Meanwhile, El Chapo was crawling toward the terminal. He and his lieutenant Arturo Beltran Leva climbed onto a baggage conveyor belt, rode it through to the other side of the airport, hijacked a taxi, and disappeared.

Seven dead, including a cardinal of the Catholic Church. A declassified US intelligence report later confirmed it. The Aralano Felix brothers tried to kill El Chapo Guzman, but instead they killed a cardinal instead. It was the day the world first heard the name Chapo. June 26th, 2020, at 6:38 in the morning, the chief of police of Mexico City is being driven down Po de la reform on his way to a security cabinet meeting with the mayor.

Little does he know, there is a trap waiting for him. A flatbed truck pulls into the intersection at Monte Blanco, blocking traffic. About eight men dressed as municipal road workers pop up over the side of the truck. They are not road workers. They are CJNG Sicarios and they are holding Barrett 50 caliber rifles, AK-47s, and fragmentation grenades. Then the shooting starts.

Roughly 28 gunmen in total open fire on Omar Garcia Harucha’s armored Suburban. They pump more than 400 rounds into the vehicle. They throw grenades as they try to crack the armor open like a tin can. Inside, Garcia Harucha’s two longtime bodyguards are killed instantly in the front seats.

A woman walking to work, a merchant from the state of Mexico, dies on the sidewalk from a stray round, and multiple officers are wounded, but the suburban holds. Garcia Haruk takes three bullets and absorbs shrapnel in his knee and his arm, but he is alive and conscious. And after a few hours later, from a hospital bed, he posts a message to Twitter that becomes one of the most famous tweets in modern Mexican history.

He says in Spanish, “This morning, we were cowardly attacked by the CJNG. Two of my comrades and friends lost their lives. I have three bullet impacts and several shrapnel wounds.” He named the cartel by name in public. Here’s what makes this story matter. The man who ordered the hit was Nessio Oera Cervantes, Elmeno, boss of the CJNG.

Years later, Garcia Haruch would become Mexico’s Secretary of Security under President Claudia Shinbomb. And in February 2026, he would lead the operation that finally killed Elmeno in a cabin in the mountains of Jaliscoco. The man El Mencho tried to murder at 6:38 in the morning is the same man who eventually took Elmano out.

The surveillance images show the attack was brazen. Monday morning around 1:00 a.m. in Puerto Vayarta, Mexico, screenshots show Jesus Alfredo Guusman sitting in a table with friends. Moments later, he’s abducted by men armed. August 15th, 2016, Puerto Valarta Lche restaurant, a high-end seafood place decorated entirely in white.

Ivan Archivaldo Guusman, son of El Chapo, is celebrating his 33rd birthday with 16 friends. His brother, Jesus Alfredo, and a dozen heavily armed bodyguards. The Chapitos believe they are untouchable. Their father is El Chapo. Their cartel runs the country. What could go wrong inside a restaurant they essentially own? Then the door opens.

About 20 CJ Sakarios walk in. They do not fire a single shot. According to the restaurant’s own chef, in 34 seconds, they had subdued both Guzman brothers, beaten them with their weapons in front of the security cameras, and walked six men out into the night. The most powerful narco princes in Mexico were just kidnapped at their own birthday party by rivals in public without firing a bullet.

Everything was on the surveillance footage. The CJNG had just delivered the most humiliating message possible to the Sinaloa cartel. But here’s the thing, they were taken to die. Years later, Sinaloa lieutenant on Damaso Lopez elin leak told Proesseso magazine the truth. They took them to kill them. That was the order. So, how did they survive? El Chapo himself.

From inside the maximum security walls of Altiplano prison, the world’s most famous drug lord got a message to Eleno. The message was simple. Eleno’s son, Rubeno Sera, was sitting in a different prison, and El Chapo could have him reached. The deal was delivered word for word.

As you give me back my sons, I’ll give you back yours.” 5 days later, the Chapitos walked free. Years later, Ivon Archivaldo gave an interview about that night to a Belgian magazine. He said, “The only lesson I learned from this is that I can’t trust anyone, not even my own shadow. Fortunately, the people who kidnapped me spared my life.

This is the only reason I am still with my family and friends.” It might be the most expensive prisoner swap in cartel history. June 11th, 1994 at 2:00 in the morning in Guadalajara, Haliscoco, the Hotel Camino Royale, a luxury hotel was hosting a debutant ball and a private birthday party for a Sinnoloan businessman named Eliki Fernandez Uriarte.

Ismael Elmo Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, had been invited to the party. Outside the hotel entrance, a Toyota packed with explosives sits idling in the dark. The men inside the car believe Elmo is upstairs at the celebration, but no one else knows that they are about to detonate one of the largest car bombs in Mexican history.

They light it. The blast shreds the front of the hotel. Windows shatter for blocks. The tour bus of the Norteno band Los Huracanes parked nearby is destroyed. The men inside the bomb car are vaporized along with their target. Five people die as nearly a dozen are injured.

But there is just one problem with the plan. El Mayo never showed up. Whether he got a tip or whether his security simply told him to skip a public party, no one knows. But while the Toyota was exploding in front of the hotel Camino Royale, Elmo Zambada was somewhere else entirely, probably already back in the mountains of Sinaloa.

The hit, according to later investigations, came from the Arano Felix brothers in Tijana, the same family that tried to kill El Chapo at the airport one month earlier. They were trying to wipe out the entire next generation of Sinaloa leadership in a single summer. Elmeo would go on to survive every cartel war for the next 30 years.

He survived the Beltron Leva schism. He survived Los Zetas. He even survived the rise of CJNG. But he was never photographed in custody until July 2024 when his old partner’s son tricked him into a meeting, threw a hood over his head, and flew him to Texas. Asked once how he stayed alive so long, Elmo gave one of the most haunting quotes in cartel history.

He said, “The bush is my home, my family, my protection, my land, the water I drink.” And then he said, “I am afraid all the time.” May 1st, 2015 in the morning, the mountains near Villa Purification, Haliscoco. The Mexican federal government has just launched its most ambitious operation in years. Operation Halisco. The mission is simple.

Capture or kill the founder of the CJNG, Nemesis Seera Cervantes, known as El Mencho. Three federal helicopters carrying 18 agents descend toward Eleno’s convoy. What the agents do not know is that someone in their own chain of command has already sold them out. El Mencho’s gunmen are waiting.

And they are not waiting with rifles. They are waiting with a 50 caliber Browning machine gun, a Barrett anti-material rifle, and a Soviet-made RPG7 rocket launcher. The Federalis had planned to parachute out of the choppers and continue on foot. They never got the chance. The CJNG fired the RPG into the air. The rocket tore through the rotor of the lead helicopter.

The chopper caught fire and spiraled into the mountains. One of the men inside that burning helicopter was a federal officer named Ivon Morales. That morning before he left for work, his wife had told him she was pregnant. He was going to be a father for the first time. Eventually, he survived the crash. Barely.

Thirdderee burns over 70% of his body. 15 reconstructive surgeries. Eight of his fellow officers did not make it. Nine federal personnel were killed in total. While the helicopter was still burning, Eleno’s men launched coordinated attacks across the state of Halisco. They torched vehicles. They blew up gas stations. They attacked government buildings.

They wanted the world to see what trying to touch Elmeno looked like. Then, President Enrique Pñenato vowed that day to dismantle the CJNG. He didn’t. Mexico did not seriously attempt to take Elmeno out again for nearly a decade. He stayed in those mountains untouched, the most powerful drug lord in the Western Hemisphere for another 11 years.

A retired DEA agent named Mike Donahghue summed it up later as he said, “That tactic worked for him. They know he’ll do it again.” In it is the only time in modern history a drug cartel shot down a military helicopter and walked away. November 17th, 1995, around 10 at night in Mexico City. The Bali High, a fashionable seafood restaurant.

At one of the tables sits Amato Curio Fuentes, the boss of the Wararez cartel, the man American authorities call the wealthiest drug trafficker in the world. He owns a fleet of Boeing 727 jets that fly Colombian cocaine across Latin America. His nickname is Lord of the Skies. He is having dinner with his wife. Then a dozen men walk through the front door of the restaurant carrying machine guns held flat against their bodies like briefcases.

At the head of the hit squad is Rammon Ariano Felix. The same Ramon who tried to kill El Chapo at the airport. The same family that had bombed the hotel Camino Royale trying to get Elmo. Now they were going after the richest narco in the world. Their goal was to stop Amato Carillo from being crowned the new boss of bosses of all Mexico.

The parking lot exploded into a firefight first. Carillo’s outer bodyguard ring engaged the attackers before they could reach the dining room. Bullets ripped through cars and storefrs. Then the gunman made it inside and opened fire across the restaurant. Amato and his wife were already moving. His security detail rushed them through the kitchen, past terrified staff, and out a back exit.

One bodyguard caught a bullet, shielding the boss as they reached the getaway car. Rammon Arilano Felix himself was wounded in the chaos. Amato escaped and the Lord of the Skies kept his crown. But here’s the dark joke at the heart of his story. Surviving an ambush by the most feared Sakario in Mexico is not what killed him.

Two years later on July 4th, 1997, Amato Curio Fuentes checked into a private hospital in Mexico City for plastic surgery. He wanted lipos suction and a new face because he wanted to disappear, but he died on the operating table because a respirator malfunctioned. 4 months later, the two surgeons who performed his operation were found tortured to death.

Their bodies were sealed inside steel drums filled with concrete. A man who survived submachine guns in a packed restaurant was killed by an elective cosmetic surgery. Whale Escobar is not universally loved. He was the target earlier this year of an assassination attempt, one that involved British mercenaries.

In 1989, the Cali cartel had just paid a Scottish ex-British SAS commando named Peter McCallis the sum of $1 million. The mission is one sentence long. Kill Pablo Escobar at his estate, Aiendonopoulos. This is not a story you hear often. It deserves its own chapter in the Escobar mythology.

The Cali bosses, the Rodriguez Orwella brothers and Pacho Herrera had decided that Colombian Sicarios were not enough. They wanted real military operators. So they recruited Meliss, a man who had served with the elite SAS and fought as a mercenary. across Africa. Meliss put together a team of 12 ex-soldiers. They trained in secret.

They studied maps of Hienda Napopoulos. They knew where Pablo slept. They knew where his bodyguards posted. They knew the helicopter approached paths through the Colombian mountains. The plan was a helicopter assault. Fly in low, hit the estate before security could respond. Kill Escobar in his bed and fly out.

But they never made it. The helicopter carrying the assault team crashed in the Colombian mountains before they could reach Hienda. The crash left Meliss and his entire team stranded deep in Escobar’s territory. Surrounded by his sakarios, surrounded by his peasant informants and surrounded by the jungle.

They aborted the mission. They escaped the country with their lives barely. Pablo Escobar never knew how close he came. A team of professional soldiers financed by his greatest enemy had been minutes from his bedroom when their helicopter went down. Malise gave interviews about it decades later.

He died in his 80s, an old man in Scotland. The team he led survived. But here’s the thing. The Cali cartel was not done trying. They were just getting started. And the failure of the MAS mission convinced them that if professional soldiers couldn’t kill Pablo, they would have to do it the Colombian way with dynamite. Late 2013, the state of Mishawakan is on fire.

The Knights Templar cartel, a religious narco group that quotes scripture while extorting lime farmers, has triggered the rise of armed citizen militias. Federal troops are flooding the region. At the top of the most wanted list sits a former elementary school teacher named Cervando Gomez Martinez. Code name Latuta. Co-founder and last surviving leader of the Knights Templar. The bounty on his head is $2.

5 million. What does Latuda do? He goes on television while thousands of federal troops sweep the Mishawakan Mountains looking for him. Latuda records a sitdown interview with Channel 4 News out of the United Kingdom. He sits in front of the camera with a graying beard, a baseball cap, and jeans and tells the reporter he will fight to the death.

Before he surrenders, he starts a YouTube channel. He calls into Mexican radio talk shows. He is broadcasting his location, almost daring them to come get him, but they can’t. For nearly two years, Latuda survives the largest manhunt in modern Mexican history. He survives multiple federal raids. He survives the death of his co-founder, Nazario Elmas Loco Moreno, who was actually killed by the Navy twice.

The first death announcement turned out to be wrong, but they got him for real in 2014. Even at that, Latuda keeps slipping away. Mansion raids find his food still warm. Safe houses find his clothes still on the bed. Every farmer in the tiarra caliente is on his payroll. He bragged on camera that he would die before he was caught alive.

February 27th, 2015, at around 3:00 in the morning, Murelia, an elite federal police unit, kicks in the door of a small safe house and Latuda is captured without a single shot fired. He took the cuffs without a fight, 55 years for one kidnapping case, then a separate 47 years for drug trafficking.

Then he was extradited to the United States in August 2025. The school teacher who started a religious cartel survived 2 years of national manhunt by going viral. And then he just got tired. One of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted fugitives is now in custody. The Department of Justice says Raphael Kado Cano was known as the narco of narcos.

He was captured by Mexican forces on Friday. He is the drug lord behind the killing of a US federal agent. Let me ask you a question. What do you do if you murder a DEA agent, get sentenced to 40 years in a Mexican prison, and then a corrupt judge just lets you walk out the front door 28 years in? If you are Raphael Caro Cano, you do not retire.

You build a new cartel. August 9th, 2013. A Mexican state court releases Koko Canantero on a technicality. The man who in 1985 ordered the torture and murder of DEA special agent Enrique Kiki Kamarina walks out of Pente Grande prison in broad daylight. The US Justice Department is informed only after he is already free. He vanishes within hours.

For the next 9 years, Carol Quantero rebuilt. He launches the Kaborca cartel in Sonora. He wages a brutal war against the Sinaloa cartel’s Chapito’s faction for control of the Arizona border. The FBI puts him on the 10 most wanted fugitives list. The State Department offers a $20 million reward and Caro Quantero survives all of it.

Now in his late60s, he is an old man living in the brush, hunted by every American agency that exists. July 15th, 2022. Midday, the mountains near San Simone, Sinaloa. Mexican Marines are sweeping the bush. A search dog named Max flushes Caro Quantero out of the bushes where he is hiding. He is 69 years old.

He is unarmed as he surrenders. But the survival story is not over. At nearly the exact moment Carol Quantero is being arrested, a Mexican Navy Blackhawk helicopter supporting the operation crashes in nearby Los Mochis. 14 of the 15 personnel on board were killed. The Navy denied any connection between the crash and the capture.

An unnamed American official told CBS News the crash was linked to the operation. Caro Quantero was not on board. The cause was never publicly resolved. He spent the next two years in Aliplano. February 27th, 2025, the Shine Bomb administration extradited him to the United States along with 28 other top narcos in a mass turnover.

He now faces federal charges in New York for the murder of Kiki Kamarena. Kairo Quantero survived 28 years in prison. He survived 9 years on the FBI’s most wanted list. He survived a cartel war with the Chapitos. The only thing that finally got him was a dog named Max. November 9th, 1999. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, Matamoros, Tamalipas, La Aurora neighborhood.

In front of a bright pink mansion that everyone in town knows belongs to the Gulf Cartel. A white Ford Bronco with diplomatic plates cruises slowly past the mansion. Inside are three men. DEA special agent Joe Dubois, FBI special agent Daniel Fuentes, and their confidential informant, a Mexican journalist pointing out cartel stash houses.

The Americans are taking pictures. What happens next becomes one of the most legendary standoffs in DEA history. About 15 Gulf Cartel gunmen surround the Bronco with their guns drawn. They have AK-47s. They have the agents boxed in on a residential street in the middle of cartel territory. Walking up to the driver’s window is Oel Cardinus Guillen himself, the boss of the Gulf cartel, the man Mexicans called El Mata amigos, the friend killer, because he had murdered his own business partner to take over the organization. Standing next to him is his brother Antonio. Tony Tormenta Cardinus orders the Americans to get out of the vehicle. They refuse. For several minutes, two federal agents stare down 15 cartel sakarios in broad daylight. Agent Dubois starts talking. He tells Cardinus very calmly that if he kills US federal agents on Mexican soil,

every American agency that exists will hunt him down until he is dead or in an American prison. No negotiation, no escape. Cardin has thought about it. This is not the boss surviving. This is the boss almost killing himself by killing two Americans. He laid them go. He told them never to come back.

It was the worst decision he could have made and the best. Dubois’s words came true. The US government launched a manhunt called Operation Impunity 2. In March 2003, the Mexican military closed in on Cardinus during a shootout in Matamoros. He was captured, extradited in 2007, sentenced to 25 years in US federal prison, and forced to forfeit $50 million in 2010, released in September 2024.

A boss survived an attack he started against the wrong target, and it took 25 years out of his life. April 21, 2012. Late in the evening at Monloa Kohila, the heart of Los Zeta’s territory, a private party is in full swing. Hundreds of guests, Norteno music, free flowing tequila. On the stage stands Baharez, a popular regional Mexican group playing a live set for the crowd.

Somewhere on that dance floor stands Harry Berto Lacano Z3, the founder and absolute boss of Los Zas. A former Mexican Army special forces soldier trained by US and Israeli instructors before he deserted with his entire unit and became the most feared paramilitary cartel in history. He is the second most wanted man in Mexico, right behind El Chapo.

Outside the venue, Mexican federal forces are quietly closing in. Their intelligence is good. They know Lasano is inside. They begin their move. Then the band on stage does something no one expected. Bond Jerez stops midset and dedicates the next song to a man in the crowd to Elasa by name. The crowd cheers.

The band launches into the song. It is unclear to this day whether the band knew the raid was happening, but the dedication acted like a warning siren. Lasano didn’t run for the front door. He walked casually out a side exit and into the night. And by the time federal troops swept the venue, the boss of Losas was gone.

He survived, but only for six more months. October 7th, 2012 in Progresso Kohila, a baseball stadium in a small town. The Mexican Navy receives a tip that armed men are loitering outside. A patrol pulls up. Lasano and a single bodyguard are sitting in a white van. The cartel boss does not surrender. Lasano and his bodyguard hurl fragmentation grenades at the Marines and open fire.

The shootout is short and brutal. Both men are killed and one Marine is wounded. Inside the van, the Navy finds a grenade launcher, 12 fragmentation grenades, a rocket propelled grenade system, two assault rifles. But the story does not end there. The Navy turns the body over to a funeral home in the town of Sabinus.

Before fingerprints can be officially confirmed, Zefortarios stormed the funeral home and steal the body. To this day, conspiracy theories swirl that Lasano survived again. The Mexican government insists the body was his, but the only way to truly prove it was burned with the rest of the corpse. A song dedicated from a stage saved his life once, but he never got that lucky again.

January 13th, 1988 at 5 in the morning in Medí, Colombia, El Pablato neighborhood, the Monaco building, an eight-story luxury fortress that serves as Pablo Escobar’s family residence, and the headquarters of the Medí cartel. The building has a sculpture garden, a private art collection, and walls thick enough to withstand a small army.

Asleep inside are Pablo, his wife Maria Victoria, his son Juan Pablo, and his three-year-old daughter Manuela. Outside on the street sits a Toyota loaded with 80 kg of dynamite. This bomb is not a message. This bomb is the opening shot of the longest, bloodiest narco war in history.

The Cali cartel has decided that Pablo Escobar can no longer be allowed to exist. Their bosses, the Rodriguez Ordoella brothers and Pacho Errera, want the United States cocaine market for themselves. So, they pull a page from Pablo’s own playbook. They bomb him. 5:00 a.m. Exactly. The Toyota detonates.

The blast shears the facade off the Monaco building. It shatters windows for four city blocks. It rips the foundations of the building apart. Three people die in the street. At least 10 are wounded, but Pablo’s bunker holds. The family was sleeping on the upper floors when the bomb went off at street level.

Pablo, Maria, Victoria, Juan Pablo, and Manuela all survive. The little girl, 3 years old, sustains permanent partial deafness in one ear from the shock wave. That fact alone will haunt Pablo Escobar for the rest of his life, and it will haunt Colombia even more. Because Pablo’s response to the Monaco bombing was not retaliation, it was apocalypse.

November 27th, 1989. An Aviana passenger jet, Flight 203, is destroyed by a bomb planted in midair. 107 people die on board. Three more killed by falling wreckage. The bomb had been meant to kill presidential candidate Cesar Gaveria Trujillo. Gaveria wasn’t on the plane. December 6th, 1989. A truck containing approximately 9,000 kg of dynamite is detonated in front of the DS headquarters in Bogota.

57 people die instantly. 2,248 are injured. 14 city blocks are depig destroyed. By the end of Pablo’s war, more than 1,000 Colombian police officers had been murdered. Three presidential candidates were dead. An attorney general was dead. Dozens of judges were dead. This is what one surviving assassination attempt caused.

The Monaco building itself stood scarred and crumbling for the next 31 years. February 22nd, 2019, it was demolished by controlled implosion. In its place rose a memorial park called Inflexion, dedicated to the thousands of victims of Pablo’s war. Pablo himself was killed on a rooftop in Medallin on December 2nd, 1993, the day after his 44th birthday.

The Colombian search block tracked his phone signal during a call to his son. He went down with two bullets in his head.