[byphoebeeaton]

It is a Sunday just after services, and Doña Consuelo Loera Pérez de Guzmán, 90, sits framed by the Pentecostal church built for her by her son, the notorious drug lord El Chapo Guzmán, in their hometown of La Tuna in Sinaloa, Mexico, on December 23, 2018. Praying countless hours for his acquittal at the criminal trial in full swing in New York, the woman family members call his "first business partner” always speaks of Chapo with a tender indulgence and an obvious pride. From Amazon Kindle Single In the Thrall of the Mountain King, excerpted in the New York Post, February 2, 2019.

A female missionary who came through long ago, converting Chapo’s mother and sisters to their evangelical faith, had a hand in erecting this sign and others around the town where El Chapo was born. It reads: "Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit: depart from evil and do good, seek peace, and follow it: the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and attentive listen to the cry of them, the wrath of the Lord against those who do evil.”

El Chapo’s birthplace grew from a modest dirt-floor house on this same site with porous adobe walls easily penetrated by scorpions to this manse by the time he was finally apprehended.

El Chapo siempre se asegura de que su madre tenga flores frescas en abundancia.

Chapo’s family has its parties on this deck, musicians playing mariachi and narcocorridos inside this bandshell. In the upper left, Chapo’s own mansion, rancho El Cielo (Heaven), rancho del Chapo, sits on the area’s highest peak, its gardens similarly lined with the same spiky cypress trees looking like a crown of thorns.