El Chapo's cocaine shipping speed earned him the nickname 'El Rapido' - New York Post

When it came to shipping hundreds of kilos of cocaine into the US, El Chapo was so quick that Colombian cartel members christened him "El Rapido" — Speedy.

That underworld moniker is just one of the colorful nicknames for El Chapo — or Shorty. The federal indictment against Joaquin Guzman Loera, currently on trial in Brooklyn, lists just about all of them.

After 1995, when Guzman took over the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, Colombian drug traffickers were so impressed with his mastery of logistics and organizing myriad smuggling routes into the US that they also christened him "El Arquitecto." Guzman could deliver hundreds of kilos of the drug in less than a week — an undertaking that took other traffickers more than a month to accomplish, according to a retired federal law enforcement official.

"He built the most impressive infrastructure in the history of drug trafficking," the retired agent told The Post. "The Mexicans under Chapo developed their own routes throughout the US to smuggle cocaine."

Guzman, now 61, focused on routes through Chicago, Atlanta, Houston and Dallas, whereas the Colombian cartels dominated Los Angeles, New York and Miami, the federal source said.

Guzman also coordinated trafficking with a handful of different Colombian cartels and guerrilla groups at once, working for the Cali Cartel, the Norte del Valle Cartel and the remnants of the Medellin Cartel after the death of leader Pablo Escobar in December 1993.

Guzman also worked jointly with members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to make sure that he could get tons of cocaine through the jungles they controlled.

Guzman never received a formal education but his knowledge of tunnels is so detailed that fellow traffickers called him "Inge," short for "ingeniero" or engineer, the federal source told The Post. In July 2015, Guzman escaped a maximum security prison in Mexico through a mile-long tunnel that he had commissioned, with an opening under the shower in his cell. A year earlier, he hid for days from police in a series of tunnels that he had built under safe houses.

"He was a tunnel guy," said the source. "He was known for building tunnels wherever he was."

Although he is still best known as El Chapo, federal agents also identified him as "El Jefe" (the boss) and "El Senor" (the lord).

Another nickname — "Apa" — is slang for father, and may have referred to Guzman's role as a community benefactor and his leadership status in the Sinaloa cartel, the source said.

"Nana" — a slang version of "enano," which means dwarf in Spanish — also described the diminutive drug lord, who stands 5 feet 5 inches.