Manuel Alejandro "El Bravo" Aponte Gomez (10 December 1974 – 9 April 2014) was a high-ranking lieutenant of the Sinaloa Cartel under Joaquin Guzman Loera.
Biography[]
Manuel Alejandro Aponte Gomez was born in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Mexico in 1974, and he served in the Mexican Army special forces and was sent to track down the Sinaloa Cartel boss El Chapo during the Mexican Drug War. However, El Chapo bribed him into switching sides, and El Bravo aided in several of his escapes before becoming one of his most trusted lieutenants. He became El Chapo's head of security, and he built several tunnels in northern Mexico to aid El Chapo's escapes. In 2012, he took part in the kidnapping of Mexican Navy operations coordinator Rodrigo Vinas, and El Chapo bribed him into being a mole for the Sinaloa Cartel. When Vinas attempted to lure El Chapo into a trap in Culiacan, "El Bravo" called in reinforcements to create a distraction before driving off of the road, through a metal gate, and onto another road, escaping from the military roadblock. After an attack by Beltran Leyva Cartel boss Fausto Isidro Meza Flores on El Chapo's safehouse in El Salto, El Chapo assigned Gomez to retaliate against Isidro. After Guzman's capture in 2014, El Bravo took part in the Sinaloa Cartel leadership struggle, and, on 9 April 2014, he was tortured and shot several times before his corpse was dumped in La Cruz de Elota, Sinaloa.