Robles is a 16-year-old bricklayer’s apprentice in the wild drug-producing municipality where Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman grew up. In this hardscrabble patch of mountainous Sinaloa state, more than 74% of the people live in poverty. And yet the tiny county seat is full of fine new, freshly painted houses.

Robles knows that many of them were built by El Chapo’s men.

It sits across from a high school and is surrounded by drainage canals that may have been part of a system officials said Guzman used as both a means of escape and to access a network of other homes.

Guzman was nothing if not discreet. “I thought the house was empty,” a neighbor told The Times on Sunday.

Guzman’s famous Houdini-style string of getaways ended early Saturday when Mexican marines, acting on U.S. intelligence, tracked him to an apartment just over 100 miles to the south in the seaside resort of Mazatlan. He had made a crucial mistake, sources said, using a satellite phone that eventually helped pinpoint his location.

He reportedly was sleeping with an AK-47 assault rifle but did not have time to grab it before the marines overpowered him in the predawn operation.

Guzman, one of the world’s leading drug traffickers and Mexico’s most-wanted billionaire fugitive, spent his first full day in an underground cell on Sunday at a maximum-security prison with other alleged traffickers with names like The Hummer.

Now in his mid-50s, he had eluded arrest for such a long time that he gained folk hero status. It is widely suspected that he paid off military, police and government officials to remain free while he steadily built his heroin, cocaine and marijuana empire.

The series of operations that finally ended in his arrest began in the second week of February, according to Mexican officials and Americans from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Marshal’s Service.

Mexican authorities captured a lieutenant to Guzman’s right-hand man, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, and confiscated a collection of cellular telephones, the sources said. Starting in mid-February — days ahead of a state visit to Mexico by President Obama — Mexican marines staged a series of raids on numerous properties in Culiacan, hot on Guzman’s trail, said the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media about the pursuit.

The phones led to two top henchmen in his operation, with code names El 19 and El 20. On Feb. 17, marines descended on the whitewashed house in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, birthplace of his powerful cartel. Guzman apparently barely escaped. Neighbors said the military staked out the place for two days.

But that’s when Guzman used the satellite phone, and U.S. intelligence agents were able to nail down its location.

“We could triangulate him, follow him wherever his phones were used,” one U.S. official told The Times.

Michael S. Vigil, a former top DEA official who had been briefed on the capture, confirmed that agents used a triangulation system to find Guzman, similar to what was employed in the 1993 pursuit and killing of Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar. “But today the technology is first rate,” he said. “You can track someone within [7 1/2 yards] anywhere in the world.”

As Mexican and undercover U.S. agents raided the properties in Culiacan, they discovered a network of homes with steel-reinforced doors and hidden tunnels that led underground and sometimes through the city’s sewer system. They learned that Guzman was always a step ahead of them, however, disappearing down the tunnels before the authorities arrived.

Last week, there were unconfirmed reports that Guzman and Zambada were in Culiacan for a family party. He typically felt so “untouchable” that showing up in the state capital would not be out of the question.

Interrogating those being arrested, and using the phone tracking devices, the U.S. and Mexicans’ search for Guzman took them to a resort hotel in Mazatlan. At the same time, one of the key detainees began to talk and served as an informant to describe how Guzman had lately been venturing down from his nearby mountain hide-out.

“He was going through these tunnels and sewers, and we knew he was in Sinaloa country,” said one U.S. official. “The investigation lasted about a month, with Chapo living in a half-dozen houses and skirting between.

“He might have started to feel he’d be safer in jail than being on the run. The Zetas were hunting for him too,” said the official, referring to a rival drug cartel.

Residents at the seaside Miramar apartment complex in Mazatlan noticed a black-haired, mustachioed man moving in at midweek. They didn’t think much of it. Mazatlan sees lots of comings and goings, including an enormous population of wintering Americans and Canadians.

On Saturday, a little before 4 a.m., several dozen Mexican marines and other agents wearing black ski masks surrounded the 11-story Miramar apartment complex. They moved quickly to the fourth floor and found Guzman in an apartment there. They also raided an apartment on the fifth floor.

No shots were fired. By about 6:30 a.m., four men, three women and a baby were arrested with Guzman, who was quickly placed in a helicopter and taken to Mexico City, where he was paraded briefly before reporters.

Guzman was “tired” of living in the mountains and “made a fatal mistake” of moving into the Culiacan and Mazatlan areas, Vigil said. “Those mountains are remote. I’ve been there. No TV. No entertainment. If you had millions and millions of dollars, you’d want some basic comforts.”

Vigil also said that Guzman had started traveling with just one or two bodyguards, so as not to raise suspicions about himself. “He was trying to get under the radar.”

Vigil described how several weeks ago when officials thought they were close to snatching the Sinaloa cartel leader, he vanished down an escape hatch in the bottom of a bathtub and fled through the sewers. “He knew how to get away.”

DEA agents have long said finding Guzman was not as difficult as making the decision to capture him. Given the possibility he might have been heavily protected, such an operation could have led to a bloodbath that no one wanted, DEA officials told The Times.

It remains unclear why President Enrique Peña Nieto, who generally has not wanted to confront cartel leaders the way his predecessor did, authorized the operation to capture Guzman.

Some Mexican commentators suggested that the president, facing low domestic approval ratings in the polls, was looking for a way to demonstrate his dedication to security issues. Capturing Guzman, by far the top prize in a drug war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, would serve to counter rumors that Peña Nieto was soft on the Sinaloa cartel and had made a deal of convenience with Guzman.

It is also possible, several experts suggested, that the capture of Guzman was handed to the president as a fait accompli, given how successful the Mexican marines have been. More than the rest of the Mexican military, they work most closely with their U.S. counterparts and have been credited with some of the most important victories in the drug war.

“Peña Nieto does not focus on security the way [previous President Felipe] Calderon did,” said George Grayson, an expert on the Mexican drug war at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “The Mexican navy has gotten very good at this — phone eavesdropping, drones — with U.S. cooperation, and I don’t think Peña Nieto” was controlling the operation.

Guzman has long been wanted by U.S. authorities, who offered a $5-million bounty for information leading to his capture.

Vigil said the Department of Justice will soon decide on the best venue for prosecuting Guzman in the U.S. — Chicago, San Diego or El Paso — to get him the harshest sentence possible. But he doubted that Peña Nieto’s government would be in a hurry to turn him over.

“He’s basically a human trophy,” he said, “the crown jewel of the new presidential administration.”

Photo: Reading about the fall of the capo in downtown Culiacan, Sinaloa, Monday, Feb. 24, 2014. [RF]

He rose from a simple low-level trafficker from Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexico’s opium and marijuana trade, to become the nation’s most powerful and most elusive fugitive.

For Mexicans, the capture of Guzman, reported Saturday to have occurred in a joint operation by Mexican marines and U.S. federal agents in the Sinaloan coastal city of Mazatlan, is somewhat akin to Colombia’s killing of Pablo Escobar — or even the U.S. elimination of Osama bin Laden.

His luxurious life on the run was the stuff of legend. More than once, he was reported to have entered a fancy restaurant, ordered cellphones confiscated, dined lavishly, then picked up everyone’s check.

So apparently untouchable was he, that his young beauty queen wife traveled uncontested by authorities to Los Angeles to give birth to twin girls in 2011.

In recent years, Guzman extended the operations of his Sinaloa cartel to an estimated 50 countries across Latin America, Africa and Europe, even hooking up with one of the most notorious Italian mafias, the ‘Ndrangheta.

“This gives us the dimension of who was ‘El Chapo’ Guzman,” said Jose Reveles, author of several books on Mexican drug-trafficking.

Given Guzman’s folk hero status, the constant rumors of his presence across borders and time zones, and his ability to bribe local officials to look the other way, it was difficult for some officials not to accord Guzman a grudging respect.

Guillermo Valdes, the former head of Mexico’s National Security and Investigation Center who authored a book on his country’s drug trade, called Guzman an exceptional leader — a “business genius.”

“I think that ‘El Chapo’ is a person with a leadership capacity and a strategic vision that the other narcos don’t have, and they recognize that,” Valdes told the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “He’s a very intelligent person, with a great capacity for listening. With a great ability to seduce people, as well as a large imagination … and creativity.”

The U.S. government offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest. The Mexican government was offering a reward of 30 million pesos, or about $2.3 million. There were many reported near-misses, including a supposed appearance in Baja California in 2012, days before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the region.

There is some disagreement over Guzman’s actual birth date, but the U.S. State Department puts it at Dec. 25, 1954, making him 59 years old. Interpol lists him as 56. The U.S. government lists him at 5-foot-8 and 165 pounds, but others say he is about 5-foot-6, hence his nickname “El Chapo,” or “Shorty.”

To many Mexicans, guessing Guzman’s whereabouts had become a popular and macabre parlor game — a kind of cartel “Where’s Waldo?” Mexican security officials, meanwhile, conducted numerous searches in vain, contributing to the mystique of bad man as wily trickster–and burnishing his reputation as a folk antihero.

A popular narco-corrido, or song glorifying the drug world, by a Mexican group called Los Buitres (The Vultures), captured the life that so many here assumed Guzman he was living, and the legend that had grown up around him:

“He sleeps at times in homes,” the song goes

“…at times in tents

Radio and rifle at the foot

of the bed

Sometimes his roof is a cave.

Guzman does seem to be everywhere.”

Many other Mexicans not seduced by Guzman’s outlaw image still believed that the Sinaloa cartel was a “businesslike” operation that didn’t prey upon innocents as much as other cartels like the Knights Templar, famous for their extensive extortion racket in the state of Michoacan; or the Zetas gang, who have terrorized regular people with extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking, and a penchant for killing that seems, at times, to be unmoored from any sort of human scruples.

Honda’s U.S. factories spit out hundreds of thousands of Accords and Civics each year. But when the automaker redesigned the Fit for North America, it turned to Mexico for an increasingly skilled workforce and favorable export rules.

Mexico already accounts for about 18% of North American auto production, but that’s expected to jump to 25% by 2020 as automakers pour billion of dollars into factories, said Joe Langley, an analyst at IHS Automotive. The nation has joined Germany, Japan and the U.S as one of the heavyweights of auto production, he said.

U.S. auto factories have also kicked into a higher gear since the recession as auto sales have rebounded. But Mexico’s plants are adding jobs and production even more quickly.

Mexico’s auto industry employment has soared 46% to about 580,000 jobs since 2009, according to the Brookings Institution. U.S. auto employment has gained 16% in the same period.

Other U.S. manufacturers — especially high-value industries such as aerospace and electronics — also will see new competition from Mexico’s industrial ascendance, said Mark Muro, a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution.

Mexico is also positioning itself as a global player in high-tech manufacturing. The nation’s federal government boasts that more than 100,000 Mexicans graduate each year prepared for careers in engineering and technology. The aerospace industry in particular has boomed, with exports of more than $5 billion in 2012, a 16% increase over 2011.

Companies such as General Electric and Honeywell develop new turbines in Mexico, and numerous companies build engines in relatively new high-tech centers such as Queretaro in the central Mexican region known as El Bajio. Aircraft company Bombardier has rapidly ramped up production in Mexico, where it now builds major aircraft components.

But the auto industry is leading the charge, with low wages, high productivity and high quality, said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley labor professor.

“The auto industry is critical, because it is among the most sophisticated of manufacturing technologies,” he said. “If you can build a Honda Fit, then almost all other manufacturing is vulnerable.”

Southern U.S. states have in recent years lured many new auto plants with lower wages and other enticements. But labor costs in the U.S. are now leveling out, Muro said.

“Mexico is the new South — the low-cost alternative,” Muro said.

Nowhere is this more evident than in auto production, driven by free-trade agreements and an export push to Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, said James Rubenstein, an auto industry analyst and geography professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

“Mexico is hot, hot, hot right now,” Rubenstein said. “While trade agreements are a controversial issue in the U.S., Mexico has embraced it fully, and it is now very easy to export out of Mexico.”

Mexico has a network of 11 free-trade agreements covering 44 countries, many in Europe and North and South America, according to the Mexican government. Mexican autoworkers earn about $8 an hour, according to the Center for Automotive Research, compared with the U.S. average of $37.

But American manufacturers would be mistaken to think Mexico’s growth relies solely on low wages, Muro said.

“You can’t compete solely on labor costs,” he said. “Mexico is developing a good supply chain and a good enough technical workforce to be very competitive. Meanwhile, it offers a strong international platform.”

“For a while, Mexico was feeling the heat from China,” Rubenstein said.

Now it’s the other way around. Mexican labor costs are higher, but the overall cost of doing business and exporting products is lower. The Mexican plants, for example, have good access to both sides of the Panama Canal.

“The quality also is higher out of Mexico,” Rubenstein said.

Both have low domestic approval ratings that sometimes stand in sharp contrast to their images abroad.

Obama flew to Mexico on Wednesday for a daylong summit with Peña Nieto and their Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, the almost-annual meeting of North America’s three leaders that has been taking place since 2005.

This year’s meeting is being held in Toluca, the rather nondescript capital of Mexico State just west of Mexico City,  where Peña Nieto served as governor until his run for the presidency in 2012.

Despite the to-be-expected protests from the left — one man Wednesday dressed up as Mexican national patriarch Miguel Hidalgo and shouted “out with foreigners” in the middle of Toluca; another burned an American flag – Obama gets relatively high marks among Mexicans.

In a survey this month by the Strategic Cabinet firm, 63.5% of Mexicans polled had a favorable opinion of Obama, down from 74.1% last April. [Link in Spanish]

Compare that to the 40% approval rating that Gallup gives Obama in the U.S., near the lowest of his presidency.

Peña Nieto fares even worse. He seems to be the darling of Wall Street and some East Coast press (including a flattering cover this week on international editions of Time magazine), but his disapproval rating at home has soared from 18% in December 2012 (the month he took office) to 61%, according to the Beltran & Associates polling firm.

With the Mexican government sprucing up Toluca and sending a massive security detachment in advance of summit, some Mexican Twitter users were circulating a tongue-in-cheek graphic that pleaded for Obama to stay – and even take over as mayor:

“Barack Obama for Municipal President of Toluca,” the graphic said, before noting his “achievements” over the last 15 days–including new plants and gardens in the old downtown area, new street paving projects, an increase in tourist revenue, and “more security with police and new circulating patrols.”

“Thank you very much,” it concludes, in English. “Please don’t go.”

All in good humor, of course, but it was easy to detect the acerbic undercurrent: a sense that Mexican authorities were applying Potemkin makeup to Toluca. Mexico State is the densest and most populous of the 31 Mexican states, and one that is suffering from its share of serious trouble.

Federal statistics show that the state’s 3,897 homicides last year led the nation.

Where Obama does come under pointed criticism in Mexico is his failure to push through immigration reform and his record-setting rate of deportations. Many deportees are Mexican.

“Almost 2 million expelled migrants during the Obama administration, a third of them Mexican,” complained Ricardo Monreal, a leftist congressman. “Why is that not a theme in the Toluca summit?”

Image: Begging Obama to stick around Toluca, via Twitter.