Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman captured – Chicago Tribune

Today is Thursday, January 8th, the eighth day of 2026. There are 357 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On January 8, 2016, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the world's most wanted drug lord, was captured for the third time in a daring raid by Mexican Marines, six months after he walked through the tunnel to freedom from a maximum security prison.

Also on this day:

In 1790, President George Washington delivered his first State of the Union address in New York.

In 1815, the last major battle of the War of 1812 came to an end when American forces defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans without receiving word of the December peace treaty.

In 1867, the U.S. House of Representatives joined the Senate in overriding President Andrew Johnson's veto of the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act, giving black men in the nation's capital the right to vote.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America” in his State of the Union address.

In 1998, Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was sentenced in New York to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In 2011, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat from Arizona, was shot when a gunman opened fire while the congresswoman was meeting with constituents in Tucson; six people were killed and another 12 were injured. (Shooter Jared Lee Loughner was sentenced in 2012 to seven consecutive life sentences plus 140 years.)

In 2020, Iran retaliated against the United States for killing Iran's top military commander and firing missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing American troops. More than 100 U.S. military personnel were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. That same day, as Iran prepared to launch a counterattack, the country's Revolutionary Guard shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran, apparently mistaking it for a missile, killing all 176 people on board.