Rene Guajardo

[9.0] "Rene Guajardo was one of the top heels in wrestling in the 1960s. His team with Karloff Lagarde is legendary and in single competition his crowning moment was ending a title reign of El Santo"

[8.0] "Said to be as great as a technician as any of the all time greats from Lucha Libre history. Arguably one of the greatest Rudos (Heels) from his generation, still deeply appreciated even to these days among old-school Lucha fans. It's so unfortunate that there's very little footage of his performances available to watch."

[9.0] "René Guajardo, the younger Rebelde, the rudo full of technical resources... a truly great wrestler, especially when teaming with his real life friends Karloff Lagarde and Ray Mendoza, and one of Santo's most fearsome rivals. However these days he's much better known as a promoter: after the mass exodus from EMLL which eventually led to the birth of UWA, Guajardo went on to run the highly successful Division del Norte (a reference to Pancho Villa's army) from Monterrey. La Division made Guajardo a much richer man than he already was (he was one of the few wrestlers who could demand, and obtain, better working conditions from the Lutheroth's) but became seminal for its blend of extremely high quality technical matches and bloody ringside brawls. Guajardo was the first in Mexico to catch on the so-called proto-hardcore style, allowing his wrestlers to each other with bottles, chairs and the like: to make brawls look more convincing Guajardo paid an extra to rookies to play the part of security guards and allow themselves to be beaten up by his wrestlers. DTU basically started here. On the other side Guajardo established an informal network among maestros throughout Mexico to have them send to him their most promising trainees: among these rookies was a young man with a mask so ugly nobody thought he would make it to the midcard, let alone the main event, in spite of his incredible skills. His name is Blue Panther. In later years Guajardo mostly worked as a talent scout for Mexican promotion and brought there talent like Chris Benoit and Owen Hart. A great wrestler but an even greater seminal figure in lucha libre."