Saturday night in a scheme befitting a caper movie, Mexico's most powerful
drug lord, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, escaped from a maximum security
prison through a 1.5-kilometer (1 mile) tunnel from a small opening in
the shower area of his cell, the country's top security official
announced Sunday.
The elaborate underground escape route built
allegedly without the detection of authorities allowed Guzman to do what
Mexican officials promised would never happen after his re-capture last
year — slip out of one of the country's most secure penitentiaries for
the second time.
Eighteen employees from various part of the
Altiplano prison 55 miles (90 kilometers) west of Mexico City have been
taken in for questioning, Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido
said in a news conference without answering questions.
A manhunt
began immediately late Saturday for the head of the powerful Sinaloa
Cartel, which has an international reach and is believed to control most
of the major crossing points for drugs at the U.S. border with Mexico.
If
Guzman is not captured immediately, the drug lord will likely be back
in full command and control of the Sinaloa cartel in 48 hours, said
Michael S. Vigil, a retired U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief
of international operations. "We may never find him again," he said.
In this Feb. 22, 2014, file photo, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman,
head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, is escorted to a helicopter in Mexico
City, following his capture overnight in the beach resort town of
Mazatlan.
Associated
Press journalists near the Altiplano saw the roads were being heavily
patrolled by Federal Police with numerous checkpoints and a Blackhawk
helicopter flying overhead. Flights were also suspended at Toluca
airport near the penitentiary in the State of Mexico, and civil aviation
hangars were being searched.
Guzman was last seen about 9 p.m.
Saturday in the shower area of his cell, according to a statement from
the National Security Commission. After a time, he was lost by the
prison's security camera surveillance network. Upon checking his cell,
authorities found it empty and a 20-by-20-inch (50-by-50 centimeter)
hole near the shower.
Guzman's escape is a major embarrassment
to the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which had
received plaudits for its aggressive approach to top drug lords. Since
the government took office in late 2012, Mexican authorities have nabbed
or killed six of them, including Guzman.
Pena Nieto arrived in
France on Sunday and will stick to his planned schedule, according to a
federal official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't
authorized to be named. But Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio
Chong, the Cabinet's head of security, will return to Mexico from
France.
Guzman faces multiple federal drug trafficking indictments
in the U.S. as well as Mexico, and was on the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration's most-wanted list.
After Guzman was arrested on
Feb. 22, 2014, the U.S. said it would file an extradition request,
though it's not clear if that happened.
The Mexican government at
the time vehemently denied the need to extradite Guzman, even as many
expressed fears he would escape as he did in 2001 while serving a
20-year sentence in the country's other top-security prison, Puente
Grande, in the western state of Jalisco.
Former Mexican Attorney
General Jesus Murillo Karam told the AP earlier this year that the U.S.
would get Guzman in "about 300 or 400 years" after he served time for
all his crimes in Mexico. Murillo Karam said sending Guzman to the
United States would save Mexico a lot of money, but keeping him was a
question of national sovereignty.
He dismissed concerns that Guzman could escape a second time. That risk "does not exist," Murillo Karam said.
"It
was engineering work very well done," said Raul Benitez, a security
expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "It wasn't
overconfidence, it was Mexican judicial nationalism ... First he had to
pay his debt in Mexico and then in the U.S. Now it's very evident that
it was a mistake."
It was difficult to believe that such an
elaborate structure could have been built without the detection of
authorities, though photographs show the facility surrounded by
construction, with large open ditches and lots of metal drainage pipes
that could have camouflaged such a project. The tunnel terminated in a
half-built house in a rural farm field near the prison, according to
authorities who cordoned off the structure. Guzman dropped by ladder
into a hole 10 meters (yards) deep that connected with a tunnel about
1.7 meters (yards) high that was fully ventilated.
Guzman is known
for the elaborate tunnels his cartel has built underneath the
Mexico-U.S. border to transport cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana,
with ventilation, lighting and even railcars to easily move products.
He
was first caught by authorities in Guatemala in 1993, extradited and
sentenced to 20 years in prison on drug-trafficking-related charges.
Many accounts say he escaped in a laundry cart, although there have been
several versions of how he got away. What is clear is that he had help
from prison guards, who were prosecuted and convicted.
Guzman was
finally re-captured in February 2014 after eluding authorities for days
across his home state of Sinaloa, for which the cartel is named. He was
listed as 56 years old last year, though there are discrepancies in his
birth date.
During his first stint as a fugitive, Guzman
transformed himself from a middling Mexican capo into arguably the most
powerful drug trafficker in the world. His fortune grew to be estimated
at more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which listed him
among the "World's Most Powerful People" and ranked him above the
presidents of France and Venezuela.
Guzman has long been known for
his ability to pay off local residents and authorities, who would tip
him off to operations launched for his capture. He finally was tracked
down to a modest beachside high-rise in the Pacific Coast resort city of
Mazatlan on Feb. 22, 2014, where he had been hiding with his wife and
twin daughters. He was taken in the early morning without a shot fired.
But
before they reached him, security forces went on a several-day chase
through Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. They found houses where
Guzman supposedly had been staying with steel-enforced doors and the
same kind of lighted, ventilated tunnels that allowed him to escape from
a bathroom to an outside drainage ditch.
Even with his 2014
capture, Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel empire continues to stretch throughout
North America and reaches as far away as Europe and Australia. The
cartel has been heavily involved in the bloody drug war that has torn
through parts of Mexico for the last decade, taking at least an
estimated 100,000 lives.
Altiplano, which is considered the main
and most secure of Mexico's federal prisons, also houses Zetas drug
cartel leader Miguel Angel Trevino, and Edgar Valdes Villarreal, known
as "La Barbie," of the Beltran Leyva cartel.