Infamous drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has escaped — for the second time in his life — from a maximum security prison in Mexico.
Guzman, the former top boss of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, was last seen at about 9pm Saturday at the Altiplano prison, about 56 miles west of Mexico City. A manhunt is underway, with Mexico’s Federal Police patrolling roads in the area and flights suspended from the nearby Toluca International Airport.
Guzman was last seen at 8:52pm in a section of shower stalls.
In a press conference early Sunday morning, Monte Alejandro Rubido, Mexico’s national security commissioner, said Guzman apparently escaped through a tunnel opening that was said to be only 50 centimeters in diameter. That tunnel led to another passageway that Rubido described as being more than a mile long, which apparently contained lighting and a ventilation system, as well as a motorcycle built onto rails to move building material. The tunnel reportedly opened up onto an abandoned construction site.
Authorities said 18 prison employees and officials have been detained are being questioned in Mexico City.
El Chapo — a nickname that means “Shorty” in reference to his diminutive stature — now has a history of busting out of Mexican prisons. He was first caught by authorities in Guatemala in 1993, extradited, and sentenced to 20 years in prison on drug-related charges. He eventually escaped from Puente Grande, another Mexican maximum security prison in western Jalisco state, in 2001 with the help of prison guards. Legend has it that El Chapo was wheeled out of Puente Grande hidden in a laundry cart.
Guzman, who is believed to be around 56 years old, wasn’t recaptured until February 2014. During his first stint as a fugitive, he rose through the ranks of the Sinaloa Cartel to become one of the most feared and powerful kingpins in the Mexican underworld. He achieved international notoriety when Forbes magazine listed his fortune at more than $1 billion. He has also been blamed for ordering some of the worst bloodshed in Mexico’s ongoing drug war, a conflict that has claimed more than 100,000 lives in the last decade.
Mexican authorities finally caught up to El Chapo in the Sinaloa beach resort city of Mazatlan on February 22, 2014. He was captured without a shot being fired in a modest beachside high-rise, where he had been hiding with his wife and twin daughters. In the preceding days, Guzman narrowly avoided arrest by escaping through hidden tunnels that led from beneath a Jacuzzi in one of his homes in Culiacan, Sinaloa.
Guzman faces multiple federal drug trafficking indictments in the US as well as Mexico, and was on the DEA’s most-wanted list. His escape is an embarrassment for the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which has touted its ability to capture cartel bosses, including the leaders of the Los Zetas, Juarez, and Beltran Leyva cartels. Several of those captured cartel leaders were housed with El Chapo in Altiplano, which had been considered the most secure facility in Mexico.
Even after Guzman’s 2014 capture, business continued as usual for the Sinaloa cartel. Top leaders Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, Juan José “El Azul” Esparragoza, and Fausto Isidro “El Chapo Isidro” Meza Flores have remained free, building a global empire that stretches from Europe to Australia.
AP
