“One day my cows made it over to the house and I didn’t see anything unusual”, said the rancher, whose home sits between the prison and the other property atop a small rise with a clear view to the prison. “He was the worst criminal in the northern and southern hemisphere, and now he’s only reinforced that by breaking out of a maximum security prison, and being on the run again”. Since he took office in late 2012, Mexican authorities have nabbed or killed six of them, including Guzman.
Advertisement
“Can you envision Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton negotiating with “El Chapo”, the Mexican drug lord who escaped from prison?”
Over the past decade, dozens of illegal tunnels built by gangs trafficking drugs and people across the US-Mexican border have cropped up, with well over 100 found since 2007.
Mexico’s top drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped through an elaborate tunnel in his cell, a security official said early yesterday.
‘If he’s not captured in the next 48 hours, he will have completely regained control of the Sinaloa cartel, ‘ retired US Drug Enforcement Administration operations chief Mike Vigil told news agency AFP on Sunday.
His second escape is sure to embarrass President Enrique Pena Nieto, who was flying to France when Guzman escaped.
It’s his second jailbreak in 15 years. There were 66 a year ago. The escape route was allegedly built without the authorities’ knowledge. The cartel’s annual revenues may exceed three billion USA dollars based on some estimates.
In the United States, he is wanted on multiple federal drug trafficking and organized crime charges. He escaped from Puente Grande, another Mexican maximum-security prison in western Jalisco state, in 2001 with the help of prison guards.
The escape also hurt Pena Nieto domestically. Gomez, a ex- school teacher who became one of Mexico’s most-wanted drug lords as head of the Knights Templar cartel. His administration has faced scandals ranging from the disappearance of 43 students in southern Guerrero State to allegations of a sweetheart real-estate deal between the president’s wife and a government contractor.
“This hurts him a lot”.
“We already have evidence here that they left yesterday at midnight”. Guzman was “considered the world’s most powerful drug lord until his arrest in Mexico in February 2014”.
When the group attached the Public Enemy label to Guzman a year before his capture in 2014, it was the first time it had been used since the Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone.
Manuel Ballbe, director of School of Risk Prevention at Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona, said it was important for the U.S.to push for extraditions. “This is a huge embarrassment for the Mexican government”, Ana Maria Salazar, a security analyst says.
The sophisticated tunnel contained air vents, electric lights, emergency oxygen tanks – and even a motorbike on rails to speed his escape.
“Holding a drug lord inside the country does not affect his financial capacity”, Ballbe said. “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”.
Guzman successfully pulled off something that Mexican authorities had promised he could not.
Advertisement
Speaking in Paris, Pena Nieto said Guzman’s escape was “an affront to the state” and demanded an investigation into whether prison guards helped him.
