Mexico
has offered a $3.8 million reward for information
leading to the arrest of Guzman, who is now the subject of an international
manhunt. CEO of the Sinaloa cartel, "El Chapo" is the world's most
powerful drug trafficker. The cartel is responsible for an estimated 25% of all
illegal drugs that enter the U.S. via Mexico. Drug enforcement experts
estimate, conservatively, that the cartel's annual revenues may exceed $3
billion. This February the city of Chicago branded him the first "Public
Enemy No. 1" since Al Capone.
According to
Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, Guzmán’s cell was under
surveillance 24 hours a day. But there were two blind spots from the cameras
that protected the inmate’s privacy in the bathroom, reports CNN.The
58-year-old, who heads the Sinaloa cartel and a multibillion-dollar
narco-trafficking empire, was able to escape through a hole in the shower area
roughly 50 by 50 cm (20 by 20 in.) wide to a 1.5-km (1-mile) tunnel.
National security
commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said Guzmán’sbehavior before his escape on
Saturday was normal for an inmate in a maximum-security prison.The Mexican
government has also released footage of the tunnel, which was even furnished
with sophisticated lighting and ventilation. Video shows a motorcycle with a
modified metal cart on tracks that Rubido said was “likely used to remove dirt
during excavation and transport the tools for the dig.”Forty-nine people have
so far been questioned in connection with Guzmán’s escape from the Altiplano maximum-security
prison. It is apparentthat Guzman had help from
prison officials.
Guzmán’s
escape on Saturday was his second from a maximum-security prison. He was first
arrested in Guatemala in 1993 but made a legendary escape from a facility in
Jalisco, Mexico, in 2001. After 13 years on the run, he was rearrested in
February 2014 and has made a great escape again now in July 2015 through
an astonishing tunnel, a mile-long structure that took his engineers nearly a
year to build.The motorbike, which was secured at its front wheel to the rails
of the mile-long tunnel, was waiting for El Chapo as he descended into the
tunnel from his prison shower block. The
slim tunnel, wascomplete with oxygen
supply piping overhead, and the rails for a fast exit, with the walls of the
structure bored with professional equipment by the Sinaloa Cartel’s expert
mining engineers.
So, Joaquin 'El
Chapo' Guzman, the billionaire leader of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, has eluded
authorities and disappeared for the second time in 15 years. He was just weeks
away from being extradited to the U.S. on 35 counts of money-laundering,
cocaine and marijuana trafficking and conspiracy. The planning appears elaborate and execution
close to perfect - El Chapo made his escape by prising open a grill in the
prison showers, unnoticed by guards, before climbing down a 32ft shaft into the
tunnel. The 5ft 6in billionaire cartel leader would
have been able to stand up straight in the tunnel, which would have required
the removal of more than 3,250 tonnes of earth.
Speaking to news
channel Univision, Escobar’s top gunman known as ‘Popeye’, said that tunnelling
out of maximum security prison is very difficult without the complicity of at
least some of the guards, who are equipped with highly sensitive sonar
equipment that will pick up any mining activity.‘You have to buy off the guards
if you want to have a chance’, said the cartel killer. ‘And they know how rich
he is, they’ll have asked for tens of millions of dollars’.‘El Chapo probably
paid around 50 million in bribes alone’. More than 30 employees who worked at
the prison have already been pulled in for questioning in the course of the
interview.Three prison system officials have been fired, including the prison
director.
And in a previous
prison escape El Chapo had bribed prison guards to push him out of the Puente
Grande maximum-security prison, in the western state of Jalisco, in a laundry
cart. Now it a much detailed plan – the tunnel was a miracle of underground engineering,
and came complete with ventilation, electric lights and a motorbike fitted to
rails, to help remove the massive amounts of earth and on which El Chapo could
make his getaway.
Colombian authorities
state that while El Chapo may have escaped for the moment from the Mexican
authorities, he won’t last long with the CIA and DEA on his tail. The escape attains a different perspective,
coming as it did when Mexico’s judiciary and politicians came under scrutiny
for their refusal to accede to US demands to extradite him, where he would have
been kept in a supermax prison.In the US he faces 35 charges including of
cocaine and marijuana trafficking, organised crime and money laundering.He
faces charges from a number of federal tribunals, including in Illinois, New
York, Florida, Texas, California and Arizona, given that the United States in
the largest marketplace of the Sinaloa cartel.
Leader of Sinaloa
drug cartel, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman is owning the titleof Chicago’s public enemy number
one.Despite having been held in a maximum-security prison more than 2,000 miles
away for more than a year, Chicago has been blaimng El Chapo and his cartel for
the growing violent drug trade in the city.Despite 60% of Mexicans being in
favour of his removal to the United States on the grounds that they feared he
would escape again, according to polls taken shortly after his capture in 2014,
Mexico’s Attorney General at the time,
assured the country that the risk of his escape a second time ‘did not
exist’.
The
Attorney General said that Mexico holding onto to Guzman was an issue of
‘National Sovereignty’, and joked that the US could have him once he had served
his Mexican sentence of ‘about 300 to 400 years’.Under the previous Mexican
administration of President Calderón a large amount of Mexican criminals were
extradited to the United States, none of whom have since escaped from federal
prison. All that has collapsed, he has escaped and Mexico has offered
$3.8m reward for capture of kingpin 'El Chapo'.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
16th July 2o15.
