MEXICO WARNED OF JAILBREAK
‘El Chapo’ escape on radar in 2014
The weekend disappearance of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman from a maximum-security prison should have come as little surprise to Mexican authorities: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had alerted them 16 months ago about several plans to escape.
Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficker began plotting to break out almost immediately after his recapture at a seaside resort in February 2014. Internal DEA documents obtained by The Associated Press revealed that drug agents got information in March 2014 that Guzman family members and drug-world associates were considering “potential operations to free Guzman.”
Mexican government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Since the 1990s Guzman’s violent and powerful cartel has been known for digging sophisticated smuggling tunnels under the U.S. border with Mexico. Guzman was first arrested in 1993 but escaped in Jalisco from one of Mexico’s top-security prisons in January 2001, allegedly by hiding in a laundry basket. He evaded capture in early February 2014 through an elaborate network of tunnels that connected multiple safe houses in Culiacan, in his home state of Sinaloa, and was arrested again a month later.
Jim Dinkins, the former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, said that Guzman’s history of tunnelling makes Saturday’s escape “really ingenious.” The sophisticated tunnel described by Mexican authorities would usually take about a year and half to two years to complete, Dinkins said, suggesting it was started almost immediately after Guzman’s arrest in 2014.
The DEA documents obtained do not include details of how the previous escape plots would be carried out. In them, Guzman is identified as Guzman-Loera.
DEA agents did not have information about Saturday night’s plan, when Guzman escaped through an underground tunnel in his prison cell’s shower area, allegedly built without the detection of authorities. It 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.
A widespread manhunt that included highway checkpoints, stepped up border security and closure of an international airport failed to turn up any trace of Guzman by Monday, more than 24 hours after he got away.
The documents revealed that in March 2014 agents in Los Angeles reported a possible escape operation funded by Rafael CaroQuintero, who helped orchestrate the 1985 kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena. That plot involved threatening or bribing prison officials. The same investigation revealed four months later that Guzman’s son had sent a team of lawyers and military counter-intelligence personnel to design a breakout plan.
In December of that year, agents in the DEA’s Houston Field Division reported that a Mexican army general said “a deal was in place to release both Guzman-Loera and imprisoned Los Zetas Cartel leader Miguel Angel Tevino-Morales.”
Widely considered the world’s richest and most powerful drug trafficker before his capture last year, Guzman slipped down a shaft from his prison cell’s shower area late Saturday and disappeared into a sophisticated 1.5 kilometre-long tunnel with ventilation, lighting and a motorcycle apparently used to move dirt.
Guzman’s arrest in 2014 was considered a crowning achievement of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government in its war against drug cartels.
Along with the 2014 escape plans, the DEA documents reveal that Guzman was still directing facets of his drug empire.
“Despite being imprisoned in a ‘high security’ facility, DEA reporting further indicates GuzmanLoera was able to provide direction tohissonandothercartelmembers via the attorneys who visited (him) in prison and possibly through the use of a cellphone provided ... by corrupt prison guards,” the documents said.