DEA agent losing sleep over El Chapo’s escape

WA SHINGTON • The Drug Enforcement Administration’s top agent hasn’t really slept since he got word Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman had sneaked out of maximum-security prison in Mexico nearly a week ago through a 1.5-kilometre-long tunnel constructed beneath his cell’s shower.

DEA’s deputy administrator Jack Riley said the last week has been a flurry of work speaking with his Mexican counterparts and helping direct U.S. efforts to capture one of the world’s most prolific and violent drug lords for the third time in 15 years.

“This guy caused me one of the best days and worst days of my life in a span of a year,” Riley said. “We are doing everything we can to track him down, much like we did a year or so ago when we hooked him.”

Guzman was arrested in February 2014, more than a decade after his last escape from a Mexican prison in 2001.

Before taking over as DEA’s operations chief in Washington last year, Riley spent four years in Chicago tracking Guzman and building a criminal case against the drug lord. After Guzman’s arrest in February 2014, authorities in Chicago, including Riley, called for his extradition to the United States to face trial on a litany of drug trafficking and other charges.

The U.S. Justice Department had not formally requested Guzman’s transfer before Saturday’s brazen escape, but Mexican government officials made it clear he would first be tried in their country.

“That is one of the reasons we pushed for extradition,” Riley said. “We were afraid of this. Not that (Mexican authorities) weren’t ca- pable of keeping him — but he’d escaped before.”

Guzman vanished Saturday night through a sophisticated tunnel that opened in the floor of his cell’s shower. Two Mexican lawmakers said Thursday at least 18 minutes passed before anyone was alerted.

According to internal DEA documents obtained by The Associated Press, U.S. drug agents learned Guzman and his associates were plotting his escape almost immediately after his arrest. The agency did not have information about the weekend escape plan, the documents show.

The warnings were passed on to Mexican authorities, said a U.S. government official briefed on the case.

Riley said he has every confidence U.S. and Mexican officials will be able to capture him again.

“I really do think we’ve got him on the run, he’s looking over his shoulder,” he said. “We are going to make it as hard on him as possible.”

Mexican authorities have established checkpoints on major highways around the country, distributed 100,000 photos of Guzman to toll booths and put 10,000 agents from various components of the Mexican federal police on high alert since the escape.

Guzman’s 2014 downfall was more than a decade in the making. First arrested in Guatemala in 1993, he spent nearly a decade in another maximum-security Mexican prison before escaping, reportedly hidden in a laundry basket.

Riley said Guzman’s use of cellphones was his undoing in 2014 and likely will be again.

“Clearly that was his Achilles heel the first time and I think it can be this time,” he said. “This time when we get him, and I tell you we are going to get him, it may have a little different outcome for him.”