Lottery for home where El Chapo staged tunnel escape
THE home of “El Chapo”, the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, is being sold via a lottery by the government of Mexico.
Guzmán fled the two-bedroom property, which has been valued at $183,000 (£132,000), in 2014 when Mexican marines had it surrounded. During El Chapo’s escape from the home via an underground tunnel, the property was damaged by Mexican marines and has been abandoned ever since.
Mexico’s Institute to Return Stolen Goods to the People, known as INDEP, has since repainted the property, tiling over the space beneath the bathtub leading to the infamous underground tunnel where Guzmán fled.
Tickets for the lottery began selling this week for about $12.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the proceeds from the auction will benefit medicine, vaccines, scholarships and road construction.
“It is about returning to the people, the town, what was confiscated … all that we can raffle off so that what is obtained is destined for the development of the nation and welfare of the people,” the president said.
INDEP’S website lists it only as “Casa en Culiacán,” without reference to its history. It is about 2,800 square feet and located, perhaps appropriately, in the area of Libertad, or “Freedom.”
Guzmán’s freedom lasted only days after the tunnel escape, as he he was found by marines again, this time on the coast in Mazatlán. By that time, he already had a reputation for daring escapes. He had slipped out of one of Mexico’s maximum-security prisons in 2001, allegedly in a laundry cart.
In July 2015, less than a year and half after his capture in Mazatlán, Guzmán slipped through a tunnel dug up to the drain in his cell’s shower and rode a motorcycle on tracks laid through a tunnel to escape another maximum-security Mexican prison.
The marines captured him again six months later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where he had been holed up in another unremarkable home.
Guzmán was extradited to the United States, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison in July 2019.