Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán sits in his cell at
ADX Florence, the USA’s so-called “escape-proof” lock-up. He hasn’t seen any natural light in
years. He has to sleep with the lights in his cell on, something he says causes extreme mental
anguish. And when he does get to leave his cell for an hour a day, he’s just transported to
another kind of cell by prison officers who barely speak to him. As prison officials have
admitted, this kind of incarceration is a fate worse than death. But they also know that El
Chapo has pulled off the unbelievable before and perhaps he’s thinking about doing it again.
Today you’ll find out why this man is about as locked down as locked down gets, and if
indeed El Chapo could somehow disappear again from the clutches of the law.
He did once say, “I’ve tunneled out of prison before, and I can do it again.”
We’ll talk about the possibility of a breakout happening later, but let’s
first look at how El Chapo became known as the “drug lord of the underworld.”
Say what you want about Chapo, but you can’t deny that he was an industrious little fella. He
was born into almost poverty on April 4, 1957, in a little place called La Tuna in Sinaloa, Mexico.
This was a small rural community where many people made their money from farming. That’s what his
parents did, his pop, Emilio Guzmán Bustillos, and his mother, María Consuelo Loera Pérez.
Life was hard for the young El Chapo, his two younger sisters and four younger brothers. It was
so hard that he actually started out having three older brothers, but they all died from natural
causes very early in life. And what did these farmers, cattle ranchers by trade, do to make ends
meet? They branched out, of course, into opium, the stuff that can end up as heroin flowing
through the veins of folks north of the border. El Chapo was special, and he showed that
from a young age. He gave up school when he was in the third grade and barely being
able to read or write he decided to go into business himself. To help the family out he
sold oranges and candies, although it was never enough to make his violent father happy.
His mother, though, saw something in this kid. She’d watch him as he cut up little pieces of
paper, tied them into bundles with elastic bands, and pretended he was rich. She later said
about that, “He’d count and recount them, then tie them up in little piles…Ever
since he was little, he always had hopes.” But when Chapo did bring home some extra cash,
his drunk pop would usually take off his belt and whip him, his screams not doing anything to affect
the old man’s temper. Once the beating was over, he’d have to hand over all his cash. All his
mother could do, fearing violence herself, was pity the child and despise the man she’d married.
El Chapo left that God-forsaken home when he was 15 and everything changed. This kid, with
big ambitions, saw a way out of poverty. His ticket to success lay in an illegal commodity,
that of marijuana, a plant that could be grown cheaply and sent to the USA where it could fetch
enough money to make El Chapo a happy young man. It was at this point that he started working under
the tutorship of his uncle, Pedro Avilés Pérez. Perez, nicknamed the “Mountain Lion” was what
you’d call a first-generation Mexican narco, being one of the original entrepreneurs
to flood the US with copious amounts of Mexican weed. This stuff was smoked
with abandon by the many members of the so-called counter-culture in the
US in the late 60s and early 70s. But the problem with weed is it stinks a fair
bit and is very bulky. It’s hard to say how much it costs because prices differ everywhere and it
depends on how much you buy and who you buy it from, but let’s say the average cost per kilo is
about $2000. That’s not much, but what is a lot is the cost of a kilo of cocaine, which could cost in
the region of 20-30,000 dollars in the US today. So, in the 1970s when disco music was becoming
the thing in the US and the hippy culture made way for a self-loving group of people who
liked snorting rails from nightclub bathrooms, the whole trafficking game changed. Cocaine
became the new money-maker. It still is, but let’s save our conclusions about the
war on drugs until the end of the show. In 1978, El Chapo’s uncle was
shot dead by federal cops, probably a result of him being set up by
another trafficker. Then the man called the original Mexican drug lord came onto the
scene. He was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. This man became the Godfather. He was untouchable, having officials and politicians in his pockets
and having those connections in Colombia, where the coke was coming from. He made deals with other
Mexican traffickers, who had their own “plazas”, in what became a Federation of traffickers.
But then in 1984 something happened that changed everything. A massive marijuana
plantation owned by Gallardo’s Guadalajara Cartel was raided and burned to the ground
by the Mexican military, and it seemed the man that had orchestrated this was a US DEA
agent named Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar. To say that Gallardo was furious would be an
understatement. This 1,000-hectare plantation was worth a staggering $8 billion a year for the
cartel. So, with the help of some corrupt Mexican officials, Gallardo had Camarena kidnapped. The
outcome was thirty hours of brutal torture with heavy objects and drills and Camarena’s body
being wrapped in plastic and dumped in a field. The DEA was less than pleased, and so launched
an investigation. To cut a long story short, that investigation was somewhat successful
because by 1989 both Gallardo and his lieutenant, Rafael Caro Quintero, were behind bars.
As you know, what tends to happen when arrests are made and some big people go down,
a so-called power vacuum starts to form. These are usually torrid affairs that involve a lot
of bloodshed as people fight for supremacy. After the Federation was abandoned,
various cartels did their own thing. One of them was the Sinaloa cartel. At this
point in the late 80s, the cartel was already making millions from trafficking cocaine.
In the 90s, it got better, and in 1995, it was solely headed by who the DEA said was
the new boss, El Chapo Guzman after his partner Héctor Luis Palma Salazar was arrested.
They were good at trafficking, too, using a network of tunnels to get the
stuff across the border into the USA. They used aircraft now and again and perhaps their
piece de resistance was putting cocaine into chili pepper cans under the brand “La Comadre” and
sending them to the US via trains and trucks. Word on the street is they got around $500
million worth of cocaine across the border using this method alone, with the packers in
the warehouse apparently getting very high during the stuffing process. It was these
fast methods that impressed the Colombians, who gave El Chapo the new name of ‘El Rapido.”
As Chapo and co were raking in millions some people in Sinaloa started calling Chapo Santa
Claus and Robin Hood, with the reason being that he’d been investing quite a lot of money in
the state’s infrastructure, and for many people, doing more good than any corrupt politician
had ever done. Let’s not forget, though, those who stood in his way generally got murdered.
Then in 1989, there was a bit of a falling out between the Felix brothers of the
Tijuana cartel and the Sinaloa boys. To cut much of this story short, Chapo sent
one of his main men to meet with the brothers and that ended with Ramon Felix killing the
man. Not only that, the brothers then told their men to murder members of the guy’s
family, to prevent any kind of reprisal. These brothers were insanely dangerous, starting
a trend in beheading and at one point throwing someone’s innocent family members off a very
high bridge. Things were turning ugly in Mexico, and you can be sure that El Chapo wasn’t going to
take these insults lying down. In the early 90s, his men went on their own killing sprees,
taking out members of the Tijuana cartel. And it was at this point that the
Mexican government had to take a stance. They couldn’t just let blood flow
through the streets as it had been doing, even though a good number of politicians,
police, and other officials were getting rich from the proceeds of drug trafficking.
In 1992, the Felix brothers opened fire on Guzman with AK-47s as he was driving through the streets
of Guadalajara. Guzman got away. Not long after, some of his men while posing as cops walked into
a nightclub and pretty much shot the place up. Six people were killed, but the Félix brothers
were apparently in the bathroom at the time and managed to escape. The bullets kept flying in this
turf war and mothers kept burying their boys, but you could say the culmination of all this was what
happened when Tijuana cartel hitmen turned up at Guadalajara International Airport on May 24, 1993.
They’d been informed that El Chapo was there and was hiding in a white Mercury Grand Marquis car.
Naturally, the men filled the thing with bullets, although they should’ve checked who was inside
it first. Because El Chapo was certainly not in that car, but the cardinal and archbishop of
Guadalajara named Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo was. They’d just taken out a man of the cloth,
something that spurred Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari into action. El Chapo,
by the way, had been at the airport that day but on hearing the calamity had made a
getaway. Something you’ll soon see that he was very good at, and possibly the best
escapologist in Mexican criminal history. So, the President was outraged. The good
people of Mexico were outraged. The Tijuana cartel were like, damn, we guess we can forget
about that ticket to heaven. Their pictures and other suspects ended up in newspapers
with a bounty of $5 million for every head. One of those heads was El Chapo’s.
While in hiding, he handed over $200 million to one of his most trusted men and said
if anything goes wrong use this to take care of my family. He gave the same amount to some of his
other men to ensure that his cartel’s business could keep going if he were to be arrested.
It was then he forged a passport using the name Jorge Ramos Pérez with the intention
of hiding out in Guatemala for a while, although at this point the authorities were hot on
his tail. He paid a Guatemalan military official a cool $1.2 million to ensure safe passage,
but it seems the official set El Chapo up. On June 9, 1993, Guatemalan troops swooped in
on Chapo as he was staying at a hotel on the Guatemala–Mexico border. In no time at all he was
sitting on a military plane in handcuffs thinking about how his first stint behind bars would go at
Mexico’s Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 2, perhaps one of the best prisons
in the world for anyone who has suitcases full of cash at their disposal.
Now we come to part two of this show, the first of El Chapo’s great escapes.
But just before we do that, we have to ask just how much money this short-in-stature drug lord had
at this time? It’s always been a tricky question, foremost because traffickers have said the
authorities exaggerate how much cash they have. That cash made from drugs pays for vast
operations that might include up to 100 people. On top of that, they hardly file their taxes
and often they keep their money offshore. That’s why when they are caught the authorities
never seem to get their hands on the millions, or billions, and even if they did, if they
were corrupt, would they always report it? But look at it this way. There have been cocaine
hauls in the US of 20 tons. The street price for that would be about $1.3 billion. Sure, as
former traffickers have said on podcasts, no one person gets anything close to that,
but still, when you consider that there is always cocaine in the US and in Europe,
some of the traffickers are making many, many millions. Some of them billions. That’s
even after they’ve paid scores of officials, the suppliers, the transporters, and
various middlemen for every shipment. Right now, someone is selling cocaine; someone
is doing some lines, perhaps even in the British Houses of Parliament bathrooms, just as the Prime
Minister there says he “is absolutely determined to fight drugs.” That actually happened.
There’s no doubt people are racking up lines in some of New York’s banking offices, and
certainly at a nightclub or living room near you wherever you are in the world. That’s a
lot of coke for the cartels to work with. It was said at his height El Chapo was making two
to four billion a year, but you can bet your life he never had that at his disposal. Still, he
was doing alright, just as his enemies were. Just to give you an idea of how much power the
cartels had, and still have, when that cardinal was shot, the Catholic Church in Mexico didn’t
think it was a hit gone wrong. Who on earth, they said, would confuse a cardinal for a drug
trafficker? They also said, isn’t it weird how this murdered cardinal had been talking for a
long time about Mexican politicians being in bed with the Narcos. They thought it was a purposeful
hit on the cardinal, with men in suits involved. So, do you really think El Chapo, with his
many many millions and super-abundant power, was going to stay behind bars for long?
He got 20 years, after which he told the TV cameras, “I am but a simple farmer.” If he
was, it's strange that he had servants in prison, that even the guards were at his beck and call.
It’s strange that he was treated like a king and was allowed to run his empire from his luxurious
cell, and that his brother and business partner Arturo could come and go as he pleased. The
investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez said he contacted judges and politicians from there and
regularly had sit-downs with business associates. It should also be mentioned here that it
was later said in court that El Chapo was working with the DEA, just as drug agencies all
over the world sometimes work with traffickers if they agree to set up other traffickers. One
US critic said El Chapo was “duping U.S. agencies into fighting its enemies.” Later the hitman and
gangster named Juan Carlos Ramirez testified in a US court saying that Mr. Chapo was bribing corrupt
DEA agents with, “prostitutes, gifts, apartments.” As the years passed, people talked about
El Chapo being “el dueño” of the prison, which basically means the owner. When he
was bored with business, he sometimes had prostitutes smuggled in, or lovers, and that
often came with a handful of Viagra pills. He did at least have to go through some of
the motions that regular prisoners face, and that was seeing a prison psychologist.
After meeting with El Chapo, this man gave his assessment, saying he was “egocentric,
narcissistic, shrewd, persistent, tenacious, meticulous, discriminating, and secretive.”
We should just say here that during his lifetime El Chapo had 18 kids with seven
different women. One of them was former police officer Zulema Hernández, who wrote to
Chapo when he was behind bars. As you know, he wasn’t too literate, so when he wrote
to her from prison, he had some hired help. One of the letters he wrote gives us some
insight not only into how he sounded, but also the fact that he was planning to leave. He wrote:
“Love, Christmas is around the corner, and nothing would make me happier than being close to you,
your skin, and your lips, but everything is uncertain. Even though I haven’t lost sight
of seeing you, I don’t want to promise any specific day because then it doesn’t work out.”
By the way, this woman ended up being shot and killed sometime later and a Z carved
into her body. That’s because the hit was the work of El Chapo’s enemies, the
outfit known as Los Zetas. She’d helped run his drug business from prison, but as
things tend to go, that was a risky venture. After eight years living in his relative
luxury, he was indicted in the US for money laundering and trafficking obscene amounts of
cocaine across the border. It was looking like he might be extradited after the Supreme
Court of Mexico made a deal with the US. The last thing he wanted was to end up in a US
prison, where bribing officers wasn’t so easy. So, he planned his escape. On January 19, 2001, as
one story goes, he bribed prison guard Francisco “El Chito” Camberos Rivera. The officer opened
up the cell and Chapo got in a laundry basket, after which, with the help of a maintenance
man, he was rolled to the front door. The maintenance guy helped Chapo into his
car trunk and drove him to a gas station, whereupon he went inside to buy something. Chapo
slipped out of the trunk and did that famous vanishing act of his. Camberos did some prison
time for that, although the prison authorities had apparently also been paid, as had the cops
who didn’t bother looking for Chapo until he’d had enough time to leave the state. This all
cost Chapo in the region of $2.5 million. But did it really all go down that way?
No, it didn’t, according to that brave journalist Anabel Hernández. She discovered documents and
video footage that revealed Chapo hadn’t done the laundry basket thing, and instead had left the
prison through the door wearing a police uniform. She said that high-ranking cops had all been paid,
as had various ministers and prison officials. They’d helped him every step of the way and had
been paid handsomely to do so. They even gave him a police escort, and as a matter of convenience,
they were at the prison the day after for when they had to go on TV and react to the escape.
Pundits have since pointed out that it wasn’t just about the money. The government was
desperate for the bloody fighting to stop, and it hoped that Chapo would again bring
the cartels together with a new kind of “Pax Mafiosa.” Just like that old Federation.
The same pundits said it was pretty obvious that for a while the only people that got
arrested seemed to be Chapo’s enemies, as if the authorities were actually working with the
Sinaloa cartel. You can be sure that those enemies were upset about this, believing Chapo was playing
both criminal and informer, which has always been the case with law enforcement and organized crime.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Chapo also had some help from people who generally don’t call
themselves criminals or crime fighters. Those were the banks. Chapo needed to launder
hundreds of millions of dollars, and to do that he went through the normal banking system.
Investigations would later reveal that he used the American bank, Wachovia bank – now a part of
Wells Fargo – and also the largest bank in Europe, HSBC. They both got found out and admitted some
wrongdoing, but no one ever went to prison for it. The fines, although large, didn’t really make a
dent in the banks’ profits and so the authorities and the banks you could say both took
something from Chapo’s hard-earned blood money. Everyone was a winner, besides El Chapo and
the folks that suffered the damage from the actual drugs. The war on drugs raged on,
and more of the same was about to come. Chapo and the other cartels ratcheted up
the violence after he escaped in 2001. Mexico soon started breaking records, with drug
murders going through the roof as well as tens of thousands of people going missing over the
years. The violence also started to get a lot more brutal, as you may have seen in those
videos involving kneeling men and chainsaws. At this point, there was still a huge bounty
on Chapo’s head, and you can be sure when he traveled he rarely didn’t use a bullet-proof
car. They made songs about him in Mexico, him now having the status of a legend. It’s reported
that he’d sometimes roll up at a restaurant with a bunch of armed guards, and before walking
out pay for everyone who was in the restaurant. People would talk about this now cult
figure, saying he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere, but the authorities had no
idea where he was. They looked from one part of Mexico to the other, raiding houses, making
arrests, but the elusive Chapo was like a ghost. Then in 2004, after a tip-off, the Mexican
Air Force gave him a surprise visit when he was having a party at a Sinaloa ranch.
Helicopters flew overhead and men in masks descended to the ground, only to discover that
El Chapo had once again slipped off. Still, some journalists later said that they’d never
actually intended to arrest him. Yet again, they said the authorities needed to look like
they were doing a good job fighting the drug war. Almost the same happened again later in 2004,
but this time the authorities were only about ten minutes late. They did at least come
away with the raid with Chapo’s laptop and some photographs, showing that he’d been
at the ranch and also put on a few pounds. They burned down the ranch
and set fire to his cars, which you can be sure appeared on TV
for public consumption, and yet again, there were some Mexican journalists saying
the whole thing was for show. How come they were always a few minutes late, and how come El
Chapo had the escape abilities of the Roadrunner? In 2005, he was seen again, this time eating in
a restaurant along with 15 guards brandishing AK-47s. One of Chapo’s men apparently
stood up and said to the other eaters: “Gentlemen, please. Give me a moment of your time.
A man is going to come in, the boss. We will ask you to remain in your seats; the doors will be
closed, and nobody is allowed to leave. You will also not be allowed to use your cellulars. Do not
worry; if you do everything that is asked of you, nothing will happen. Continue eating and don't
ask for your check. The boss will pay. Thank you.” El Chapo then arrived and ordered some steak,
after which he shook some hands and left. As promised, everyone got a free meal that day.
That’s the story anyway, some people believe people said stuff like that just to create some
added mythology behind, for some, a Mexican hero. In 2006, the new Mexican President Felipe Calderón
assured his people that he would put an end to the violence, declaring a more serious war on drugs
using incorruptible forces from the Mexican military. 53,000 people related to the cartels
were eventually arrested, but guess what, the Sinaloa cartel was pretty much untouched with only
1,000 of its members feeling the wrath of the law. Investigations later revealed that Chapo
had given some of his own cartel members up and ratted on tons of other cartels after
he’d made a deal with the DEA and Calderon. This help he gave to the US authorities
led to that indictment going away in 2008. As these arrests were compelling some US
politicians to talk about a “significant victory” and making El Chapo not very popular
with the people he’d given up, cocaine and blood flowed in the streets as it always had done,
but now both streams were about to get bigger. Meanwhile, more rumors surfaced that El Chapo had
been seen, sometimes in Guatemala, or Honduras, or again, showing some largesse in Mexican
restaurants. Apparently one time he did that in Juarez, home of the Juárez Cartel, and after they
found out they burned the place to the ground. In 2009, the Mexican government said anyone who
gives information leading to the arrest of El Chapo would receive MXN$30 million ($2.1
million US) and at the same time, the US government put a $5 million bounty on his head.
That was nothing in the great scheme of things, with experts saying the drug war costs the
US $50 billion per year and hundreds of millions were spent on just catching El Chapo.
Later in 2009, Chapo met with some of his top guys and according to documents that were later
obtained, he told them that if push came to shove, they had to defend the drug shipments
at all costs, even if it meant opening fire on US or Mexican authorities.
Some members of the Mexican church said they knew El Chapo was in a town called
Guanaceví in the Northwest of Mexico, a place famous for its gold mines and tasty enchiladas.
The Roman Catholic Archbishop Héctor González said that, to which the President warned him not
to speak loosely if he didn’t know the facts. Not long after that, some undercover military officers
entered the town, only to be later found dead with a sign on them saying, “You'll never get Chapo.”
The rumors of his whereabouts persisted, with some saying he was now traveling under a false name as
far as Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, and even to Europe. The DEA thought that but said most of the
time he hid out like Osama Bin Laden in parts of Mexico where the terrain was rough and any sign of
helicopters or trucks would be seen from far away. Still, there is evidence that he did travel
often, and again, to places such as Argentina, Honduras, and Guatemala, and plenty of
folks in Mexico from time to time were on the receiving end of a free meal when
Chapo turned up at their favorite eatery. Then on February 21, 2012, after being tipped off
by the US, Mexican cops yet again just missed El Chapo when they raided a mansion in Los Cabos,
Baja California Sur. He had apparently arranged to meet a sex worker there, but after she
told him it wasn’t a good day for sex, he rescheduled. Cops arrested her, as well
as one of Chapo’s chefs and his pilot. It was beginning to look like El Chapo had a crystal
ball, but as you know, that wasn’t the case. He flew around in private jets and changed
up how he communicated with his men, and it looked as though they’d never get him.
The US even made a secret plan to send in the Navy SEALs, which consisted of sending men in
by land and by air. If they met any resistance from El Chapo’s men, their orders were to
shoot to kill. It never happened because the Mexican Armed Forces didn’t like the plan.
In 2013, it was rumored he’d been shot and killed in Guatemala, but this was more nonsense.
Even Wikileaks shared some information, saying he was indeed in northern Guatemala
but very much alive. More intelligence said he had been in various hospitals to deal with
his diabetes and heart disease, a consequence partly down to him putting on stacks of weight.
Then there came a break in the investigation. Dutch cops arrested José Rodrigo Aréchiga Gamboa,
who at the time was the boss of the Sinaloa cartel’s assassins squad, Los Ántrax. They also
got one of Chapo’s top logistics guys, and so now the DEA had a fair bit to go off in terms of how
the cartel’s communications and movements went. They believed that Chapo was getting tired
of hiding out all the time and was spending more time eating at nice restaurants in Sinaloa’s
largest city, Culiacán. One time he ordered one of his runners to pick up the meal. That was Hidalgo
Arguello, and he was arrested at the restaurant. He led them to Chapo’s ex-wife’s house,
but when they got there, Chapo was gone. The Mexican authorities soon tracked a signal
coming from what they believed was Chapo’s phone, and in time they were breaking down a reinforced
door which they believed would finally lead them to their man. Inside this safe house were
cameras and monitors, but no El Chapo. What they didn’t know at that time was as
they’d been trying to bash down that door, Chapo had used one of his tunnels to escape.
He hadn’t crawled pretty far by the time they found a bathtub that could be raised using
hydraulics. They soon discovered that once raised there was an opening to a staircase
that led to a tunnel. Off they went, moving much faster than the portly gangster.
The Mexican Navy were the ones in pursuit in the tunnel. In the streets above, was the Mexican
Army, and they were out in force. In the air, a US drone was circling around. Not even the
great Houdini could get away from this lot, but all the Navy ended up finding
was an end to the tunnel at a river. Little did they know that Chapo had used a sewage
system that took him to a storm drain. There, he and his right-hand man, a former Mexican
armed forces commando named Hoo Ramírez, fled in a vehicle. It was Ramirez’s phone that
the authorities later picked up via signals, which told them he was now in the city of Mazatlán.
The next evening, February 21, 2014, the Mexican Navy, the DEA, the U.S. Marshal Service, and
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, were in Mazatlán either hoping to capture El
Chapo and Ramírez or at least just get Ramírez. A phone signal led them to the Miramar
condominiums, but not the exact room. The first room that was busted open belonged to
two American tourists. But when they stormed into room #401, there they found Ramirez armed
with an AK 47. He didn’t put up a fight. In another room, they found a babysitter and
Chapo’s two young girls, Mali and María. He was in another room with his wife. No shots were
fired. Chapo was roughed up a bit but he never went for a nearby rifle. Chapo suddenly
just looked like your average father as they marched him past a bowl full of fruit in
the kitchen in his $1,200 a month apartment. Finally, they had him, and what an exhaustive and
expensive chase it was. You’d hope this time they wouldn’t let him escape again.
Chapo had other ideas. The US authorities were now happy, hailing
the capture as one of the most important in the annals of crime history. Attorney General
Eric Holder said it was a “landmark achievement” adding, “The criminal activity Guzmán
allegedly directed contributed to the death and destruction of millions of lives across
the globe through drug addiction, violence, and corruption.” The US Secretary of Homeland
Security Jeh Johnson was similarly made up, saying on TV, “We congratulate our
Mexican partners in this achievement.” It was now time to get him back to
the US where he could face the music, but first, he had to be transported to
the maximum-security prison Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 1. His ride was a Black
Hawk helicopter, followed by two more helicopters. This time El Chapo was certainly not going to
use the prison as an office or a place to make out with one of his hired sex workers. There
would be no business meetings and no running about in the yard. His room was barren. He had
no contact with other inmates. His family was only allowed to visit him with a judge’s
approval and only once every nine days. There was one bed, one shower, and one
toilet, in a room that was incredibly dingy. Watching his every move was a security camera.
It was 23 hours a day like this, and even when he was allowed out, he wasn’t allowed to see
other prisoners. The officers were even told never to talk to him unless giving him an order.
This man who’d not long ago appeared on the Forbes rich list as a billionaire was given
the government-approved $48 each month to buy products for personal hygiene. There was
no way of getting money in from the outside. His days were spent alone in that cell.
This might seem somewhat extrajudicial, but the fear was that Chapo had escaped
before and if he had any chance to wield his massive wealth, he might do it again.
The Mexicans filed charges against him relating to drug trafficking and organized crime
while the US was busy filing for extradition. Then in April 2014, the Attorney General of Mexico
dealt a blow to the US when he declared that he wanted Chapo to face charges on his home turf. He
said he feared that the US would grant him some leniency for giving other criminal figures up.
As time passed, questions were asked about just how solitary Chapo’s confinement was. In July,
he and another drug kingpin went on hunger strike over the poor conditions in the prison. Something
like 1,000 other prisoners joined the strike, but since El Chapo was not supposed to be
able to communicate with other prisoners, how did he manage this?
The Washington Post wrote, “The world’s most fearsome drug lord was
now apparently a human rights crusader but that he had the freedom of movement and
communication inside the prison to pull it off.” That’s a question you need to think about as
we head further into this unbelievable story. In September, a US court indicted Chapo for
his drug empire and also for using a team of trained assassins to commit “hundreds of
acts of violence, including murders, assaults, kidnappings, assassinations, and acts of torture.”
Those were some pretty serious charges, but again, Chapo’s lawyers managed to get an injunction
against the extradition on the grounds that under the Mexican constitution his rights would
be violated in the US. It was finally decided that Chapo should first serve his sentence in Mexico,
which would mean dying in a Mexican prison seeing as his sentence was going to be 300 to 400 years.
This was what was going on in July 2015, just over a year since Chapo had been imprisoned.
No one ever expected him to get out. He would die an old man behind bars. Then on the evening
of July 11, he was suddenly gone. This time his Houdini trick would shock the world. No one
in history had pulled anything off like this. He’d last been seen by the
security cameras at 8.52 pm. That’s when he went to take a shower. The
spot where he did that was the only place in his cell that the security cameras couldn’t
pick up. He seemingly walked into the shower and disappeared, and when officers went
to inspect, he had indeed just vanished. Below the shower, the authorities found a small
hole in the ground, with PVC piping acting as a ladder. This led down to a tunnel, and not a small
tunnel, either. It was replete with tracks at the foot of it and connected to those was a motorcycle
that had been adapted to run on the tracks. That bike wasn’t so much for a fast getaway
for El Chapo, but for the people who’d been doing all that digging down there. It
was estimated that the earth that had been removed could have filled up something
like 350 trucks, something that would have taken a year using that small bike as transport.
About one mile from the start of the tunnel was the end, which was inside a half-built house.
Chapo had his people construct, something which didn’t really make any of the nearby
farmers suspicious. They later said that sure, they saw someone building and moving what
appeared to be a lot of dirt and sand, but so what, that kind of thing was normal.
Seriously, did no one at all in the prison know this was going on?
A lot of pundits said someone must have been in on it, and that’s likely why
Chapo was able to start that protest in prison. Maybe, they said, his confinement wasn’t
exactly what the public had been told. One of those pundits said:
“Here's a guy who time and again has proved he can build a hole in the ground.
If they're not looking at every single piece of soil around where they have that guy locked
up, then they don't have the willingness.” Talk about the Mexican authorities having
eggs on their faces, not to mention the US feeling like some more millions of dollars had
gone to waste chasing this man. How had tunnels not been suspected when the authorities knew
Chapo had a thing for building them? The man was like a mole on steroids. Digging was his thing.
After his arrest in 2014, they’d found several tunnels leading from various houses in the city
of Culiacan, not to mention all those so-called super tunnels his cartel had used to get cocaine
under the US border. El Chapo was to tunneling what Ted Bundy was to killing, and you’d have
never left Bundy alone in a prison cell with a pretty, young woman and a hammer lying nearby.
Chapo’s guys hadn’t even rushed the tunnel, making it two feet wide and more than five feet high,
big enough for Chapo to stroll through rather than crawl and get dirty. It had ventilation
inside and was fitted with lights. The only thing missing perhaps was a bar at the end where the
diggers could have a beer after a hard day’s work. It was a total embarrassment for all involved,
with the authorities declaring states of emergency in nearby areas and closing down
the closest airport. The chase was on, again, and it was one massive manhunt.
As heavily armed cops stopped vehicles all over Mexico State, inside the prison around
30 employees were held back and interrogated. A US professor who wrote about crime trends around
the globe told the New York Times, “It is almost Mexico’s worst nightmare, and I suspect many in
U.S. law enforcement are apoplectic right now.” This was exactly why they’d wanted him extradited.
They didn’t trust the Mexican prison system to hold that man down. And to think, when that
Mexican General Attorney announced to the world that El Chapo was not going to be extradited
before he served out his time in Mexico, when someone talked about the escape risk, he
shrugged it off and said, “It doesn’t exist.” You won’t be surprised to hear that he
was replaced after Chapo got away again. Around this time, seven officials, including two
members of Mexico's secret service and some prison staff, were arrested. Six others were also put
in handcuffs, and prison directors and staff were fired. It’s still not clear who helped him
escape from the inside, if anyone at all. It might only have been the work of his family and cartel.
To make matters worse for the authorities, soon after Chapo escaped, a Twitter account bearing
his name seemed to taunt those who were after him. Writing in Spanish, he basically told Donald Trump
that he could eat his own poop. He also wrote, “Life takes many turns, one day you're in
the hole and the next day you're on top.” He addressed one tweet to the Mexican
President, saying, “Don't call me a delinquent because I give people work unlike you,
you cowardly politician.” Another tweet said, “Never say never, this world keeps turning. In
this life, he who risks nothing cannot win.” That certainly enshrouded El Chapo with
more legendary status. You have to ask, how did he manage to get on Twitter
so fast? According to the US media, these tweets very likely came from Chapo’s hand.
Now Interpol had been given the warning. Airports were on the lookout for him. Helicopters scoured
the skies. Police were stopping cars all over nearby cities and towns. These were desperate
times, especially as the days passed and El Chapo didn’t turn up. They were so desperate
that the Mexican government asked for the help of Colombian officials who’d helped hunt
down members of the Cali and Medellín Cartels. What no one knew right then was how he’d
gotten away, or not the full story anyway. It turned out that once he’d gotten to that
half-built house he’d been taken on the back of an ATV to a warehouse. He was then taken to
another city where a private plane picked him up and took him to a hideout in the mountainous
area of La Tuna in his state of choice, Sinaloa. That’s where he decided it
was time to get more famous and rub shoulders with a Hollywood superstar. El Chapo had first gotten acquainted
with celebrities a few years earlier when he was contacted by one of Mexico’s
most famous actresses, Kate del Castillo. She shocked the world in 2012 when she
announced this about the murderous drug kingpin: “Today, I believe more in El Chapo Guzmán than
in the governments that hide all the truths.” She then wrote a letter to Mr. Chapo – yes, she
actually addressed him Mr. Chapo – which started, “Don't you think it would be great if you
could start trafficking with positive things.” Her answer to his problems and problems at large
was that he should start trafficking in love. Now, you’d think El Chapo would have almost choked
on his “Ceviche de Sierra” when he saw that, but no, it seems he took a liking to her. In
2014, Chapo’s lawyers got in touch with her and while he was on the run a year later, they
talked about making a movie about his life. This is where the actor Sean Penn comes in. Through Castillo, Penn and Chapo got in touch
and the two agreed to meet at Chapo’s hideout in the mountains. Penn knew there’d be a certain
amount of hood-over-the-head stuff going on and he understood he was meeting with a very
dangerous man, writing, “I’d seen plenty of video and graphic photography of those beheaded,
exploded, dismembered or bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous journalists
and cartel enemies alike.” When Penn arrived, Chapo told him that he was born
poor, and he hadn’t been given many opportunities in life, even saying he wasn’t really a violent
man. He also said, “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana than
anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks, and boats.”
That communication almost gave him away, because the Mexican authorities tracked some
signals and proceeded to raid the hideout. He escaped again and got on a helicopter as
the authorities were right behind him. They said they didn’t shoot because Chapo was with two
women and a young girl. The women were his chefs. But now the US authorities were more peeved than
ever. This man was now talking to Hollywood stars for God’s sake, and yet the country had been
chasing him around for years and spending many, many millions of taxpayers’ dollars to do so.
It was then decided another Mexican-American operation would be launched; this time
called Operation Black Swan. The U.S. Army’s elite counterterrorism unit, Delta Force,
wouldn’t be involved in any actual raids but helped by giving tactical advice.
The Mexican Navy had heard that at a coastal town in Sinaloa called Los Mochis armed
guards had been spotted at a certain house. They put the house under surveillance, hearing
one night, January 8, 2016, someone special was about to arrive. That night a large order for
tacos was placed at a restaurant, enough to please El Chapo and a bunch of bodyguards.
They raided the place early in the morning, not really knowing who’d be there but
assuming at least some of Chapo’s top men. Cops, the army, and 17 highly-trained
specialists from Mexico’s special forces kicked down a door and opened fire.
Five of Chapo’s men were killed there and then, and another six were injured,
compared to one of the special force’s men. Laying next to the bloodied men was
a total of eight assault rifles, 2 M16s with grenade launchers, 2
Barrett M82 sniper rifles, a loaded RPG, and outside there were two armored cars.
Chapo, as always, was well hidden and as soon as he heard the gunshots, he lifted up a
mirror that was covering an entrance to another one of his very useful tunnels. Alongside
him was his chief assassin, “El Cholo Ivan.” One tunnel led to another tunnel and eventually
the men got out and attempted to get far away from the scene in a stolen vehicle which they’d
held up at gunpoint. Cops all over the state were alerted to the license plate number of the vehicle
and in no time Chapo and his sicario were stopped. He offered those cops a huge amount of cash,
houses, cushy jobs, anything they wanted, but this time the bribe was rebuffed.
Chapo looked at them and said, “You are all going to die.” These four cops
on the scene radioed through to their bosses and were told something like 40 assassins were
on their way to free Chapo and his assassin. In no uncertain terms, they were told to go
straight to a motel and wait there for the special forces to arrive. They did, and at last,
again, Chapo was in the hands of the authorities. He was taken to Mexico City and flown by
helicopter to the prison he’d escaped from and there he was greeted by some men that
wanted a serious chat with him. Yet again, Mexican and US officials praised the great work
of both sides and hailed this capture as a great success in the never-ending war on drugs. They
didn’t say never-ending, but as you’ll soon see, getting Chapo out of the way had
virtually no effect on the flow of drugs into the US and around the world.
Chapo and his lawyers tried to fight extradition but this time it didn’t work.
One of the Mexican judges involved with the extradition went out jogging one morning and
was assassinated, but it still went through. On January 19, 2017, Chapo arrived
on US soil to great media fanfare. On July 17, 2019, Chapo was told he’d be serving a
life sentence plus 30 years at an American prison. He was also ordered to pay back some of the money
he’d earned, which officially was $12,666,181,704. None of that was found and it’s still missing.
The question is, could El Chapo actually escape again?
We think the answer is a resounding no. He sits in a cell for 23 hours a day in a prison
that is located in the middle of nowhere. Even if you could dig a tunnel, you’d be spotted at some
point since there is nothing around for miles. ADX Florence has the most modern surveillance in any
prison, which includes sensor pads all over the floors if someone somehow went for a walk around.
That will never be possible. Even when Chapo does get out of his cell he is taken to another
roofed area by a five-man team. That area also doesn’t have natural light. As a former
official at this prison said, Chapo’s life is now a fate worse than death. Chapo himself
said, “It’s been torture, the most inhumane situation I have lived in my entire life. It has
been physical, emotional, and mental torture.” You won’t be surprised to hear that there
was another turf war in Mexico after Chapo became absent, leading to record-breaking murder
rates, mostly drug war deaths, in 2017 and 2018. The rate went down somewhat in Mexico
as lockdowns hit the world in 2020, but drug abuse went up in many countries as
people dealt with the fallout of a deadly virus. And now the US has a new drug
trafficking enemy number one in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s “El Mencho.” He’s one of the most wanted men in the world,
with the US now offering a US$10 million reward for his capture as well as Mexico also
offering a handsome reward. But again, he’s just one man in a giant network of
mostly formerly poor men who accept the risks of selling drugs when the
rewards are so incredibly high. Taking El Chapo out of the mix did nothing at
all to reduce drug supply and use in the US and elsewhere, leading one Harvard academic
stating, “We are choosing to throw money away to stop something we are never going to
stop. So all the bragging and boasting about locking up El Chapo is meaningless.”
He isn’t alone in thinking that, with many experts and media saying the war on
drugs has been a “catastrophic failure” on an unprecedented level in terms of the misery and
death it has caused in the wake of not working. The prisons are overflowing, the shootings
still happen, the addicts still die – sometimes from pharmaceutical drugs in the mix. John and
Jane from just about any city or town near you can go outside and easily buy a gram bag of this
or that. It hardly matters where you are in the world, which is testament to the failures
of the war and the veracity of its soldiers. Also, as experts following this war have
written, when law enforcement does have some success and puts a leak in the drug pipeline
from time to time, it almost always ends with even more extreme violence as products
going missing causes paranoia and chaos. On top of that, Human Rights Watch said a while
back that most of the arrests in this war, 80 percent of them, are for possession, not
sales or trafficking, and many habitual users do what they do because they need help, not
prison, where drugs are usually plentiful. Since the war on drugs started it has cost
over one trillion dollars in the US alone, but this industry of misery costs tons of
money in just about every country. Nonetheless, to just dismantle the various industries it
supports, prison, justice, law enforcement, and many more, would mean disrupting the economy,
and also, getting tough on drugs has always been a useful tactic for politicians to amass more votes.
Still, as the arrest of Mr. Chapo shows, which is just a microcosm of the war on
drugs at large, while drugs remain illegal, there will always be more El Chapo’s. We’d like
to give you a number as to how many people this war has killed since it started decades ago with
that nice guy President Richard Nixon, but right now this writer’s mind is somewhat boggled.
National Geographic says 2.5 million lives have been lost, and you can take that or leave it.
Maybe, some say, the war on drugs is just the best thing we can do, but if you want to see
what would happen if a country did something radical and decriminalized drugs, look no further
than Portugal, which in the year 2001 did that and decided public health was more important
than public order when it came to illicit drugs. Drugs are still there, but things have for the
most part changed for the better. “Why hasn't the world copied it,” asked one British journalist?
Many people now think it's only a matter of time before that happens because as things stand,
the War on Drugs makes the grade for how Albert Einstein once described the definition of
insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
Now you need to watch “Insane Drugs Given to Soldiers to Win Wars.” Or, have a look at “Human
Sleep Experiment That Went Horribly Wrong.”
