Drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman escapes from Mexico prison

(AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File).

El Chapo is probably the highest-profile cartel leader to escape prison in recent years, but prison breaks in Mexico aren’t all that uncommon. They found houses where Guzman supposedly had been staying with steel-enforced doors and the same kind of lighted, ventilated escape tunnels.

The roads are being heavily patrolled by federal police and checkpoints are set up.

Guzman’s escape is an “affront to the Mexican state”, President Enrique Peña Nieto said in Paris, where he begins an official state visit on Monday.

At least observers weren’t surprised by Guzman’s escape given Mexican prisons’ reputation, including Gal Pissetzky, a defense attorney who has represented suspected drug trafficker in USA courts nationwide.

Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman – one of the world’s most notorious crime figures – escaped a maximum-security prison Saturday via a 1,600-yard tunnel dug under his shower cell, Mexico’s top security official said.

The most powerful drug lord in Mexico, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, is on the run again.

The official US reaction was measured. There were 66 past year.

And after years of frustrating authorities the elusive Mexican almost escaped capture altogether.

Guzman escaped late Saturday from Mexico’s top-security prison, even though senior officials had earlier said such an escape was impossible.

Before his last capture, the United States had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest, while the city of Chicago declared him “Public Enemy Number One”, joining American gangster Al Capone as the only criminal to ever get the moniker.

Then Pena Nieto came along in December 2012, and less than two years into his presidency, his security forces caught the biggest fish of them all.

More than 80,000 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since 2006.

“This hurts him a lot”.

Guzman is believed to have been brazen enough to walk into restaurants in his state of Sinaloa, ask diners to hand their cell phones to his bodyguards, eat calmly and pay everyone’s tabs before leaving. That risk ‘does not exist, ‘ Murillo Karam said.

“International pressure is the check and balance against the state’s corrupt powers”, Ballbe said.

By several accounts, including an examination by The New Yorker, Guzman helped invent the drug tunnel, commissioning his personal architect, Felipe de Jesus Corona-Verbera, to design several that burrowed beneath the USA border and emerged in warehouses on the other side. “It is very difficult for the state to do something against the size of the bribes that these networks can produce”.

Not agreeing to extradite Guzman was a “disastrous mistake” by a Mexican administration that has overestimated its capacity to fight crime, said Alejandro Hope, a former Mexican intelligence officer.

“One day my cows made it over to the house and I didn’t see anything odd”, said the rancher, whose home sits between the prison and the other property atop a small rise with a clear view to the prison. But authorities tracked him to another home, where they arrested him a few days later. “If Chapo Guzman is able to make it back to the mountainous terrain that he knows so well in the state of Sinaloa … he may never be captured again”, he said.