KUSI News: El Chapo’ escapes from maximum security prison, again

Some U.S. prosecutors wanted to ask for his extradition following last year’s arrest, but Mexican officials insisted on trying him first.

When news of Guzman’s getaway broke, the Mexican president was en route to France. “This is undoubtedly an affront to the, but I am also confident that Mexican institutions, particularly those charged with public security rise to the challenge, with the strength and determination to re-capture this criminal”, he said from the. “All the accolades that Mexico has received in their counterdrug efforts will be erased by this one event”, Vigil said.

Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel have given headaches to the last three Mexican presidents.

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

Associated Press journalists near the Altiplano saw the roads were being heavily patrolled by Federal Police with numerous checkpoints and a Blackhawk helicopter flying overhead. Flights have also been suspended at Toluca airport near the penitentiary.

The tunnel led to a gray brick building on a hill surrounded by pastures in central Mexico State. After a time, he was lost by the prison’s security camera surveillance network. An alert was triggered when prison guards found his cell empty.

Guzman is the storied boss of one of the world’s most powerful and deadly drug trafficking operations.

Former DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger says he’s shocked at the escape of Joaquin Guzman, saying the man known as “El Chapo” is “the most risky cartel leader in the world”.

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

After the launch of a massive manhunt for Guzman, Pena Nieto ordered an investigation into whether public officials had helped the capo escape. “It is an administration that already has a lot of image problems, with the scandals over the students and the ‘white house, ‘ and now this comes along and paints them as an administration with serious problems of inefficiency and corruption”, Chabat said.

“It was engineering work very well done”, said Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

In 2013, investigators said they’d uncovered a passageway zigzagging underground between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, that was so sophisticated they called it a “super tunnel”.

It was there where authorities discovered the entrance to an elaborate mile-long tunnel-that had artificial lighting, ventilation, and even a motorcycle on rails-that ran underneath the prison and ended in a nearby neighborhood filled with construction sites. Neighbors said it has been common to see earth-movers and dump-trucks, which may have made Guzman’s tunnel-builders more hard to detect. He did not want to be quoted by name for safety reasons. El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel is notorious for cocaine and heroin trade in Chicago. He was serving 20 years related to drug trafficking charges after being extradited from Guatemala in 1993, where he had fled from Mexico.

In the United States, two convicted murderers escaped from a high-security prison in New York state last month.

Added Shirk, “It is clear that maximum security prisons in Mexico are anything but”.

– April 4, 1957: Guzman born in the Sinaloa state mountain town of Badiraguato, according to Interpol.

Officials say they expect Guzman to disappear once more into his organization’s well-organized infrastructure built to hide him.

He finally was tracked down to a modest beachside high-rise in the Pacific Coast resort city of Mazatlan, where he had been hiding with his wife and twin daughters. He was taken in the early morning without a shot fired.

At the time of his capture in 2014, Guzman’s empire reached throughout North America and as far as Europe and Australia.