the great escape - of Mexican drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman

The ways of Rich and famous are sometimes too strange ~this man, a CEO !was featured continuously in Forbes list and is now most wanted fugitive.

Mexico,  is a federal republic in North America, bordered by the United States;  Guatemala, Belize, and Pacific Ocean,  Caribbean Sea; and Gulf of Mexico.It is the eleventh most populous and the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the World.  In pre-Columbian Mexico many Mesoamerican cultures matured into advanced civilizations such as the Olmec, the Toltec, theTeotihuacan, the Zapotec, the Maya and the Aztec before first contact with Europeans. In 1521, the Spanish Empire conquered and colonized the territory.  The Mexican Revolution in 1910, culminated with the promulgation of the 1917 Constitution and the emergence of the country's current political system.

In Mexico over the last few months security and crime stories such as the mass kidnapping of several dozen residents by 300 masked criminals in the town of Chilapa Guerrero and the more recent killing of 42 suspected cartel members by Federal Police in TanhuatoMichoacan, have attracted a lot of attention. Although Mexico’s government has decimated the leadership structures of groups such as the Zetas and Caballeros Templarios, over the course of 2014, a new group, the New Generation Cartel of Jalisco, has risen to prominence.

Joaquin Guzman Loera  was on Forbes Lists - #67 Powerful People (2013); #63 in 2012 is on the run having escaped from the high security prison.  Surveillance footage released yesterday  shows Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera apparently escaping from his prison cell via the shower on Saturday night. The footage reveals Guzman walking to and from the shower area, which does not have its own camera but can be partially seen in the video. He returns to his bed, where he seems to put on shoes, then goes back to the shower area and disappears behind a partition, where he escapes through a tunnel off-camera.The footage also shows a glowing object, possibly a mirror reflecting light or an electronic device such as a cellphone or tablet. The object was left behind when Guzman made his escape from the maximum-security Altiplano prison. Also left behind was an ankle bracelet that was supposed to monitor his location.

Mexico has offered a $3.8 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Guzman, who is now the subject of an international manhunt. CEO of the Sinaloa cartel, "El Chapo" is the world's most powerful drug trafficker. The cartel is responsible for an estimated 25% of all illegal drugs that enter the U.S. via Mexico. Drug enforcement experts estimate, conservatively, that the cartel's annual revenues may exceed $3 billion. This February the city of Chicago branded him the first "Public Enemy No. 1" since Al Capone.

According to Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, Guzmán’s cell was under surveillance 24 hours a day. But there were two blind spots from the cameras that protected the inmate’s privacy in the bathroom, reports CNN.The 58-year-old, who heads the Sinaloa cartel and a multibillion-dollar narco-trafficking empire, was able to escape through a hole in the shower area roughly 50 by 50 cm (20 by 20 in.) wide to a 1.5-km (1-mile) tunnel.

National security commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said Guzmán’sbehavior before his escape on Saturday was normal for an inmate in a maximum-security prison.The Mexican government has also released footage of the tunnel, which was even furnished with sophisticated lighting and ventilation. Video shows a motorcycle with a modified metal cart on tracks that Rubido said was “likely used to remove dirt during excavation and transport the tools for the dig.”Forty-nine people have so far been questioned in connection with Guzmán’s escape from the Altiplano maximum-security prison. It is apparentthat Guzman had help from prison officials.

Guzmán’s escape on Saturday was his second from a maximum-security prison. He was first arrested in Guatemala in 1993 but made a legendary escape from a facility in Jalisco, Mexico, in 2001. After 13 years on the run, he was rearrested in February 2014 and has made a great escape again now in July 2015 through an astonishing tunnel, a mile-long structure that took his engineers nearly a year to build.The motorbike, which was secured at its front wheel to the rails of the mile-long tunnel, was waiting for El Chapo as he descended into the tunnel from his prison shower block.  The slim tunnel,  wascomplete with oxygen supply piping overhead, and the rails for a fast exit, with the walls of the structure bored with professional equipment by the Sinaloa Cartel’s expert mining engineers.

So, Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, the billionaire leader of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, has eluded authorities and disappeared for the second time in 15 years. He was just weeks away from being extradited to the U.S. on 35 counts of money-laundering, cocaine and marijuana trafficking and conspiracy.  The planning appears elaborate and execution close to perfect - El Chapo made his escape by prising open a grill in the prison showers, unnoticed by guards, before climbing down a 32ft shaft into the tunnel. The 5ft 6in billionaire cartel leader would have been able to stand up straight in the tunnel, which would have required the removal of more than 3,250 tonnes of earth. 

Speaking to news channel Univision, Escobar’s top gunman known as ‘Popeye’, said that tunnelling out of maximum security prison is very difficult without the complicity of at least some of the guards, who are equipped with highly sensitive sonar equipment that will pick up any mining activity.‘You have to buy off the guards if you want to have a chance’, said the cartel killer. ‘And they know how rich he is, they’ll have asked for tens of millions of dollars’.‘El Chapo probably paid around 50 million in bribes alone’. More than 30 employees who worked at the prison have already been pulled in for questioning in the course of the interview.Three prison system officials have been fired, including the prison director.

And in a previous prison escape El Chapo had bribed prison guards to push him out of the Puente Grande maximum-security prison, in the western state of Jalisco, in a laundry cart. Now it a much detailed plan – the  tunnel was a miracle of underground engineering, and came complete with ventilation, electric lights and a motorbike fitted to rails, to help remove the massive amounts of earth and on which El Chapo could make his getaway. 

Colombian authorities state that while El Chapo may have escaped for the moment from the Mexican authorities, he won’t last long with the CIA and DEA on his tail.  The escape attains a different perspective, coming as it did when Mexico’s judiciary and politicians came under scrutiny for their refusal to accede to US demands to extradite him, where he would have been kept in a supermax prison.In the US he faces 35 charges including of cocaine and marijuana trafficking, organised crime and money laundering.He faces charges from a number of federal tribunals, including in Illinois, New York, Florida, Texas, California and Arizona, given that the United States in the largest marketplace of the Sinaloa cartel.

Leader of Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman is owning the  titleof Chicago’s public enemy number one.Despite having been held in a maximum-security prison more than 2,000 miles away for more than a year, Chicago has been blaimng El Chapo and his cartel for the growing violent drug trade in the city.Despite 60% of Mexicans being in favour of his removal to the United States on the grounds that they feared he would escape again, according to polls taken shortly after his capture in 2014, Mexico’s Attorney General at the time,  assured the country that the risk of his escape a second time ‘did not exist’. 

The Attorney General said that Mexico holding onto to Guzman was an issue of ‘National Sovereignty’, and joked that the US could have him once he had served his Mexican sentence of ‘about 300 to 400 years’.Under the previous Mexican administration of President Calderón a large amount of Mexican criminals were extradited to the United States, none of whom have since escaped from federal prison. All that has collapsed, he has escaped and Mexico has offered $3.8m reward for capture of kingpin 'El Chapo'.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

16^th July 2o15.