From NYRB, Alma Guillermoprieto:
On June 25, the United States issued a formal request to the Mexican government for the extradition of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as Chapo, who was being held at Mexico’s highest security prison. On July 11, less than three weeks later, Guzmán Loera released himself from the supposedly impregnable prison in President Enrique Peña Nieto’s home state, by means of a sixty-foot-deep tunnel that had apparently been dug from a half-built house a mile away, directly into the shower of his prison cell. Guzmán, of course, had been transferred to the Almoloya prison immediately after his capture eighteen months earlier, in February 2014, even as the government of Peña Nieto made it clear that its most important trophy in the decades-long war on drugs would not be sent to face charges in the United States, unlike so many other captured drug lords.
As a friend of mine commented, Guzmán’s jailbreak is an unbroken string of punchlines, arguably the greatest pie-in-the-face embarrassment any Mexican government has ever had to deal with, and Mexicans are still riffing compulsively about it. (A startled Bugs Bunny emerges from his hole; “You’ll never guess who I just ran into!”) But as the country’s highest officials in charge of national security tried to recover face over the course of the past week, they failed to come up with answers to quiet the laughter. Serious questions continue to pile up, all of them having to do with whether the Mexican government was more inept or more corrupt in its stewardship of its most notorious prisoner, just how much of the evolving and often contradictory official account is a lie, and ultimately, whether the US extradition request in June triggered Guzmán’s Fantastic Mr. Fox-like disappearance in July. Because if it did, then one has to explain away the existence of the tunnel, which appears to have been under construction for at least a year.
But if one dismisses the extradition-escape theory, more questions arise, because, really, with all the cooperation Guzmán received, and all the money and trickery he must have had to deploy in order to get that tunnel built and precisely choreograph his escape, wouldn’t it have been easier just to stroll out the front door? Did he? Millions of Mexicans believe that there is no such tunnel, that the few feet that reporters have been allowed to inspect, at the entry point in Guzmán’s prison shower and at the exit hatch a mile away, are a sham. (Citing safety concerns, the government has not allowed the press or members of Congress to traverse the construction’s entire length.)
According to this theory, Guzmán turned himself in voluntarily last year after the government—fearful of what Chapo might tell about his high-level connections in Mexico— agreed not to extradite him. This would also explain the government’s strange initial reluctance to accept loudly-proferred US assistance after Guzmán vanished. This is conspiracy delirium of the highest order, but given the government’s utter failure to account for the many questions surrounding his escape, it’s been as good an explanation as any.
Now that anyone who is following the story feels that no news break could top what we have seen this past week, the unusually well-sourced and serious weekly magazine Proceso has come out with a breathtaking new version of what happened in its July 19 issue. According to the magazine, Chapo really was taken prisoner unawares last year in his home state of Sinaloa, but not by Mexican security forces. Instead, he was arrested by DEA agents and US marshals disguised as Mexican marines. This information comes from two unnamed and uncharacterized US sources who spoke to a Proceso reporter in Washington, DC. According to the sources, US intelligence had been successfully tracking Guzmán during the first three weeks of February 2014, thanks to a combination of satellite surveillance and information provided by his associates. On the night of February 22, when Guzmán checked into a quiet beachfront hotel in the resort city of Mazatlán, and had his wife and twin daughters join him, the agents told Proceso they were able to pinpoint the room their intended prey was in.
Comments