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Mexican officials chipped away at ‘El Chapo’s’ network to recapture him Mexican officials chipped away at ‘El Chapo’s’ network to recapture him
(about 7 hours later)
CULIACAN, Mexico — From the moment Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán popped out of his tunnel and was whisked to a pair of waiting Cessnas, Mexican authorities chipped away at the vast network of accomplices that helped the billionaire drug lord escape from maximum-security prison. LOS MOCHIS, Mexico — In the rain and darkness Friday morning, Mexican marines crept up in trucks with their lights out and jumped between rooftops on Boulevard Jiquilpan, surrounding a little white house in this coastal city where their country’s most-wanted fugitive, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was hiding.
They arrested corrupt prison guards and officials, relatives who handed out bribes and oversaw tunnel construction, and his trusted pilots who flew him to his home state of Sinaloa. But it was also Guzmán’s contact with Hollywood producers and actresses about starring in a biopic based on his life that ultimately helped authorities recapture the chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel in a roadside motel. When the shooting started, neighbors woke terrified. Marines went door to door rousting people from their beds, desperately trying to keep the billionaire drug lord — who had escaped twice from federal prison — from slipping away again.
Mexican Attorney General Arely Gómez González provided these details in her account of Guzmán’s capture at a news conference Friday night. After weeks of investigation and military and police operations in the region, Gómez said, authorities had an understanding of Guzmán’s properties and vehicles, including planes. In October, they tracked him to a ranch house in the town of Pueblo Nuevo in the western state of Durango. But as Guzmán fled — falling and injuring his face and leg — he was accompanied by two women and a young girl, and soldiers circling above in a helicopter didn’t want to fire and risk killing the others, Gómez said. Then he did just that. Famous for his Houdini-like disappearing acts, Guzmán vanished down an escape hatch and into the sewer. It wasn’t until he popped up four blocks away, stole a car, and sped out of town that Mexican authorities finally captured him on the highway and ended six months of national humiliation for letting the world’s top drug lord go free.
By late December, authorities suspected that Guzmán had gone to the coast. They began to focus on a white concrete house in an upscale neighborhood of Los Mochis, a city in northern Sinaloa, where they suspected he was hiding out. By Friday morning, commandos from an elite Mexican marine unit raided his house, setting off a gun battle that left five people dead. Guzmán and one of his top lieutenants, Ivan Gastelum, used one of their signature moves: fleeing through the sewer system. They popped up through a manhole cover and stole a car but were ultimately pursued to a motel about five miles north. “I never thought they’d catch him again,” said José Carlos Castro, a 29-year-old auto shop employee who worked across from the raided house. “Much less right here.”
Guzman was captured unharmed on Highway 15 that passes through Los Mochis. Federal police and soldiers then escorted him to the Doux hotel, where they took him to room 51 for questioning, according to hotel staff. [Mexican officials chipped away at ‘El Chapo’s’ network to recapture him]
Gómez said Guzmán would return to Altiplano, the same prison where he escaped six months ago. It is unclear whether he will be extradited to the United States. The capture was celebrated by law enforcement officials in Washington because Guzmán runs a drug-trafficking network with vast international reach that has been dumping tons of cocaine and heroin into U.S. cities for years. But more than that, it represented a massive vindication, at least symbolically, for a Mexican government that has often seemed incapable of alleviating the brutal drug war violence that has left some 100,000 dead in the past decade.
“Mission accomplished: we have him,” President Enrique Peña Nieto said Friday on Twitter. “I want to inform the Mexicans that Joaquín Guzmán . . . has been captured.” After two prison escapes, many expect the Mexican government to extradite Guzmán to the United States. After his last capture, it refused to do so, preferring to hold and interrogate Guzmán in Mexico. The Mexican attorney general’s office said in a statement Saturday that extradition procedures would begin. But that could take weeks or months, as the accusations against Guzmán must be reviewed and a judge needs to recommend a course of action.
The news was an immediate boost to Peña Nieto, who has struggled with corruption scandals, drug violence and the humiliation of the escape last year by Mexico’s most famous prisoner. Peña Nieto, speaking later Friday in a televised address from the national palace, shared the credit with Mexico’s armed forces and intelligence services. “There are a series of things that could take months,” one official said.
“Day and night, they worked to accomplish the mission I gave them, to recapture this criminal and bring him to justice,” Peña Nieto said. “Months of intense and careful intelligence work and criminal investigation allowed them to detain this criminal and dismantle his network of influence and protection.” From the moment Guzmán popped out of his prison escape tunnel six months ago and was whisked to a pair of waiting Cessnas, Mexican authorities undertook a massive manhunt to recapture him, setting up highway checkpoints across several states. Over the next weeks and months, as military operations focused on his home state of Sinaloa, authorities chipped away at the vast network of accomplices who helped Guzmán escape from maximum-security prison. They arrested corrupt prison guards and officials, relatives who handed out bribes and oversaw tunnel construction, and his trusted pilots, who flew him to Sinaloa.
With Guzmán’s capture, the president said, 98 of Mexico’s 122 most wanted criminals had been killed or captured. But it was Guzmán’s contact with movie producers and actresses about a biopic based on his life that ultimately helped authorities recapture the chief of the Sinaloa cartel along a highway outside a coastal town, according to Mexican attorney general Arely Gómez González. In a news conference Friday night, Gómez said that after weeks of investigation and military and police operations in the region, authorities had acquired an understanding of Guzmán’s properties and vehicles, including planes. In October, they tracked him to a ranch house in the town of Pueblo Nuevo in the western state of Durango. As Guzmán fled — falling and injuring his face and leg — he was accompanied by two women and a young girl, and soldiers circling above in a helicopter didn’t want to fire and risk killing them, Gómez said.
It seemed likely that U.S. officials would press to have the former fugitive handed over. After Guzmán’s last arrest, in 2014, the U.S. government wanted him to face a multitude of pending charges in American courts. But Mexican authorities refused, considering it a point of pride for them to interrogate and prosecute their most important criminal in their own judicial system. [Key dates in Mexico’s pursuit of drug lord ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán]
For a year and a half before his escape last year, Guzmán had been held in Altiplano prison outside Mexico City, supposedly the nation’s most secure detention center, where he lived in a tiny concrete cell with a hole in the floor for a toilet. His accomplices cut through the floor of his shower stall and ferried him into a mile-long tunnel equipped with a motorcycle. Several prison officials have since been accused of facilitating his escape. By late December, authorities suspected that Guzmán had gone to the coast. They began to focus on Los Mochis, a city nestled amid corn and cane fields in northern Sinaloa, and a white two-story house — obscured by trees and across from a dental office and an auto-glass repair shop — that neighbors said was for rent. The neighborhood was upper middle class: The mayor and the governor's mother lived nearby. The house also sat directly above the sewer tunnels.
[In Mexican town where ‘Chapo’ broke out of jail, admiration and awe] When the gunfight erupted, some neighbors dove to the floor, desperate to avoid stray bullets. The rattle of gunfire was punctuated by explosions of what might have been the rocket-propelled grenades later found in the house. Buses blocked off the streets, and helicopters swooped low over the rooftops. After more than an hour of fighting, five of Guzmán’s men lay dead and others had been arrested. One marine was injured.
In a statement Friday, U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said Guzmán’s capture represented “a victory for the citizens of both Mexico and the United States, and a vindication of the rule of law in our countries.” She later called her Mexican counterpart, Gómez, to congratulate her. “I thought we were in Syria,” said one neighbor who lived a block away and refused, like many others interviewed, to give her name out of fear for her safety. “This has been the biggest shock of my life. The world’s most-wanted man is my neighbor.”
It is unclear what role the United States played in the capture, but U.S. officials have lately been praising their security partnership with the Mexican government. Guzmán’s capture in Mazatlan in 2014 was due in part to extensive U.S. wiretapping and intelligence work to track the kingpin’s bodyguards. Guzmán and one of his top lieutenants, Jorge Ivan Gastelum, fled through a hatch into the sewer tunnels, a tactic Guzmán had used in previous escapes. Some of those escape hatches were hidden under a bathtub. A Mexican marine at the scene Saturday wouldn’t give details but said the passageway in the Los Mochis house was “the same system as the others.”
Since the billionaire drug lord escaped last year, he had grown into a fugitive of epic proportions in the public imagination. He had broken out of a Mexican prison twice in the past two decades and seemed capable of outwitting authorities at every turn. During his latest period on the lam there were only sporadic reports of his whereabouts, including rumors that he had injured his leg fleeing one of many military operations to find him. About 9:00 a.m., Guzmán, in a dirty tanktop, and a shirtless Gastelum emerged from the sewer four blocks east between an Office Depot and a Pollo Feliz restaurant. According to people who work in the area, the two fugitives forced open a square metal manhole but had trouble lifting the hinged cover, so they wedged in one of their shoes to prop it open. At that point, they brandished their guns and ordered one of the vendors selling the local newspaper, El Debate, to remove the cover so they could reach the street, according to two people who heard the account from the vendor.
The arrest confirmed what many Chapo-watchers assumed, that he would not flee Mexico but would return to his home state, where he would have protection from residents, corrupt local police and his extensive cartel network. Around his home town, in the remote Sierra Madre mountains of eastern Sinaloa, checkered with plots of marijuana and opium poppy, residents have often praised Guzmán for his ­largess, which included giving them jobs and medical care and even air-dropping bags of money from Cessnas into peasant ­villages. “He was terrified and shaking,” one woman said of the vendor.
But like the first time he was recaptured, in a 2014 raid on his condominium in the beach resort city of Mazatlan, he was caught on the coast Friday — this time after a battle near a two-story white house on a residential street of Los Mochis, with a palm tree out front, televised images show. Inside the sewer from which they emerged Saturday was a weapon that appeared to be an assault rifle, still propped against the wall under the manhole cover.
A neighbor who lives about two blocks from the house, in an upper-middle-class subdivision, said by telephone that the commotion started about 3:40 a.m. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns, the neighbor said she heard gunfire and what she assumed to be bombs, and rushed to a windowless room inside her house for safety. A white sedan was stopped at the traffic light when they emerged. Guzmán and Gastelum ordered a man and a woman out of the car and sped off through drizzling rain. Authorities apprehended the vehicle outside of town on Highway 15 and took the men to the Doux Hotel, a mid-range roadside establishment nearby that rents rooms by the night and the hour. The federal police put Guzmán in Room 51, away from the road, and searched every room in the hotel to make sure theircaptive had no surprises in store, according to hotel staff.
The gun battle lasted for about an hour, stopped for 15 minutes, then resumed, she said. Neighbors exchanged a running commentary on the WhatsApp messaging app, she said, that informed her there were frequent military and police patrols driving with their lights off, while helicopters circled overhead. “I think it’s kind of stupid,” said a guest from Tijuana who refused to give his name for security reasons. “If you have that kind of money, why would you be here in Los Mochis? You’d be in Dubai or Switzerland.”
The neighbor added that authorities were searching storm drains and that she believed that some of the suspects escaped through them. On Saturday, bullet holes could be seen in the neighbors’ metal gates near the raid, and a woman was hosing off blood pooled in her carport. An architect who lives nearby said marines burst into many houses around their target to try to encircle Guzmán. He complained that they took a TV monitor attached to his security system. “They just stole it,” he said.
Mexican news outlets reported that Guzmán escaped the house and fled through a sewer but was ultimately captured at the Hotel Doux, about five miles north of the house. A person who answered the phone at the hotel declined to comment. [Prison break shines spotlight on Mexico’s corruption woes]
Five suspected gunmen were killed in the raid, authorities said. They reported recovering four vehicles, two of them armored, plus at least nine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, officials said. Guzmán was eventually flown to Mexico City and returned to Altiplano prison, the maximum-security facility he escaped from in July and supposedly the nation’s most secure detention center. For a year and a half before that, he lived in a tiny concrete cell with a hole in the floor for a toilet. To free him, his accomplices cut through the floor of his shower stall and ferried him into a mile-long tunnel equipped with a motorcycle.
By Friday afternoon, Guzmán had been flown to the navy hangar in Mexico City, the same place where he was dragged before news cameras after his last arrest. Pictures circulating online showed him in a disheveled tank-top, a less flattering look than his last perp walk, in a crisp white dress shirt.
In the murky world of Mexican drug trafficking, it is unclear how much the Sinaloa cartel suffered during Guzmán’s last incarceration — or changed while he was out of prison.
“We don’t know whether the Sinaloa cartel will simply continue to operate as usual under El Mayo Zambada and other cartel leaders or if it will eventually devolve into smaller groups,” said Andrew Selee, a Mexico expert at the Wilson Center in Washington. “And if the Sinaloa cartel does fragment, will it produce more violence or lower the death toll?”
On Friday morning, the news coursed through a euphoric Mexican government.
“We are very happy,” Education Secretary Aurelio Nuño, who was Peña Nieto’s chief of staff when Guzmán fled prison, said in an interview.
Nuño noted that the first time Guzmán slipped out of federal prison, in 2001, he managed to stay on the lam for more than a decade, while this time he was free for less than a year.
“To achieve this for a second time ultimately speaks to the determination of this president, of this government, and a growing capacity of the Mexican state in terms of intelligence,” he said.
Elahe Izadi and Sari Horwitz in Washington, Nick Miroff in Havana and Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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