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Stunning Escape of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán Fuels Mexicans’ Cynicism ‘El Chapo’ Prison Break Bruises Mexican President’s Image
(about 4 hours later)
MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities on Monday continued their manhunt for Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the country’s most notorious drug kingpin, as many Mexicans expressed disbelief at his stunning escape and wondered how much of the government’s waning credibility may have slipped away through the tunnel that carried the trafficker to freedom. MEXICO CITY — However bruised and battered he has been, President Enrique Peña Nieto has always clung to the polished image he sold to the Mexican electorate: the perfectly coifed wunderkind who would break with the corrupt, incompetent past and get things done.
“They’re all in it together, they’re all accomplices,” said José Manuel Gil, 61, a grocery shop owner, in Mexico City. “These all-mighty criminals are so powerful, I have an impression they have a direct line to the president, to let him know what they are doing and just wiring millions to buy off their free rein.” Even when Mexicans complained that his signature reforms in energy, telecommunications and education were not bearing fruit, he stuck to his script, telling them to be patient, that such a grand reshaping of Mexico would take time.
The stunning escape of Mr. Guzmán, known as “El Chapo,” or “Shorty,” from what was supposed to be the country’s most secure prison was the latest blow to an already weakened President Enrique Peña Nieto. It fed a deep cynicism in Mexico about the country’s leadership and its corruption-riddled institutions. But for many Mexicans, the stunning escape of the country’s most notorious drug kingpin, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, shattered the president’s own closely defended narrative, leading many here to ask how much of Mr. Peña Nieto’s waning credibility may have slipped away through the tunnel that carried the trafficker to freedom.
“Accusations of ineptness, that really gets them, it undermines their narrative,” Alejandro Hope, a security expert and former intelligence officer, said of the Peña Nieto administration. “A subtext of this is that crime and violence were the result of the ineptness of” previous governments.
“Now that the smart guys were in charge, those things would not happen,” he added. “Whoops.”
Mr. Guzmán’s arrest in 2014 by the Mexican authorities, aided by intelligence provided by the United States, was a coup for Mr. Peña Nieto, who sought to use it as a prime example of his government’s effectiveness.
Because Mr. Guzmán had escaped from prison before, and then evaded capture as Mexico’s most wanted man for years, Mr. Peña Nieto assured the public that the same mishap would not happen under his watch. A second escape would be “unforgivable,” he said.
Mr. Peña Nieto’s own words are coming back to haunt him. Mr. Guzmán not only broke out of what was supposed to be Mexico’s most secure prison over the weekend, but it happened in the president’s home state, a political stronghold where Mr. Peña Nieto served as governor before becoming president in 2012.
Now the breakout has become a symbol of the president’s inability to overcome the deeply rooted ills of corruption, impunity and gaping holes in the rule of law.
“The lack of rule of law, the stain of corruption and the disaster of the criminal system in Mexico is probably Mexico’s No. 1 problem,” said Enrique Krauze, a historian. “The escape only underlines the cruel and bitter reality. We need to reform the system starting from its roots.”“The lack of rule of law, the stain of corruption and the disaster of the criminal system in Mexico is probably Mexico’s No. 1 problem,” said Enrique Krauze, a historian. “The escape only underlines the cruel and bitter reality. We need to reform the system starting from its roots.”
Of Mr. Guzmán’s escape he added, “Our worst nightmare has happened. This has a terrible weight, real and symbolic.” Of Mr. Guzmán’s escape he added: “Our worst nightmare has happened. This has a terrible weight, real and symbolic.”
On Saturday night, Mr. Guzmán entered the shower area of his cell and dropped through a small opening in the floor, about 20 inches on each side. He climbed down a ladder in a vertical shaft, then continued through an elaborately constructed tunnel about a mile long that ended in a small house on a construction site in a nearby community. On Saturday night, Mr. Guzmán entered the shower area of his cell and dropped through a small opening in the floor, about 20 inches on each side. He climbed down a ladder in a vertical shaft, then fled through an elaborate tunnel about a mile long that ended in a small house on a construction site.
When guards noticed that he had not come out of the shower, they sounded the alarm, but by then he had disappeared. The escape was announced Sunday morning. Some Mexicans reacted to the escape with humor, joking that the drug traffickers were better at building infrastructure than the government. That included a new subway line in Mexico City, which has been plagued by problems, prompting quips that the project should be handed over to Mr. Guzmán and his minions. Some started referring to Mr. Guzmán not as El Chapo (or Shorty) but El Topo, the mole.
Local news media reported on Monday that the head of the Altiplano prison, which is about a 90 minute drive west of Mexico City, had been detained and was being questioned by investigators, along with about 30 other prison employees.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Alma Camarena Díaz, 54, of Mexico City. “The level of corruption in this country, it is just everywhere.”“It’s unbelievable,” said Alma Camarena Díaz, 54, of Mexico City. “The level of corruption in this country, it is just everywhere.”
Mr. Guzmán, who is believed to be in his late 50s, rose through the ranks of Mexico’s drug syndicates to lead what is known as the Sinaloa Cartel, the country’s most powerful and, according to American authorities, the source of the greatest amount of drugs flowing into the United States. He is an underworld figure of mythical proportions and had once before escaped from prison, by bribing guards and, by some accounts, hiding in a laundry cart. When Mr. Peña Nieto took office in December 2012, he tried to shift the focus of the country and its image away from that of a nation rived by drug violence and corruption. But his own image has been bruised by corruption allegations in his immediate circle.
His latest escape was also a blow to the country’s main drug war strategy, carried out with help from the United States, of going after the leaders of violent trafficking gangs. Late last year, local journalists published details of a luxurious house that the first lady, Angélica Rivera, was buying on credit from a contractor that had done a lot of government business. Then, the finance minister, Luis Videgaray, was also shown to have bought a house from the company. In each case, officials have asserted that there were no conflicts of interest.
“The wheels are coming off on the war on drugs and it’s not just in Mexico,” said Jeremy McDermott, a director of InsightCrime, a research group based in Medellín, Colombia, that tracks organized crime in the Americas. Perhaps the president’s lowest moment was the disappearance last year of 43 students in the state of Guerrero. Investigators revealed that a mayor, who had been working with a criminal organization in the area, had handed the students to the gang, which then killed them and burned the remains. Scores of police officers were also arrested in the episode.
He pointed to recent developments around the region that have undermined the longstanding consensus about how to combat drug trafficking, including ballooning cocaine production in Colombia despite years of interdiction efforts; the Colombian government’s recent decision to stop aerial spraying of drug crops there; and a shift in the United States that includes the legalization of marijuana in several states. Rancor rose across the nation when Mr. Peña Nieto traveled to Asia during the crisis for economic and political summit meetings. (He ultimately shortened the trip, to six days from 10, amid a wave of criticism.)
But here in Mexico, the focus was squarely on Mr. Peña Nieto and the country’s inability to overcome the deeply-rooted ills of corruption, impunity and a flawed rule of law. Mr. Peña Nieto’s standing in the polls soon sunk to the lowest levels in decades for a Mexican president, and voters, fed up with traditional parties, elected independent candidates for the first time in June elections, including the governor of a major economic hub, Nuevo León State.
Mr. Guzmán’s arrest in 2014 by the Mexican authorities, aided by intelligence provided by the United States, was at the time a coup for Mr. Peña Nieto, who sought to use it as a show of his government’s effectiveness. Now Mr. Peña Nieto has generated another torrent of criticism by going forward with a state visit to France to sign economic and other accords and participate in Bastille Day events as questions swirl at home about the escape.
But now Mr. Peña Nieto’s own words may come back to haunt him. On the national stage, Mr. Peña Nieto has passed measures to fix entrenched problems that experts agreed were a drag on economic growth in Mexico, perhaps most notably in the energy sector. For the first time in nearly eight decades, the nation will allow private companies — from Mexico and abroad — to develop new oil fields with its state-owned oil companies, contracts that will begin to be auctioned this week.
In a television interview just after Mr. Guzmán was captured last year, Mr. Peña Nieto was told that many Mexicans believed it was likely that he would escape again. Mr. Peña Nieto has also taken on telecommunications monopolies in the country and sought to neuter the powerful teachers’ unions that controlled classrooms and, in the view of many, left Mexico behind in education.
Mr. Peña Nieto said that a second escape would be “unforgivable.” But approaching the halfway mark of his six-year term, Mexicans complain they have yet to feel the dramatic change such measures promised. And now Mr. Guzmán’s escape has robbed the president of his biggest accomplishment on the security front.
“This is a responsibility that the government has taken on, to assure that the escape that occurred a few years ago is not repeated,” the president said, adding that his government would be asking every day: “Is he being properly watched? Is he secure?” “Chapo’s escape puts an end to the ‘Mexico Moment’ strategy” of the president, said Isabel Studer, the founding director of the Global Institute for Sustainability at the Egade Business School in Mexico, citing the phrase Mr. Peña Nieto used during his inaugural address: “This is Mexico’s moment.”
Some Mexicans reacted to the escape with black humor. The sophisticated tunnel built to whisk Mr. Guzmán to freedom led some to joke that the drug traffickers were better at building infrastructure than the government. That included a new subway line in Mexico City, which has been plagued by problems, prompting quips that the project should be handed over to Mr. Guzmán and his minions. She added: “Peña Nieto’s reforms have so far failed to achieve what they were meant for, such as improving Mexico’s image abroad and boosting the Mexican economy. While the pending structural reforms were obviously needed, they are doomed to fail due to the evident weakness of the Mexican State — with rampant corruption and no law enforcement capabilities.”
When Mr. Peña Nieto took office in December 2012, he attempted to shift the focus of the country and its image away from that of a nation rived by drug violence and corruption, and pressed ahead with reforms that many Mexicans felt were long overdue. From the start, Mr. Peña Nieto did not want Mexico’s chronic violence and organized crime problems to define his presidency. He has veered from strategy to strategy, promising to reduce violence early on. But ultimately he adopted much of the same approach as his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, with an emphasis on using the military to hunt kingpins.
He passed reforms that experts agreed were a drag on economic growth in Mexico, perhaps most notably in the energy sector. For the first time in seven decades, the nation will allow outside companies to codevelop new oil fields with its state-owned oil companies, contracts that will begin to be auctioned this week. As Mexican security forces broke apart older, more established criminal groups, new gangs began to form that proved very deadly.
But Mr. Peña Nieto’s own image has been bruised by corruption allegations in his immediate circle. Late last year, local journalists published details of a luxurious house that the first lady, Angelica Rivera, was buying on credit from a contractor that had done a lot of government business. In early May, members of the New Generation gang fired a rocket-propelled grenade into an army helicopter, killing eight soldiers in a round of violence that claimed the lives of more than a dozen security forces. The emergence of the gang, forged from the pieces of other networks whose prominence had waned, was a stunning reminder of the flexibility of the syndicates.
Ms. Rivera backed out of the house deal after it was made public. Then, the finance minister, Luis Videgaray, was also shown to have bought a house from the company. Mr. Videgaray argued that he paid back the loan and saw no conflict of interest because he bought the house a couple of months before he joined the cabinet. More than any single strategy, Mr. Peña Nieto has emphasized speaking positively about his country, especially to the outside world. As recently as January, he urged his diplomats in Mexico City to emphasize that, despite a year of shuddering violence in 2014, Mexico was on a “clear path” and that they should “demonstrate to the world that Mexico is not backing down in the face of adversity.”
Mr. Peña Nieto’s standing in the polls sunk to the lowest levels in decades for a Mexican president, and voters, fed up with traditional parties, elected independent candidates for the first time in June elections, including the governor of the economic hub, Nuevo León State. The prison that had held Mr. Guzmán is an imposing compound, with tall guard towers, concrete walls and metal fences topped by razor wire — a stark contrast with the peaceful green fields of corn and livestock around it.
Though rattled, the president has tried to position Mexico as a country on the move economically, no longer mired in the violence of the drug war and the corruption of past administrations. On Sunday, people posted on social media that their cars had been stopped and searched on a highway near the prison. But on Monday there was little sign of a manhunt. Cars traveled freely on the mostly dirt roads near the prison and several people who lived in the poor communities nearby said that the authorities had not asked to search their houses for the fugitive.
Yet episodes of extreme violence and corruption continued to drag the country back into the spotlight. Mr. Guzmán rose through the ranks of Mexico’s drug syndicates to lead the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s most powerful and, according to the American authorities, the biggest source of drugs flowing into the United States. He is an underworld figure of mythical proportions and had once before escaped from prison, by bribing guards and, by some accounts, hiding in a laundry cart.
New gangs began to emerge as the security institutions broke apart the older, more established criminal groups. It often led to more infighting between the smaller players. From the moment he was recaptured last year, officials on both sides of the border have said that they expected another escape attempt. Local news reports said the authorities were questioning the head of the prison and about 30 other employees there, fueling widespread suspicions of corruption.
In early May, members of the New Generation gang fired a rocket-propelled grenade into an army helicopter, killing eight soldiers in a round of violence that claimed the lives of more than a dozen security forces. The emergence of the gang, forged from the pieces of other networks whose prominence had waned, was a stunning reminder of the flexibility and deadliness of the syndicates. “They’re all in it together,” said José Manuel Gil, 61, a grocery shop owner in Mexico City. “They’re all accomplices.”
The most devastating example of the nation’s inability to establish the rule of law across large swaths of the country was the disappearance last year of 43 students in the state of Guerrero.
Investigators revealed that the mayor of the town of Iguala had been working with a gang in the area and had turned the students over to its members, who, the authorities have said, killed them and burned the remains. Scores of police officers were also arrested in the episode.
In the search for the students, the mass graves of others were uncovered, revealing the extent of violence in the region.
“What the escape really tells us about Mexico is the extreme difference between the quality and professionalism within the government,” said Viridriana Rios, a security analyst and director of a civic group. “You have an elite government that is able to capture drug traffickers and approve reforms the country has been waiting to see for decades, but all of the major scandals in terms of the security have come from the inability of the federal government to control the state and local governments.”
In November, responding to mass protests over the disappearance of the students, Mr. Peña Nieto promised to overhaul the state and local police in Mexico, who have time and again been complicit in the criminal activity choking certain parts of the country.
“You can create strategy at the high level of the government with your Harvard and M.I.T. educated advisers, but that is just reform on paper,” Ms. Rios said. “To implement you need to change and professionalize the other layers of government.”
But enacting those changes is a tall order. Given the public ire over a series of public embarrassments, most recently with Mr. Guzmán, the ability to pass laws that could contravene entrenched financial interests could be compromised as well.
“Now, with the lack of confidence and the corruption scandals, they don’t have political leverage to implement these changes,” Ms. Rios said.
And it is not entirely clear that Mr. Peña Nieto has received the message. Many Mexicans criticized his decision to remain in France after Mr. Guzmán’s escape was announced. Though he dispatched his interior secretary to oversee the operation to recapture the drug kingpin, the president insisted that he needed to stay to sign economic agreements.
The business community itself appears to be growing tired of the reminders of Mexico’s inability to secure the rule of law. Leaders are outraged and embarrassed by a system that can allow a drug lord known for burrowing underground to get around the law to somehow escape through his shower in the nation’s most secure prison.
“We are calling on the branches of the executive, legislative and judicial as well as all levels of government to return to work to secure that Mexicans have public security and that combination of corruption and impunity do no place doubt on the advance of reforms,” according to a statement released by the main business lobby in Mexico, the Consejo Coordinador de Empresarial.
Alejandro Hope, a security expert and former intelligence officer, said the escape undermines Mr. Peña Nieto’s main narrative: that he gets things done, in contrast to the incompetence of previous governments.
“A subtext of this is that crime and violence were the result of the ineptness” of previous administrations, he said. “Now that the smart guys were in charge, those things would not happen. Woops.”