El Chapo Escape 2020
Drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been recaptured seven months after he escaped from prison, Mexican authorities announced Friday.
But this isn’t the first time El Chapo, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, has been on the lam. The drug kingpin has a long history of capture, escape and recapture.
Here are some major dates in Guzman’s timeline (with some information from the Associated Press):
One year after being sentenced, 'El Chapo' is hoping an appeal can get him out of Supermax, his lawyer says By Maria Santana Updated 1124 GMT (1924 HKT) July 22, 2020. El Chapo's wife Emma Coronel Aispuro is preparing to rat out high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel after she was arrested. Escape from a maximum-security Mexican prison in 2015,. El Chapo: Rare prison video emerges. A video has emerged which shows the Mexican drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman in prison. He was arrested in 2016 and was found guilty at his drug.
- El Chapo used Coronel to tell his sons to purchase firearms, an armored truck and a warehouse near the prison to facilitate his eventual 2015 escape, according to testimony from a cooperating witness. She also allegedly made payments totaling around $1 million to the same witness in an attempt to help her husband escape prison a third time.
- FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2019 file photo, Emma Coronel Aispuro, center, wife of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, leaves federal court in New York. The wife of Mexican drug kingpin and escape artist Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been arrested on international drug trafficking charges at an airport in Virginia.
- June 10, 1993: Mexico announces Guzman’s first capture in Guatemala. But even after Guzman was imprisoned, “He continued to manage his affairs from prison with scarcely a hitch,” writes Robert Saviano in his book ZeroZeroZero. “The maximum security prison Puente Grande, where he was transferred in 1995, became his new base of operations,”
- Jan. 19, 2001: With the help of bribed guards, Guzman escapes from his top-security prison. Saviano describes the escape: “One of them—Francisco Camberos Rivera, known as El Chito, or the Silent One—opened the door to El Chapo’s cell and helped him climb into a cart of dirty laundry. They headed down unguarded hallways and through wide-open electronic doors to the inner parking lot, where only one guard was on duty. El Chapo jumped out of the cart and leaped into the trunk of a Chevrolet Monte Carlo.”
- Feb. 22, 2014: El Chapo is captured in Mazatlan after hiding in tunnels for days. The success was touted as a huge win for authorities, who by then had deemed Guzman the “most powerful drug trafficker in the world.”
- July 11, 2015: Guzman escapes through a tunnel from Mexico’s top-security prison. You can see the path he took to escape here.
- Jan. 8, 2016: He is once again re-captured in Los Mochis, Sinaloa after a shootout with Mexican marines. Five people were killed and one marine was wounded in the fight.
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For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.A federal prison that housed some of Mexico’s most powerful crime bosses will shut down, marking the end for a facility that saw everything from high-profile escapes to lavish parties with narcocorridos.
Authorities in Mexico announced September 28 that the Federal Center for Social Rehabilitation Number Two in western Jalisco State, better known as the Puente Grande prison, will close and its inmates will be transferred to other facilities.
Guards and officials employed at the prison will also be relocated across the country, according to the statement.
SEE ALSO:Mexico News and Profiles
Security Minister Alfonso Durazo later clarified that the shutdown was ordered because the prison was “self-governed” by the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación — CJNG).
The prison was the scene of a brawl in May of this year that left eight people dead and eight others injured, according to state authorities. In the aftermath, officials seized two firearms and an explosive device, but they did not say how the weapons entered the facility.
A year earlier, in August 2019, CJNG boss Heleno Madrigal Virrueta, alias “El 20,” was found dead in his cell. Authorities reported the death as a suicide, but other organized crime figures in the prison have died under mysterious circumstances.
InSight Crime Analysis
Puente Grande was infamous for housing Mexico’s cartel kingpins, but it will be remembered most for the prison break of Sinaloa Cartel capo Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo.”
A who’s who of crime bosses were incarcerated at Puente Grande, including Guadalajara Cartel kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Beltrán Leyva Organization (BLO) leader Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, alias “El Mochomo.”
But it was El Chapo who bought his way out of the maximum security prison. In January 2001, he walked out of his electronically secured cell, after which someone then smuggled him out in a laundry truck. Another Sinaloa native, Dámaso López Núñez, the prison’s vice director at the time, aided his escape and eventually became a drug trafficker in his own right known as “El Licenciado.”
SEE ALSO:The Prison Dilemma in the Americas
In Puente Grande, guards ceded control to high-profile inmates. A 2017 video of a party thrown by CJNG operative José Luis Gutiérrez Valencia, alias “Don Chelo,” showed him surrounded by bodyguards as other prisoners danced and drank beside him. Los Buchones de Culiacán, a musical group famous for its narcocorridos, even played songs praising the CJNG boss during the celebration.
“I’m the one who rules here,” Don Chelo said, laying bare the lack of official control in the prison.
Puente Grande’s closing is likely to be a positive development given its unruly history. But the levels of corruption in Mexico’s prison system and the various legal loopholes still available to those with money mean that maximum security seldom applies to Mexico’s most notorious criminals.
*This article was updated October 2 to include comments from Security Minister Alfonso Durazo.
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