2024-03-12 16:09:14
By: El País
The impossible has happened. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, one of the biggest drug traffickers on the planet, has escaped. The leader of the Sinaloa cartel, 58 years old, escaped at nine o’clock on Saturday night from the maximum security prison of El Altiplano through a 1,500-meter tunnel. A passageway, illuminated and ventilated, through which the pride of the Mexican security forces has collapsed.
The magnitude of the work, which even had rails to remove debris; The dangerousness of the prisoner, who only needed to go to the shower to disappear, and the impunity revealed by the entire incredible escape plan, place the Mexican Government before the most serious of challenges and call into question its ability to confront its public enemy. number one.
His capture a year ago, considered an unprecedented success in the fight against drug trafficking, now faces its reverse. And what is worse, the unstoppable suspicion that he received help from inside the prison. All staff at the prison, until now the most secure in Mexico, have been detained and 18 officials are being questioned in the capital.
The last recording in which he is seen was recorded at 8:52 p.m. After taking his medication, El Chapo was currently heading to the shower area. There, outside the video surveillance area, he began his escape. Everything was prepared to the millimeter. Hidden under a trapdoor, a rectangular mouth, measuring 2.5 square meters, had been excavated. This hole communicates with a vertical conduit 10 meters deep, in which the criminals installed a ladder. After lowering it, Guzmán Loera only had to go to the final tunnel (1.7 meters high and 70 centimeters wide) and reach, under electric light and good ventilation, a building under construction in the Colonia Santa Juanita. There, he disappeared. Only construction supplies were left behind.