Notorious Mexican drug kingpin who escaped once before from prison — and spent more than a decade on the lam — has done it again.
This time, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman disappeared down a hole near his cell and walked nearly a mile underground to freedom, triggering a massive manhunt Sunday.
Guzman wielded so much power as head of the Sinaloa drug cartel that the Chicago Crime Commission called him Public Enemy No. 1, a label applied to gangster Al Capone in 1930.
Guzman, 56, escaped late Saturday from Mexico’s Altiplano maximum-security prison through a specially built, lighted and ventilated tunnel that ended in a half-built house in a rural farm field near the prison.
The elaborate escape route, built allegedly without the detection of authorities, allowed Guzman to do what Mexican officials promised would never happen again: slip out of one of the country’s most secure penitentiaries.
“This represents without a doubt an affront to the Mexican state,” President Enrique Peña Nieto said Sunday during a previously scheduled trip to France. “But I also have confidence in the institutions of the Mexican state … that they have the strength and determination to recapture this criminal.”
Eighteen employees from Altiplano, 55 miles west of Mexico City, were being questioned, Mexico’s Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said.
After Guzman‘s first escape in 2001, from Puente Grande prison, he spent more than a decade on the run, rising to lead the Sinaloa cartel, which smuggles large quantities of drugs into the United States. The cartel is a key player in a drug war that has ravaged parts of Mexico for years and cost thousands of lives.
Guzman escaped that time with the help of prison guards, who possibly hid him in a laundry cart. He was recaptured in February 2014 and held at Altiplano since then.
“We share the government of Mexico’s concern regarding the escape,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday in a statement. “The U.S. government stands ready to work with our Mexican partners to provide any assistance that may help support his swift recapture.“