Drug lord El Chapo recaptured, Mexican president says
El Chapo is back in custody, Mexico’s president announced in a tweet Friday.
Notorious escaped drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was recaptured in his home state of Sinaloa in a dramatic, pre-dawn shootout with Mexican marines, officials said.
Guzman had been on the lam since his dramatic July 11 escape through a mile-long tunnel from a prison outside Mexico City.
Five people were killed and one marine was wounded as marines clashed with Guzman’s guards at the fugitive’s hideout, a home in the city of Los Mochis, officials said. Law enforcement agents were fired on from inside as they raided the structure.
“Mision cumplida: lo tenemos,” President Enrique Pena Niento revealed hours later in a tweet.
“Mission accomplished: we have him.”
The recapture caps a riveting, and for the Mexican government, embarrassing, escape yarn.
Guzman popped down a hidden hatch in the shower of his cell and fled his so-called maximum security prison on a custom motorcycle through a mile-long tunnel estimated to have taken a year to construct.
The tunnel — five feet high and 30 feet underground — featured air ducts, electrical lighting, and a rail on which El Chapo could ride to freedom on a custom-rigged motorbike.
He surfaced inside a walled site a mile south of the prison. Since then his whereabouts were the subject of folklore, red herrings and tantalizing taunts, including snaps on social media posts purporting to show him flying in a private plane and knocking back a beer with family or friends.
It was the second escape for Guzman, whose slipperiness is attributed to violence and bribes aimed at law enforcement and government figures. In 2001, bribed prison workers helped him flee out of the front door in a laundry cart.
That time, he was missing for 13 years before getting caught at a hotel in the beachfront resort of Mazatlan.
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