Documents: US agents knew of 'El Chapo' escape plots in 2014

[alp227]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. drug authorities knew Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and his associates had developed several escape plans starting almost immediately after his arrest last year, according to internal Drug Enforcement Administration documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The internal DEA documents reveal that drug agents first got information on escape plans in March 2014, about a month after Guzman was captured in the Mexican seaside resort town of Mazatlan. Various Guzman family members and drug-world associates were considering "potential operations to free Guzman," the documents show.

That Guzman began plotting to break out shortly after his arrest should have come as little surprise to Mexican authorities: The DEA had alerted them about the plans. Mexican federal government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the earlier escape schemes.

Since the 1990s his violent and powerful cartel has been known for digging sophisticated smuggling tunnels under the U.S. border with Mexico. Guzman was first arrested in 1993 but escaped from one of Mexico's top-security prisons, in Jalisco, in January 2001, allegedly by hiding in a laundry basket. He evaded capture in early February 2014 through an elaborate network of tunnels that connected multiple safe houses in Culiacan, in his home state of Sinaloa, and was arrested again a month later.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/1d82863979b74d599c789e596be3339b/escape-top-drug-lord-strong-blow-mexicos-government

[ananda]

1. Too many TBTF banks involved?

???

[Sunlei]

2. Everyone knew he would get out.

[ripcord]

3. The tunnel was a prop

A limo picked him up in front of the gate.

[Eugene]

4. +1

This could be another laundry cart story.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

5. Did El Chapo break out? Or did his cronies break in?

My understanding is that he didn't dig a shovel full of dirt, he didn't swing a pick or even saw a bar. His gang members dug an elaborate and sophisticated tunnel straight to him, with ample electric lighting, ventilation, and even a little electric car inside the tunnel to get away on. I'll bet dozens and dozens of Mexican police and investigators knew about it and so did the people in the vicinity of the elaborate digging site. The man known to be the number one drug kingpin in the world whose organization has conducted digs before should require the police to keep a watch over every potential digging site within a ten mile radius at least. These gangs use bribes and threats of killing the wife, the mother, the children, the grand parents and even the family dog and cat against anyone who tells. It also wouldn't surprise me to learn that he's bought politicians in the higher echelons of the Mexican government and law enforcement.

[hunter]

6. Our "War on Drugs" made the man who he is.

If drugs were treated as an ordinary public health issue, then the drug gangs wouldn't have such resources.

Cannabis and opium are easy to grow, and amphetamines are easy to make.

It was the same with alcohol during Prohibition.

The extreme profits and violence in the "industry" are a consequence of agencies like the DEA. They are, in effect, the price-support branch of the illegal drug industry, the unethical pharmaceutical industry, and ultimately of the big banks that specialize in money-laundering and tax-evasion.

If anyone with a drug problem could walk into a free clinic and get whatever they need to make it through the day, and maybe whatever it is they need to eventually get off drugs, then the drug gangs would have to find something else to do.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

7. Greed and the love of money made this man

If he couldn't make his billions selling heroin, it would have been selling organs or selling child sex slaves if there was profit in it or something else outside the bounds of civilized behavior.. El Chapo is a scavenger, a profiteer who will sell father and mother for profit, a parasite. He's the worst example of an extremist capitalist opportunist entrepreneur with no moral compass whatsoever. While I favor the decriminalization of marijuana and I don't think heroin users should be behind bars but instead in medical facilities, I feel that the heroin peddlers should do hard time. Heroin sales is not a victimless crime. Anything but. They're killers. Heroin destroys the kidneys, the liver, the heart, and the brain. Thousands of overdoses occur every year. Thousands of lives are dramatically shortened. Even if you get the user to a medical facility, the permanent damage is already done. I've read the arguments in favor of legalizing drugs, but even the most extremist libertarians pause when it comes to sheer poison like heroin. No government wants to hand out heroin if it's legalized and no government wants to have to preside over clinics to get sick, poisoned people off heroin. Heroin sales is El Chapo's primary source of his vast wealth. His expertise in the U.S. heroin market, his ability to expand sales and push it has led to a dramatic rise in heroin use. I could be offered one billion in the bank but I wouldn't order the deaths of over 30,000 people or poison and kill thousands of heroin users. Heroin sales should never be decriminalized and the government shouldn't offer it in place of the drug cartels.. I applaud the fact there's a DEA that goes against the murderers who sell heroin. To me there's little difference in shooting someone with a gun and selling heroin to a heavy drug user. I think someone like El Chapo should be treated like Bin Laden. He's probably been responsible for more deaths than Bin Laden, all for profit and greed. He deserves no understanding or compassion.

[hunter]

8. One might say the same about Dick Cheney. He's still free, and still profiting from death.

Hell, Cheney has someone else's heart beating in his chest. The devil won't take Cheney yet because, just like "El Chapo," Cheney is doing exceptionally well the devil's work on earth.

Clean cheap pharmaceutical quality opiates are not especially deadly. Look at Rush Limbaugh. He was entirely saturated with opiates for years, yet still he lives... He has money and avoided things like dirty shared needles and crappy product. He never shot-up with cheap pimp-supplied heroin in an abandoned industrial building, cuddling with his fellow whores for warmth. These opiates ruined Limbaugh's hearing, but he could afford to have that damage repaired (to some degree) with a cochlear implant.

I know a couple of ex-heroin addicts my age who miraculously escaped both AIDS and the damage done by dirty I.V. heroin. One was a cheap prostitute in San Francisco to support her habit. (I have some horror stories about her... she once tried to kill herself in my bath tub...) Some of them did methadone for a few years, a dozen years even, but most eventually reached a place where they didn't "need" opiates anymore.

I support needle exchange projects. And free condoms.

The same sort of progress is possible with methamphetamines, probably the worst drug out there because so much of it is crap. It's possible for a meth addict to become a functional human being again with supervision and clean, cheap, pharmaceutical grade amphetamines.

The people starting to die in my age cohort are mostly the heavy and entirely legal tobacco-and-alcohol abusers. That's what killed two of my grandparents.