El Chapo Escapes Again 2017
Drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been recaptured seven months after he escaped from prison, Mexican authorities announced Friday.
Los Angeles Times – In his last 90 seconds as a prisoner, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman paced his tiny cell, repeatedly entered a shower out of view of surveillance cameras, returned to his bed. The 31-year-old Emma Coronel Aispuro, who is a former beauty queen, was arrested in Virginia at Dulles International Airport and is scheduled to appear on Tuesday in federal court in Washington. She has dual citizenship in both Mexico and the United States and she is the wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
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):
- 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.