El Chapo's Escape Details Revealed! Drug Kingpin Called 'Lord' in Prison

By Ma. Elena| Jul 20, 2015

As the all-out manhunt for Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman persists, further details about his jailbreak continue to surface.

The underground tunnel used by the Mexican drug lord to escape the Altiplano Federal Prison is 1.5 kilometer long and 10 meters deep, which then led to a half-constructed empty house in the fields of Santa Juanita, RT reported.

The Daily Beast wrote that the escape tunnel was sophisticatedly built. PVC pipes ventilated the passageway illuminated by overhead electric bulbs. A small motorbike was also seen in the tunnel, presumably to carry El Chapo to the end. The tunnel even contained an oxygen tank to help a person breathe while going deeper into the channel.

Officials revealed that El Chapo broke the bulbs illuminating the tunnel as he took off, and managed to get rid of the tracker bracelet he was forced to wear in the prison, the news outlet added.

Miguel Osorio Chong, Secretary of the Interior in the cabinet of President Enrique Peña Nieto, believes that El Chapo "had to have relied on the aid of prison staff or directors to make his escape," The Daily Beast noted. General Jorge Carrillo Olea, the former chief of Mexico's spy agency CISEN, agreed with Osorio Chong and said that Altiplano is "impossible to penetrate."

"I know this, I designed the damn thing, it is impregnable. The installation is impregnable, but the people who work there are not. Unfortunately, there is much corruption," Carrillo told the national magazine Variopinto, as quoted by The Daily Beast.

El Chapo, who is the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was reportedly treated with "great respect" by guards, who called the drug lord "Don Joaquin" and "Lord," Daily Mail wrote. The news outlet also reported that El Chapo had privileges, and was the only prisoner in Altiplano with a cell phone.

Osorio Chong suspects that El Chapo's accomplices obtained access to Altiplano's blueprints, the news outlet added. No one was dismissed from work, except for the director of the prison and two administrators in the bureau of prisons.

Prison officials allowed contractor Sistema Cutzamala to renovate Altiplano's plumbing system. The project persisted through day and night and made a lot of construction noises, and was likely used by El Chapo's group as a cover to do their own excavation in the tunnel undetected, The Daily Beast explained.

"There have also been claims that Guzman may have paid $50 million in bribes to help him escape the prison, which is equipped with underground sonar to detect any possible tunneling activities," RT wrote.

This was El Chapo's second prison break. Back in 2001, he escaped from a maximum security prison and was not caught again until February 2014 at a Mexican beach resort, CNN wrote. He was first apprehended by authorities in Guatemala in 1993, Yahoo! News reported.

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