Ever since the powerful drug lord known as El Chapo escaped from a maximum-security prison through a 1.5km-long tunnel that opened right into the shower of his cell, Mexico has been wondering how his accomplices got their hands on the blueprints to operate with such pinpoint precision.
The answer could be simple: They might have had them for years.
It turns out that the prison is a virtual replica of another lockup that El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, broke out of in 2001 in another escape.
Photo: AP
He essentially broke out of the same prison twice.
Authorities believe that for his first escape, Guzman had the help of a top prison security official who went on to become a trusted member of his Sinaloa cartel.
Investigators think that the confederate, Damaso Lopez, might have taken a copy of the blueprints for the other prison when he left his job at about the time of Guzman’s earlier escape, a senior Mexican law enforcement official said.
And since the layout of the two prisons is almost identical, those blueprints could have helped when planning this month’s breakout.
The official said that Lopez was now a prime suspect in the hunt for the people who planned and carried out this month’s escape. Beyond the possible blueprints, Lopez is believed to have close knowledge of the layout of the prisons and security procedures. The tunnel makers might have also had the GPS coordinates for Guzman’s shower stall.
Authorities have so far detained seven prison employees, including four whose job was to watch closed-circuit television monitors.
Lopez remains at large.
Lopez was charged with drug trafficking in a 2011 indictment filed in a US federal court in Virginia, and in 2013 he was described as Guzman’s right-hand man and a senior lieutenant in the Sinaloa cartel in a statement by the US Treasury Department.
The tunnel that Guzman used to escape extended under the prison walls, ending in a shaft that opened in a hole in the floor of the tiny shower of his cell.
There was little room for error. Being off by a meter would have meant failure.
“Certainly they needed the blueprints,” Mexican Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said last week.
The prison that he escaped from this month, about an hour’s drive from Mexico City, is known as Altiplano, or Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 1, because it was the first of a new set of modern prisons. The prison that Guzman escaped from in 2001 is Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 2. A third prison with the same design near Matamoros on the border with Texas was finished in 1994.
The Mexican law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation into Guzman’s escape is continuing, confirmed that the design for the three prisons was the same.
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