MEXICO CITY — In his last moments as Mexico’s most important prisoner, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman paces his cell, past his single bunk with rumpled sheets, the plastic water jugs on the floor. He seems particularly interested in what’s behind the waist-high wall of the shower stall, as he keeps bending down to look at the floor.
It is Saturday night, near 9 p.m., inside Cell 20 of the Altiplano maximum security prison, and the video surveillance camera captures Guzman’s shadow as it traces across the walls. The 60-square-foot room is inside the wing for the country’s most dangerous criminals, where the drug lord has spent the past year and a half in solitary confinement under 24-hour-surveillance, a monitoring bracelet on his wrist.
As the video shows, Guzman sits down on the edge of his bunk and slips off his shoes. He pads back to the shower, kneels behind the wall and disappears.
Mexican authorities released the surveillance footage of Guzman’s dramatic prison escape on Tuesday night. From a hole in the shower floor, one of the small blind spots for the surveillance camera, Guzman’s allies had built a hatch over a shaft dropping 30 feet underground and leading to a tunnel that ran to a small cinder-block house in the corn fields south of the prison.
Guzman lifted the concrete slab cut into the shower stall floor and descended by ladder out of his cell. The tunnel, full of pumped-in oxygen, was equipped with a motorcycle-on-rails used to ferry out dirt and supplies. Guzman likely rode it on his way through the nearly mile-long tunnel, well before authorities recognized he had escaped and launched a manhunt.
In the four days since his disappearance, Mexican authorities have flailed to explain how their prized prisoner could have out-foxed the country’s most secure prison. Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong has said that prison officials must have colluded with Guzman to help him flee.
After initial hesitation, the Mexican government has agreed to accept the offer by the United States to help try to find and rearrest Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, which is responsible for transporting a large portion of the cocaine and heroin that reaches the United States.
