MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican authorities must have colluded with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to enable the drug lord to escape from a maximum security prison on Saturday night, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said yesterday.
“There will be no rest for this criminal,” Osorio Chong told a news conference in Mexico City.
Mexico would offer 60 million pesos ($3.82 million) for information leading to the capture of Guzman, Mexico’s Attorney General Arely Gomez told the same news conference.
The dramatic escape on Saturday of the world’s most notorious drug lord has raised pressure on Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to curb corruption and the drug gangs that play an outsized and violent role in his country.
Speaking from Paris, where he was beginning a four-day state visit just as Guzman was breaking out of jail, Pena Nieto called the escape an “affront to Mexico” and promised a full investigation. But skepticism is rife in Mexico. In February of 2014, when Guzman was re-arrested after a previous jail break, Pena Nieto said another escape by the drug kingpin would be “unforgivable.” Since the latest escape Pena Nieto’s critics have reminded him incessantly of that statement.
Opposition politicians have also been quick to note that he did not cut his Paris trip short, despite calls for him to do so. And members of the ruling party and opposition alike are convinced that the escape had to have been an inside job. The mile-long tunnel would have required noisy digging equipment and produced tons of dirt to be disposed of, they note. Moreover, the tunnel came up exactly under the shower in Guzman’s cell, which suggests that the drug lord’s accomplices had detailed information about the prison’s design.
“There had to have been complicity,” said Ricardo Pacheco, a congressman in Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, who heads the lower house justice committee. “To have done a thing like this, you need immense quantities of all kinds of resources: material, technical and human.”
The escape came after a difficult 12 months in which Pena Nieto’s approval ratings had already fallen to multi-year lows. Allegations of extra-judicial killings by the army, and of collusion between police and a drug cartel in the apparent massacre of 43 trainee teachers last year sparked mass protests.
