Guzmán on the Loose

The brutal Sinaloa Drug Cartel boss escaped prison - again.

El Chapo was cool as a cucumber as he escaped from his jail cell and then tunneled to freedom, and it was all caught on surveillance video.

Check it out. At 8:51 PM Saturday, El Chapo checks out the shower, then walks to a bench where he sits for a short time, and then breezes back to the shower where he escapes down a hole that was cut in the floor.

It's closed-circuit video for prison guards to see. The question ... were they looking? 

   TMZ

Are you kidding? They've got El Chapo behind bars. They're not gonna have someone watching him? Not to mention, it's not his first escape from prison.

What surprises me is that they didn't destroy the tape. The accomplice who was supposed to be watching must not have had keys to the video room.

Mexico's most notorious drug lord now has one more nefarious title: serial prison escapee. Authorities are scrambling to find Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman after his stunning escape from a maximum-security prison west of Mexico City.

[...]

The leader of the Sinaloa cartel stepped into a shower Saturday night, crawled through a hole and vanished through a mile-long tunnel apparently built just for him.

Mexico's government is offering a reward of up to 60 million pesos ($3.8 million) for information leading to his capture.

  CNN

Yeah. They should have been paying the guards better, it wouldn't have cost them so much.  Although, come to think of it, if the price for stopping him meant the loss of limb, life or family, which it could well have, maybe no amount of pay would have been enough.

[Guzman] was inside a cell with 24-hour hour closed circuit video surveillance and a bracelet that monitored his every move. The video system, he said, had two blind spots that Guzman exploited. And he left the bracelet behind before he crawled into the tunnel and made his getaway.

He could just take the bracelet off? WTF?

Mexico's interior minister said Monday that he'd fired the prison's director, and he vowed the government won't stop until Guzman is behind bars again.

Yeah, whatever. Guzman could be paying the prison director more than he would have made for the rest of his life. And the next one, too.

"If he went out that tunnel, it was with an armed escort, most likely a mix of prison guards and his own people, if the past is prologue," said Don Winslow, who's tracked Guzman's career for 15 years. […] "My bet is that he went out the front gate, and the tunnel was a tissue-thin face-saving device for Mexican officials .”

I'm with you, Don.