The Taking of El Chapo

In early January, [Guzmán] arrived in the coastal city of Los Mochis, in Sinaloa, at a home where the authorities had trailed one of the chief tunnel diggers from his escape. Construction crews had been hard at work on the house for weeks. Telephone intercepts indicated that someone big was about to arrive.

[...]

The circle had already been drawing tighter around Mr. Guzmán, with the authorities pressing into the villages and homes of his associates and upending life for many in the areas where he was believed to be hiding. But his meeting with the [Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo] gave them the break they needed: actionable intelligence of his specific location.

Six days later, a detachment of marines swept in to capture Mr. Guzmán [...], acting with information from American authorities.

[...]

The final bit of evidence was a food order, Mexican officials said.

Just two blocks away, a big order of tacos was picked up after midnight on Jan. 8 by a man driving a white van, like the one believed to be driven by Mr. Guzmán’s associates, witnesses said.

Hours later, at 4:30 a.m., the marines stormed the compound.

[...]

El Chapo’s image [...] seemed only to grow after his [several] escapes.

[...]

Mr. Guzmán’s capture [...] brings to a close, for now, one of the most exhaustive manhunts the Mexican government has conducted, an endeavor that drew in more than 2,500 people across the nation.

That all that effort was committed to the pursuit of a single man — whose arrest, despite his wealth and influence, will do little to alter the dynamics of the drug trade or the war against it — reflects just how potent a symbol Mr. Guzmán has become in Mexico and beyond.

  NYT

On the road, Mr. Guzmán and his associate headed out of town along Highway 15. But the federal police were on alert, and they spotted the two men in the Ford Focus and arrested them.

Ford Focus?!?

Perhaps that was meant to disguise them.  Surely it wasn't simply just their preferred getaway car.

Sean Penn's Amazing Capture

The Intercept has an article detailing all of the "mistakes" Sean Penn makes in his Rolling Stone article about meeting with El Chapo, so that actual journalists can see what not to do if they want to protect their source's anonymity and location.  Or, as I like to call it: How you know that Sean Penn was working with the DEA/CIA/FBI the whole time.

Also, Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel.net brings up a point to lend credence to that claim: namely, Penn agrees to what he claims is El Chapo's request not to print the names of "a host of corrupt major corporations" ... "several through which his money has been laundered, and who take their own cynical slice of the narco pie."

If Penn is sincere in his stated desire to end the war on drugs, ending the profits for American banks tied to illicit trafficking would need to be one of the first steps.

But he doesn’t name those companies that are laundering Chapo’s money, which will continue to be laundering Sinaloa cartel money even as Guzmán gets removed from the network.

[...]

But it’s funny how the press, too, seems uninterested in learning the names of the banks that continue to prop up both our own country’s power structure as well as facilitate traffickers like Guzmán.

  Emptywheel

Damn Good Question

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Actor Sean Penn Captures Mexican Drug Lord

That should be the headline.

U.S. actor Sean Penn writes in his article in Rolling Stone magazine that Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was interested in having a movie filmed about his life.

U.S. actor Sean Penn writes in his article in Rolling Stone magazine that Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was interested in having a movie filmed about his life.

Penn purportedly met with Guzman in late 2015, before the drug lord's capture by security forces, at an undisclosed hideout in Mexico.

A Mexican law enforcement official says recaptured drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's secret interview with actor Sean Penn helped authorities locate his whereabouts.

Guzman was arrested early Friday after a shootout in his home state of Sinaloa that killed five and injured one marine.

  Ap

Or, 'Actor Sean Penn gets five killed.'

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Third Time's a Charm?

The world's most-wanted drug lord was captured for a third time in a daring raid Friday by Mexican marines, six months after he tunneled out of a maximum security prison in a made-for-Hollywood escape that deeply embarrassed the government and strained ties with the United States.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto announced the capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, writing in his Twitter account: "mission accomplished: we have him."

[...]

Guzman was apprehended after a shootout with Mexican marines in Los Mochis, a seaside city in Guzman's home state of Sinaloa, said a federal official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted by name. He said Guzman was taken alive and was not wounded.

Five people were killed and one Mexican marine wounded in the clash at a house. It was unclear if Guzman was there or nearby when the raid was under way. Another law enforcement official said Guzman was captured at a motel on the outskirts of Los Mochis.

  MSN

So why is the US government taking credit?

In the United States, the Drug Enforcement Administration hailed the capture as proof of the close relationship between the two countries. "The arrest is a significant achievement in our shared fight against transnational organized crime, violence, and drug trafficking," a DEA statement said.

The U.S. Justice Department commended the working relationship as well.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I would have thought with all his money, he'd have been wearing nicer clothes. Perhaps they thought this looked more humiliating...maybe the thing now is to keep an old nasty undershirt handy to put on high value captures for their photo ops.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed Captured

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.

Score for Los Federales: Got Shorty

The head of the biggest, baddest, Mexican drug cartel, Joaquin  "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman has been captured. Not in a bloody battle – so the movie will have to take license – but quietly from a hotel in Mazatlan.

The head of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel – who was widely considered the world's most powerful drug lord – was captured overnight by U.S. and Mexican authorities at a hotel in Mazatlan, Mexico, ending a bloody and decades-long career that terrorized large swaths of the country.

  alJazeera

Maybe ended HIS bloody career, but it won’t have ended bloody terrorization of the country by drug cartels. Something needs to be done about US drug policies for that to happen.

Guzman's capture ended a long and storied manhunt. He was rumored to live everywhere from Argentina to Guatemala since he slipped out in 2001 from prison in a laundry truck – a spectacular feat that fed his larger-than-life persona.

That’ll be good in the movie.  (They'll want to throw in this part about a gunfight a couple weeks ago in Guatemala in which it was rumored that El Chapo had been killed.)

Guzman's success and infamy surpassed those of Colombia's Pablo Escobar, who was gunned down by police in 1993 after waging a decade-long reign of terror in the South American country, killing hundreds of police, judges, journalists and politicians.

Now THAT will be a movie with no need for license.  Oh, wait.  There are already a number of those.

His arrest comes on the heels of the takedown of several top Sinaloa operatives in the past few months, and at least 10 mid-level cartel members in the past week.

The son of Sinaloa's co-leader and Guzman's partner, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, was arrested in November after entering Arizona, where he had an appointment with U.S. immigration authorities to arrange legal status for his wife.

What? No wonder the cartel came on bad times. How smart was that?

The following month, Zambada's main lieutenant was killed as Mexican helicopter gunships sprayed bullets at his mansion in the Gulf of California resort of Puerto Penasco in a four-hour gunbattle.

That’ll be good in the movie.

Days later, police in the Netherlands arrested Zambada's flamboyant top enforcer as he arrived in Amsterdam.

[...]

At one point, [Guzman’s] fortune grew to more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which listed him among the "World's Most Powerful People" and ranked him above the presidents of France and Venezuela.

In 2013, the financial magazine took Guzman off the list, saying it was likely security expenses had cut into his trove.

I thought Forbes was a respected publication. I don’t know how you determine a power ranking when you include people from every facet of the spectrum, but let’s say we can assume Forbes has this rated correctly. How do you get away with presuming something has eaten into someone’s treasury enough to knock him down your list? Perhaps I should actually read the Forbes article. Maybe alJazeera’s writer is not doing it justice. After all – are we talking about money or power? They do go hand in hand;  however, I don’t think they’re entirely interchangeable. But I digress.

I don’t keep up with cartel goings on, so I cannot tell you which cartel will now take over El Chapo’s business. But one of them will.  Unless he's got a tough and read underboss somewhere down the chain of command.  That will be good in the movie.