After a 13-year run, one of the world’s most wanted men has been captured.
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was apprehended early Saturday morning inside a condominium in Mazatlan, Mexico.
According to reports, authorities had been close in capturing Guzmán for months but it wasn’t until the discovery earlier this month of seven houses in Culiacan, which were connected through secret tunnels, that they were able to zero in on him.
The discovery of the houses was made after a messenger spilled the beans when Mexican authorities questioned him.
Last week, authorities raided one of those houses but because it took them a while to get past the steel doors, Guzmán was able to escape through a hatch below a bathtub.
Although Guzmán was a pioneer of underground tunnels and escapes, in the end it was a satellite phone call that helped locate him.
Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service have been able to obtain information from wiretaps for years.
Over the years, as more arrests were made in the hunt for Guzmán, officials confiscated dozens of cell phones that contained information of Guzmán’s whereabouts.
A wiretap from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department helped track Guzmán to the condo where he was arrested by Mexican marines without a single shot being fired.
Guzmán is currently in a high-security prison just outside of Mexico City.
The United States has already expressed interest in prosecuting Guzmán, the federal district court in Chicago, a city in which he did a lot of his business in, among them.
However, some say that bringing Guzmán into the U.S. could take some time because he would have to finish the sentencing he escaped from in 2001 first.
Over the weekend, the public has been very vocal about Guzmán’s arrest. Some are skeptical that it really is him who was arrested, saying it is all a plot so he could continue to hide or that it could simply be someone else because the man shown arrested looks nothing like “El Chapo.”
Others do believe it is Guzmán saying he could have had plastic surgery to hide his appearance and wonder how people can expect him to look the same way he did 13 years ago.
Weigh in! What are your thoughts on the Guzmán capture?
