3.8 Mill

3.8 Mill

By

Aadrian Jackson

Mexican drug kingpin, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who escaped once before from prison and spent more than a decade undercover, has done it again. After Guzman's first escape in 2001, from the Puente Grande prison, he spent more than a decade on the run, rising to lead the Sinaloa cartel, which smuggles large quantities of drugs into the United States. The cartel is a key player in a drug war that has ravaged parts of Mexico for years and cost thousands of lives.

           

El Chapo, who is 56 years old, escaped late Saturday from Mexico's Altiplano maximum-security prison through a specially built, lighted and ventilated tunnel that ended in a half-built house in a rural farm field near the prison. He disappeared down a hole near his cell and walked nearly a mile underground to freedom, triggering a massive manhunt Sunday.

It took 13 years after the first time he escaped from prison, and it was very difficult to find him then, and now that he has escaped after a year from being found from the first time, it is going to be mighty difficult to find the worldwide known drug lord.

A former administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Peter Bensinger, said he was disappointed by the bold getaway. "It is a shock that the most dangerous cartel leader in the world has escaped," Bensinger said Sunday. "He ought to have been housed in an American prison."

"We may never find him again," said Michael Vigil, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration chief of international operations.

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told CNN Monday, "So this is not somebody who is playing around with prison officials," he said. "He pretty much controls what he wants to do, and they go along with it. They look the other way to keep their families alive."

Mexico's government is offering a reward of up to 60 million pesos ($3.8 million) for information leading to his capture, the country's attorney general told reporters Monday, July 13, 2015.

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