It's 2015 and the world's most powerful drug trafficker, El Chapo, is about to escape from prison.
Did you see it?
Right now.
He's gone.
"One of the world's richest, most notorious drug kingpins broke out of prison."
"Former cartel leader is considered one of the most dangerous drug traffickers in the world."
Joaquin Guzman Loera, better known as "El Chapo", broke out of his cell by crawling
out of a hole in the shower.
The escape of Chapo Guzman translates into two things:
More violence for Mexico
and more drugs coming into the United States.
El Chapo was the leader of the
Sinaloa Cartel, a murderous criminal organization that has killed thousands during Mexico's
violent drug wars.
Their methods are brutal.
But violence isn't what makes El Chapo different from other traffickers.
Instead, his legacy has been shaped by two abilities: transporting more drugs across
the border than anyone else and always finding a way to escape authorities.
That was, until now.
After being captured again in Mexico, El Chapo is standing trial in the United States.
It's the latest chapter for the world's most powerful drug trafficker and to understand
how El Chapo got here, it helps to look at a single innovation, the one tool that El
Chapo used to transform the drug trade is the same tool that made him its most elusive
target: tunnels.
"Tunnels."
"Through a tunnel."
"Used by El Chapo."
"Tunnel King."
"Master of tunnels."
[Spanish]: "The king of tunnels."
"Prince of tunnels."
"It's a magnificent feat of architecture and engineering."
"Being used to smuggle drugs."
"And it's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
"There's not really any form of technology right now that can discover these tunnels
being built."
"The tunnel.
Look at this."
In 1990, federal agents in Douglas, Arizona, found something new: a sophisticated drug
tunnel from the US to Mexico.
And when investigators got inside it, they were amazed by what they saw.
The tunnel was 300 feet long and lit by an electrical system running along the wall.
At one end, a lever raised a hydraulic lift that opened an entrance in the safehouse floor.
One agent said it was "like something out of a James Bond movie."
In fact, it had been built by an architect working for El Chapo.
And agents didn't know it yet, but this was their first sign of a major shift in the US
drug trade.
In the 1980s, US drug traffic had been dominated by cocaine coming through the Caribbean, but
during the next two decades US forces led a crackdown which changed the drug trade in
two ways that put El Chapo in the right place at the right time.
First, drug traffic shifted to routes through Mexico.
Second, as national militaries worked with the US to destroy crops in South America,
traffickers focused on drugs they could grow elsewhere.
The coca plant is only grown in the Andes mountains, but marijuana can be grown in Mexico,
especially in mountain ranges along the western coast.
And the same is true for the opium poppy, the raw ingredient processed to make heroin.
For both crops, the densest region of cultivation includes the state of Sinaloa, the home of El Chapo.
El Chapo also had the ideal way to move those drugs: unlike cocaine, which is odorless and
can be tightly packed into a vehicle, marijuana is bulky and has a strong smell.
But by using his tunnels, El Chapo could get massive amounts across the border quickly.
By 2010, El Chapo had become the most powerful trafficker in the country.
And as the Sinaloa Cartel increased their power, their territory expanded to include
the entire Western half of the US border.
As their control spread west, one particular area became crucial to their operation:
a suburb of San Diego called Otay Mesa.
There are three reasons why they chose Otay Mesa, and understanding them gives you a sense
of how sophisticated El Chapo's operation really was.
First, it is near two major transportation hubs, Tijuana and San Diego, so drugs can
quickly get to the border and out to dealers on the other side.
Second, it’s an industrial area across the border from Tijuana’s airport, meaning there’s
a steady stream of noise and traffic that make it easy to go undetected.
The third reason, is the soil.
To the west is ocean, where the ground is too damp,
And to the East the earth rises to become hard mountainous rock.
Otay Mesa is located in between, and soil maps show a geological sweet spot where the
soil is soft enough to dig by hand, but strong enough to support a tunnel.
“Yeah, this is the stair system.
it's about a 70 foot drop."
In November 2010, agents found a tunnel in
Otay Mesa built by the Sinaloa Cartel.
Inside, electricity powered lighting and a ventilation system.
Along the floor, a rail system allowed workers to remove rubble during construction and then
transport drugs once they started using it.
Over the next few years, agents found more massive tunnels.
Tunnels like these can take several months and millions of dollars to build, but they’re
worth it.
The tunnels are so big that traffickers can move multiple tons of drugs at once,
As the Sinaloa Cartel continued building in Otay Mesa, their tunnels got more impressive,
like building an entrance for one beneath a bathroom floor.
El Chapo’s tunnels are dug so deep that ground penetrating radar can’t detect them
And at ground level, the entrances are hidden in clever ways.
But El Chapo wasn’t only building tunnels to smuggle drugs across the border.
In 2014, authorities raided his safehouse in the Sinaloan capital of Culiacan, but El Chapo
escaped by fleeing through a tunnel hidden beneath his bathtub.
A few days later, authorities tracked him down in Mazatlan,
where El Chapo was captured and sent to Altiplano maximum security prison.
A year later, he was gone.
This was the largest tunnel ever built by the Sinaloa Cartel.
It stretched nearly a mile, to a farmhouse in a nearby field..
A year before, that field had been empty.
Beneath a hole in the floor, authorities found a motorcycle that El Chapo
had used to cruise through the tunnel in less than ten minutes.
In Sinaloa, El Chapo’s supporters celebrated the spectacular escape.
But his freedom was short lived.
A few months later, authorities broke into his hideout in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where
he was arrested after a bloody gun battle.
He escaped through a tunnel hidden behind his mirror that led into the sewer,
but authorities caught him a few hours later when he crawled out of a manhole and tried
to flee town.
This time he was extradited to the US, where he is on trial in New York City.
Authorities are so serious about security that they shut down the Brooklyn Bridge when
El Chapo is moved from his Manhattan jail cell to the court house.
But even as he sits in jail, El Chapo’s
legacy lives on.
In 2018, two major tunnels were discovered
along the US border.
In Arizona, one stretched across from Mexico to the back of an abandoned KFC.
And in California, authorities found an unfinished tunnel that had been equipped with electricity
and ventilation systems that run on solar power.
Another piece of his legacy also continues.
In 2018, drug violence contributed to more people being murdered in Mexico than ever before.
But as aspiring kingpins add to the violence in Mexico, El Chapo is back in his cell.
At least, for now.
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