Just before seven in the morning on January 20, 2001, when it was still not completely light, a heavily armed special commando unit of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), wearing dark uniforms, hoods and helmets, along with sixty elite officers from the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) commanded by their new director, Genaro García Luna, took control of the Puente Grande maximum security prison and its immediate environs. They arrived six hours after the prison warden, Leonardo Beltrán Santana, had told his superiors that Joaquín Guzmán had disappeared. Mexico’s first right-wing government, under President Vicente Fox, had only recently taken office.
The PFP seized all the entrances and exits, as well as the Control Center. Then they spread out through all areas of the prison, including the staff dormitories. Meanwhile, García Luna and his people began to search the perimeter for some trace of the missing drug baron.1
At 11 o’clock the night before, Warden Beltrán had been given the bad news by a shocked-looking Commander Jesús Vizcaíno: prisoner 516 was not in his cell, and couldn’t be found anywhere.
At about 10:30 p.m., Vizcaíno and two other commanders had gone to the dormitory with orders finally to move Joaquín Guzmán to the Observation and Classification Center.2 They went straight to Unit 3 and up to level 1-A. Stopping at the cell of Guzmán’s “private secretary,” Jaime Valencia Fontes, they asked for “Mr. Guzmán.” There were torn photographs and other papers on the floor of the cell. Looking dejected and smelling of alcohol, Fontes smiled wryly and mumbled something that only one of the commanders, Juan José Pérez, understood. To judge by his expression, it wasn’t good news.
They rushed to El Chapo’s cell, whose bars were covered by a beige sheet. “Mr. Guzmán, get dressed and pack your things,” said Pérez as he drew back the makeshift curtain. Nobody answered. He pulled back the blankets on the bed and realized that El Chapo wasn’t there: instead he saw two pillows arranged to look like the outline of a body. As he ran down the corridor, distraught, the commander could only yell “He’s busted out!”3
President Fox’s administration began on December 1, 2000. It rapidly transferred all of the Interior Secretariat’s police powers to a newly created Secretariat of Public Security, with the exception of those of the intelligence service, Cisen. Although one of Fox’s campaign promises had been to rid government institutions of the PRI—the party which had run Mexico for the last seventy years—he strangely left in post many of the officials responsible for public security and the prison service.
Fox made Santiago Creel, from his own party the PAN, Secretary of the Interior, while he appointed as head of Cisen someone with absolutely no experience in intelligence or investigations, Eduardo Medina Mora—whose only known merits were that he had been on the board of the leading private TV company, Televisa, and that his brother was a top executive at Banamex.4
Alejandro Gertz Manero was named secretary of public security. He had been in charge of public security for the Mexico City federal district during the PRD administration of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Jorge Tello Peón stayed on in the new role of under secretary for public security, with the same responsibilities he had had when security was a department of the Interior. These included the management, operation and oversight of federal prisons. Enrique Pérez Rodríguez continued in his post as director general of prevention and rehabilitation, that is, as the immediate head of the prison service. And, of course, Leonardo Beltrán and Luis Fernández kept their jobs as warden and assistant warden of Puente Grande.
“Intelligence” tasks inside the prison were the remit of the Federal Police. They were in charge of the surveillance cameras, microphones, and other means of monitoring what went on inside the jail.
When the new government came in, some staff at the prison thought things would change. One of them was the head of the prison’s Control Center, Guillermo Paredes, in charge of the security cameras. For two years he had witnessed, through the lenses of those same cameras, all the anomalies taking place in the prison. At last, at the beginning of December 2000, he thought he saw an opportunity to stop the rot. Some of the Federal Police who came to replace the intelligence officers from Cisen, among them Armando Ruiz, asked him about the irregularities.5 Paredes told them that El Chapo, El Güero and El Texas had complete control of the prison, and he also warned them that the situation was very delicate.
A few days later, Ruiz told Paredes that he’d already spoken to his boss, Humberto Martínez, director general of technical services at the PFP, about the corruption. What neither Ruiz nor Paredes knew was that Martínez was one of Tello’s men. Without a doubt, the fact that many such officials continued to run the prison system allowed El Chapo Guzmán to enjoy that year’s Christmas festivities in peace.
Instead of taking up the matter himself, Martínez sent word that if anyone wanted to make a complaint, they should raise it directly with him. Paredes was no fool. He decided to keep quiet.
It was after 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The silence hanging over the broad freeway between Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo was broken by the roar of a convoy of SUVs, speeding towards the prison. At the junction outside the gates, there was a temporary checkpoint where perimeter guard José Luis de la Cruz stood watch with a colleague. He’d had specific orders from the deputy director for perimeter security not to let anybody in; he’d even been told to park a pick-up truck transversally across the road, to block access to the jail.
When de la Cruz saw the vehicles approaching without switching off their lights, he nervously swiveled his weapon and chambered a round, thinking it could be an attack. The driver of the lead vehicle suddenly slammed on the brakes, opened the door and jumped out.6 The guard’s fears vanished when he recognized the smiling face of prison commander Juan Raúl Sarmiento. “It’s us,” he shouted jovially, like someone arriving at a party. De la Cruz moved his truck to let the line of vehicles pass. Joaquín Guzmán’s relatives were traveling in some of them; Héctor Palma’s in others. There was also a big group of mariachis and 500 liters of alcohol for the Xmas party.7 The sumptuous feast arrived a few minutes later. It had been prepared at the last moment, but the menu was first-class: lobster bisque, filet mignon, roast potatoes, prawns, green salad, and trays of nibbles, with canned sauces to spice up the dishes after reheating.
El Chapo and El Güero had been planning the celebration for weeks. They sent for a brighter yellow paint than that usually used in the prison; the prison guards themselves worked overtime painting the walls. The corridors and cells of Units 3 and 4 were hung with Christmas lights and decorations. Guzman’s outside gofer, El Chito, had been entrusted with organizing the banquet and buying the family gifts, as well as getting special food and drink for the ordinary prison inmates.
Corruption had been rife in Puente Grande for the last two years, but this cynical display of power was unprecedented. The party went on for three days. El Chapo and El Güero’s relatives stayed until December 26, taking advantage of the authorities’ extreme laxity. Although it had looked as if the change of government might mean the drug barons would lose their privileges, they were acting with extraordinary confidence. In fact, one of the guests at the party was the prison warden himself; Leonardo Beltrán never let go of the briefcase full of wads the traffickers had given him for Christmas.8
With the supposed democratic transition in Mexico, something had certainly shifted, deep down in the creaky structures of the old system; but they had not been weakened, quite the contrary. Now that the presidential office was occupied by Vicente Fox, a very special place in the pantheon of drug traffickers was being prepared for Joaquín Guzmán. The story of a second-rate gangster trussed like a pig in the back of an old pick-up truck was about to change profoundly, thanks to the Fox government.
Once the festive season was over, El Chapo stepped up his recruitment drive—but now he wanted people to work for him not on the inside, but on the outside, as if he knew for certain that he would soon be free. Although there were a number of charges still pending against him, the only one he lost any sleep over was the request for extradition to the United States. Many drug traffickers hardly fear going to jail, because they know that in Mexico their power to corrupt means they can continue to do business from inside, via their relatives or associates. But in the US it’s a different story; extradition is a sentence to living death.
Prison guard José Salvador Hernández Quiroz testified to several disturbing approaches made to him in those January days.9 One evening a prison commander, Miguel Ángel Godínez, came up and said:
“Mr. Guzmán told me he was to be freed shortly, which means he’s looking for men to work for him outside. I thought of you as a good candidate.”
“No way,” said Hernández tersely.
“Think about it,” said El Chapo’s ad hoc head hunter. “You’d get between twelve and fifteen thousand pesos a month. The work might be in Jalisco, Colima, Nayarit, or Sinaloa.”
Days later, Jaime Flores Sánchez told him he’d also been invited, directly by Guzmán, and he was going to accept.
“Don’t rush into anything,” advised Hernández. “Your family’s peace of mind is on the line when you get mixed up with such people. Godínez asked me, but I said no.” He warned off another guard two days afterward; but he was beginning to feel cornered. Before long Miguel Ángel Leal confessed to him that he’d accepted, too, largely because El Chapo had again offered to pay all his son’s medical expenses. Other people were bribed with cash up front.
Puente Grande was abuzz. In the corridors, restrooms, meeting rooms, and visiting areas—places where Cisen had powerful microphones planted—all the talk was of El Chapo’s imminent escape. Yes, but how? And when? And who would be helping him?
If the Jalisco human rights commissioner, Guadalupe Morfín, still had any doubts about the complicity of senior government figures in the corruption at Puente Grande, these were finally dispelled on January 19, 2001.
The resounding defeat suffered by Antonio Aguilar had left his right-hand man and Morfín’s original informant, Felipe Leaños, perilously exposed. On November 7, 2000, he visited Morfín again, this time accompanied by a guard named Claudio Ríos, to denounce the beating of two colleagues by prison staff who were still on the “payroll.” Leaños had reason to fear for his life.
On January 16, 2001, Lupita Morfín—as her friends call her—tried to get hold of the national human rights commissioner, José Luis Soberanes, to complain about his decision to shelve the complaint Leaños had made a year before. The only action taken had been for Enrique Pérez and Leonardo Beltrán to move Leaños to work in another part of the prison, where he was soon the target of renewed harassment. Soberanes wasn’t in his office; Morfín left a message; the ombudsman never returned her call.
The next day, prison officers Claudio Ríos and Salvador Moreno requested an urgent meeting with Morfín. When she received them they were almost in tears. They couldn’t take any more. On top of the pressure from The Three, The Plumbers, and The Sinaloas, now it seemed members of the human rights commission had become another co-opted group. The guards related how, on January 15, two representatives of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) had arrived in Guadalajara. They had called Claudio Ríos and asked him to come to their hotel with the other guards who had complained about the harassment and corruption in Puente Grande. “At last!” Ríos must have thought. But in fact the visitors had no intention of investigating the matter: they just wanted the guards to drop their complaint. The collusion between these representatives of Soberanes’s commission and the corrupt prison officials was clear. As a result, only three correctional officers maintained their complaint to the CNDH: Felipe Leaños, Claudio Ríos, and Salvador Moreno.
The following evening, January 16, all three were summoned to Warden Beltrán’s office. One by one, they were called in by the CNDH representatives to confront the prison authorities they had denounced. The aim was obviously to intimidate them, and get them to retract their accusations about who really controlled the prison. The ever cynical director general of the prison service, Enrique Pérez, was also present at this illegal confrontation.
On the morning of January 17, in Morfín’s office, what most worried Ríos and Moreno was that since then their fellow guard Leaños hadn’t answered his phone. By now, they told her, the whole prison knew about their complaints, because the CHDH representatives had shown no discretion at all. Morfín immediately called the secretary of public security, Alejandro Gertz. He wasn’t there, so she left a message: they needed to take immediate action to ensure the whistle-blowers’ safety. She also phoned Soberanes again, to no avail. She left another message.
Given the seriousness of the situation, on January 18 Morfín called the secretary of the Interior, Santiago Creel. She couldn’t get through to him, either. Later she did manage to speak to the special ambassador for human rights and democracy at the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs, Marieclaire Acosta, who suggested she talk to the president’s national security adviser, Adolfo Aguilar Zínser—the only one who responded at all.
On the morning of January 19, under secretary Jorge Tello phoned Morfín, to say that he was in Guadalajara to investigate the irregularities at the federal jail. Two years after he was first fully apprised of the abuse and corruption, Tello had developed a plan, and he would use Lupita Morfín’s complaint to help him carry it out.
“I’m now number two at public security, and Secretary Gertz has sent me to investigate what you told him [on voice mail]. Can we get together?”
“Yes,” she answered immediately.
“I’m on my way to the prison,” said Tello.
“I think you’d better come back and speak to me first,” cautioned Morfín.
“I’m already at El Salto.”
“Never mind, just turn around.”
Morfín then heard Tello ask someone about directions.
“Excuse me?” said Morfín, thinking he was talking to her.
“No, I’m asking the prison warden, who’s right here with me.”
“You mean you’re coming here with Leonardo Beltrán?” asked Morfín, surprised and outraged.
“Yes, but relax, he won’t come in, he’ll wait outside.”
“You are putting my safety at risk, I have nothing to tell you, and I won’t see you!” shouted Morfín, and hung up.
Guadalupe Morfín couldn’t understand what was happening. She found it hard to credit that everything Leonardo Beltrán had done over the past two years at Puente Grande had been with the clear knowledge and approval, not only of Enrique Pérez, but also of Jorge Tello, the overall boss of both of them. She tried to contact the secretary, Alejandro Gertz, to express her surprise at the way his team were behaving. It seemed obvious to her that Tello should not go to her office with Beltrán. It would immediately give her away as a source of information, and further endanger the guards who had placed their trust in her.
That day was unfolding strangely at Puente Grande. From very early, the staff who monitored the video cameras were diverted from their duties and given cleaning chores outside the Control Center.10 The door to the corridor that led to El Chapo’s cell was covered with a sheet of plywood, at the top of which were small openings so you could see out. It was the first time in five years that the drug baron had taken such a liberty.11 The plywood was removed at 11 a.m. by one of Guzmán’s goons, and put back an hour later, remaining there until the evening.
El Chapo had a busy day ahead of him. First he played a game of volleyball, his favourite sport. After that he began to receive visits in his cell, almost non-stop, one after another, well into the afternoon. The first audience was at 11:15 with El Güero Palma and El Texas. It lasted twenty minutes. At midday, El Chapo spent fifteen minutes with Commander Pérez Díaz, who he saw twice again in the course of the day. He also had two brief meetings with Commander Navarro, of the perimeter guard. Other visitors included commanders Vizcaíno and Ochoa, and even the prison doctor, Alfredo Valdez, the same one who had carried out a forced abortion on Zulema Hernández. There were so many people who wanted to say goodbye that at 2 p.m. Guzmán didn’t go to the canteen for lunch: the food on tray number 516 remained untouched.12
Jorge Tello arrived at Puente Grande after midday, on a lightning visit to the maximum security prison which he was ultimately responsible for. With him were the head of the prison service, Enrique Pérez, and two top Federal Police officials, Humberto Martínez and Nicolás Suárez. As soon as Tello arrived, Valencia Fontes—as if reminding his boss of an appointment—handed El Chapo a card with the names of all the visitors written on it.13 El Chapo was breathing calmly; he seemed quite unruffled.
During his visit, Tello dropped into the Control Center, where everything that went on in the prison was supposedly filmed. As he left that room packed with TV monitors, the under secretary was overheard to murmur something strange: “Today they are not leaving the prison.”14
Ostensibly, Tello had come to investigate the accusations of corruption made by the guards. However, the under secretary didn’t even bother to meet them in the total of forty-one minutes he spent at the prison.15 The only thing he did was order that El Chapo, El Güero and El Texas should be moved to the prison’s Observation Center. Before he left, Tello had a brief meeting with Pérez, Suárez, Martínez, and the prison warden, Beltrán. In spite of the allegations of corruption in the prison, they agreed to put off until the following week an examination of technical issues at the Control Center and possible changes in personnel. This gave Joaquín Guzmán a window for leaving the prison in the following hours.
No, Tello had not come to look into irregularities, but to coordinate a quite different plan. In 1993, from his office in the Secretariat of Defense, he had helped to lock up El Chapo Guzmán. Now, eight years later, he was going to unlock the door. Immediately after he left, fifteen people from internal security were seen inside the staff dormitory—wearing not their regulation blue uniforms, but the black ones used by external, perimeter security; while those who really were from external security were also deployed inside the prison, still in their black kit.16 The same color as the clothes that El Chapo put on before leaving the prison. At 4 p.m., four Federal Police personnel were seen on the roof of the prison clinic and communications area.17 Something was afoot.
Meanwhile, El Chito Camberos was engaged in his last outside job for El Chapo. He called his friends José de Jesús Briseño and Ramón Muñoz, asking them to drive him to Plaza del Sol, a Guadalajara mall, in the gray Golf he’d recently bought on Guzmán’s orders.18 El Chito, clutching a small valise, seemed unusually nervous and taciturn; all he said was he had to collect some air tickets to the capital, plus a car from El Chapo’s son César, a business administration student. At around 4 p.m. they arrived at the mall and parked outside a pizza house. Before long they saw a grey Cutlass approach.
“There’s César, in the armored car. Keep your phone turned on, and if you don’t hear from me, leave the Golf in my mom’s garage or in yours,” said El Chito to Briseño, as he got out and went over to talk to his boss’s eldest, a stocky young man with streaked hair and dark glasses. Then El Chito drove off, reaching Puente Grande around 7 p.m.—the time when Guzmán went to bid farewell to his old accomplice and compadre, Héctor Palma, in the latter’s cell. They conferred for barely five minutes, before strolling together down the corridor to the exit of Unit 4. “Take care, compadrito,” Palma said.19 They would not see each other again.
About half an hour later, at 7:30 p.m., Guzmán was seen on Level C of Unit 3, talking to fellow inmates Valencia Fontes and Vázquez Méndez and two guards, Antonio Díaz and Victor Godoy. El Chito, was also there. A few laundry carts stood nearby. El Chapo asked his fixer to put blankets and food in one cart, and more blankets and some religious paintings done by a fellow prisoner in another. Then El Chito and Godoy began pushing them towards the kitchen area. A third cart was pushed by Valencia Fontes, El Chapo’s “private secretary.”20
At 8 o’clock, El Chito pushed one of the carts out of Unit 3 and apparently passed security checkpoints V7, V6, V4, V2, and V1 until he got to the vehicle checkpoint. The guards who saw him pass later declared to public prosecutors that the cart he was pushing must have been pretty heavy, because of the effort he was making, but they never said that he looked nervous or in a hurry.21 At 8:15, guard Miguel Ángel Leal Amador waved El Chito out through the main gate, trundling his laundry cart covered in blankets. The checkpoints at Puente Grande have sophisticated heat and movement sensors, capable of detecting a living creature the size of a cat. If the cart had indeed been carrying Joaquín Guzmán, the alarms would necessarily have gone off.22
It was quite common, albeit against the rules, for The Three’s “trash” to be taken out of the prison in a laundry cart whenever an inspection was due. Usually these were things they weren’t allowed to have, like microwave ovens, clothes, telephones and so on. The items were then handed to intermediaries sent by the prisoners.23
In the staff car park, El Chito abandoned the laundry cart once he had passed the wire fencing.24 He had taken El Chapo’s household items, but not the man himself. At 8:40, the guard in charge of the prison’s mail, Jesús Cortés Ortiz, was ordered to bring back the laundry cart that had been left out by the guard post. There were only a few dirty blankets inside.25
Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán did not leave Puente Grande with El Chito. Nor did he leave in a laundry cart. Guzmán was seen inside the prison after his fixer had driven off. This is clear from the hundreds of written witness statements contained in Case 16/2001-III, dealing with the escape.26 In these legal proceedings, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) under the Fox government states that El Chito left the Puente Grande car park at 8:40 p.m., and that El Chapo left with him, thanks to the supposed trick with the laundry cart. However, the PGR also asserts that El Chapo escaped from the prison at 9:30.27 Clearly, both things cannot be true.
What really happened that night is that at 9:30 p.m., El Chapo, Valencia Fontes, and Vázquez Muñoz walked down the corridor on level 1B. Vázquez was carrying a mattress folded in half, and a white sheet like those on prisoners’ beds. The guard Antonio Díaz was intrigued by their behaviour, and discreetly followed them. All three entered the medical cubicle where Dr Velázquez usually saw patients; access to this area, next to the prison uniform storeroom and close to the exit, was prohibited for inmates.28 They left the third laundry cart outside the door.
A few seconds later, Valencia and Vázquez came out again; Guzmán was not with them. Díaz slipped into the security cabin and from there observed how El Chapo’s two companions stood guard outside the medical area, as if to prevent anyone from entering. When he left the cabin at the end of his shift, at 9:55 p.m., they were still there. At almost the same time, Commander Vizcaíno and his two companions were heading to dormitory A to carry out their orders to move El Chapo Guzmán to the Observation Center. He was not in his cell, and nobody thought of looking for him in the medical area.
At 10:30 hours, Vizcaíno knocked on the door of Warden Beltrán’s office.
“Joaquín Guzmán is not in his cell,” said the commander, clearly agitated.
“Mobilize all of the staff, including those on breaks. They’re to make a thorough search of all parts of Unit 3,” ordered Beltrán calmly. He didn’t seem surprised by the news.
Then Beltrán himself went over to the Control Center, supposedly to direct the operation and keep abreast of developments. But he never set off the jailbreak alarm.29
It was not until after 1 a.m. on January 20 that Beltrán called Enrique Pérez Rodríguez, the head of the prison service, to tell him the drug baron had disappeared. Pérez told him to keep searching, but they found nothing. At 2 a.m. Beltrán informed the Federal Police in Jalisco what was happening. Twenty minutes later he called the regional military command, and then the local PGR office.30 At the same time commanders Pérez and Vizcaíno gathered all the correctional officers together inside the prison.31
Beltrán phoned his chief again at about 3 a.m. to tell him El Chapo still hadn’t been found. It was only then that Pérez Rodríguez attempted to inform his own superior, Under Secretary Tello Peón. He dialed his cell, his office, his home, without success. Eventually he got hold of him on his wife’s phone. Tello merely responded that he would inform the secretary of public security, Alejandro Gertz, and get back to him in half an hour. At this, Pérez told Beltrán also to call back in half an hour. Thirty minutes later the prison warden complied, reporting that El Chapo still hadn’t appeared and that he’d informed all the relevant authorities of this fact. Precious time was passing, and nobody was doing anything.
Under Secretary Jorge Tello took no initiative; he was acting as if he didn’t care, or maybe as if he was waiting for something. At 4 a.m. the head of the prison service called him again. This time Tello instructed Pérez to meet him at the PJF hangar at Mexico City airport in an hour and a half, so they could travel to Puente Grande. At the airport, Tello, Pérez, Nicolás Suárez, Humberto Martínez, Octavio Campos, and two other men from the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) whose names are not recorded, boarded a plane belonging to the PFP.
Tello arrived at the prison at 7 a.m. on January 20. The story had begun to be reported on radio and TV, and President Fox was soon informed by his spokesperson, Marta Sahagún. A few minutes later, Secretary of Public Security Alejandro Gertz filled them in further, telling the president that according to Tello, Guzmán had escaped in a laundry cart through the garbage area. However, presidential advisers familiar with the high-security prison systems told Fox that this was impossible, because of the sensors.
Gertz gave orders for the Federal Police to take over perimeter security at Puente Grande. Meanwhile Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha had sent the new head of the PJF, Genaro García Luna, and the director of UEDO (the government’s specialized organized crime unit), José Larrieta, to Jalisco, along with two elite detachments to begin hunting for Guzmán between Jalisco state and the northern border. In a press conference that same day, Tello Peón explained that initial investigations showed that the fugitive “must have had help from prison administrators, which represents a betrayal of the institution. This is a criminal conspiracy,” he charged cynically, in spite of all that he had done himself to aid the drug baron’s flight.
“There are clear indications of who may have had a hand in springing the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel,” he added.32 Obviously, he didn’t include himself on the list.
That same day the warden of Puente Grande, Leonardo Beltrán, and thirty-three prison officers who were on duty at the time, were placed under provisional arrest on suspicion of abetting the drug baron’s escape. Jaime Fernández López was appointed acting warden. All the tapes of Tello’s visit to the jail, right up to the operation on January 20, were wiped.33 However, in spite of the obstacles, as the sworn statements piled up, the truth began to emerge.
At 11 a.m on February 9, 2001, Commander Antonio Aguilar Garzón made a statement to the UEDO public prosecutors about what he had witnessed at Puente Grande: it was a tale of complicity, corruption, and concealment, from Under Secretary of Public Security Tello on down, since early 1999. The web of deceit involved Miguel Ángel Yunes, head of the prison service from April 1999 to April 2000, his deputy and successor Enrique Pérez, and the warden of Puente Grande, Leonardo Beltrán. Aguilar also told how he had been relieved of his post at the prison after revealing how it was controlled by El Chapo Guzmán and his friends.
Right from January 20, Guadalupe Morfín, the Jalisco human rights commissioner, had bravely offered to give testimony. “I wish to denounce acts which may constitute a crime,” her statement began. Morfín related how the the national human rights commission headed by José Luis Soberanes had tried to shelve the complaints of corruption and harassment of employees at Puente Grande. She not only confirmed that Enrique Pérez and Leonardo Beltrán were aware of the irregularities; she also denounced the strange behavior of Jorge Tello when it came to investigating the abuses in the jail. On February 2, Morfín presented a series of documents proving her points. However, neither her accusations nor her documentation had any effect. The investigations were exclusively targeted at the corruption lower down, that of Warden Beltrán and the prison guards who were complicit; there was no probe into those responsible for the corruption at the top, those with the power to prevent or permit El Chapo’s escape. Thus the investigations by the PGR and the PJF quickly turned into a farce. One explanation is that the new head of the PJF, Genaro García Luna, was one of Tello’s most loyal subordinates, who had worked with him since 1989.
García Luna’s servile nature and personal loyalty to his bosses, rather than to any institution, made him just the right man to lead the investigation into Guzmán’s escape. He put one of his own most faithful subordinates in charge of the enquiries; Edgar Millán was so obliging that he never produced a report into what really happened at Puente Grande. For the best part of a month, Jorge Tello and Enrique Pérez could sleep in peace. Nobody troubled them and nobody questioned them. They were part of the group doing the investigating, not that being investigated. It was only after Antonio Aguilar appeared before public prosecutors that they were called on to testify. Still, it was only a formality; they appeared as witnesses, not as suspects.
Enrique Pérez Rodríguez made his statement on February 11, 2001. Speaking of the visit to Puente Grande on January 19, 2001, Pérez said that the prison warden “never mentioned any signs, suspicions, or rumors of a possible prisoner escape, so we had no prior knowledge of what would happen.” It was a barefaced lie. He was never confronted with the five clear and decisive statements implicating him, made by Antonio Aguilar, Felipe Leaños, Claudio Ríos, Salvador Moreno, and Guadalupe Morfín.
Jorge Tello Peón took the stand on the afternoon of February 12, 2001. It was twenty-four days since the escape. If his lies had been bricks, you could have built a wall with them. The under secretary stated that in the meetings with the representatives of the human rights commission, no irregularities had been detected: “Director General Pérez Rodríguez informed us that some of the complaints made proved to be false, and that when the representatives of the CNDH interviewed the complainants in the presence of the prison authorities, nothing came up in their view that amounted to any kind of infraction.” Tello further claimed that during the visit he had undertaken on orders from Secretary Gertz, all he noticed was “clear signs of disorder resulting from inadequate cleaning and maintenance.” Thus he had merely ordered Guzmán, Palma, and Martínez to be relocated, because up until then he did not have any “concrete information about a possible escape.” It was obvious that Tello was lying, and they were letting him lie. In the absence of questions, such testimonies became demented monologues. The enquiries carried out by the Fox administration were a joke.
Tello Peón would not be troubled again by the PGR. At the end of February 2001, he resigned as under secretary of public security, for “personal reasons.” His resignation was news for a couple of days, then it was forgotten. The following month he became a top executive in Cemex, the Mexican cement company that is one of the biggest in the world.
Pérez Rodríguez also resigned, four weeks later. Neither of these two officials was held responsible for El Chapo Guzmán’s escape from prison, in spite of all the testimony incriminating them. The full weight of the law fell on the prison warden, Leonardo Beltrán Santana, the assistant warden, Luis Francisco Fernández Ruiz, and sixty-one lesser members of the prison staff who had been in detention since January 20, 2001. Three of these were released almost immediately for lack of evidence, while fifty-nine of them were charged. El Güero Palma and El Texas Martínez were also indicted for bribery, organized crime, and helping a prisoner to escape. Antonio Aguilar’s honesty and bravery were rewarded by sending him to the Federal Center for Psychosocial Rehabilitation, in June 2001.
On September 5, 2001, Francisco Javier Camberos, El Chito, arrived unexpectedly in a lawyer’s office to say that he feared for his life, and wanted to hand himself in. El Chapo’s fixer knew rather too much about the escape, and many people had an interest in his silence. The affair was getting tense, since the guards’ testimonies contradicted the official version. In fact, it was Guzmán Loera who had told him to go to the law and tell the story of the laundry cart.
Obedient to his script, El Chito stammered that he alone had achieved the springing of the Sinaloa boss.34 “Nobody helped me, I have sole responsibility for the little favor I did him,” was how he confessed his guilt to a judge at the Reclusorio Oriente prison—in the presence of the fifty-nine former guards and employees of the prison, his co-defendants in this trial, as well as a score of defense attorneys. The performance lasted more than four hours.
“I, too, am a Mexican, and I don’t think it’s fair for the authorities in this country to do whatever they want. Mr. Guzmán said to me that even though he’d done his time, they still wanted to drag him away to the States!” Camberos conveyed the pathos of this, then added: “There was no plan, I just suddenly thought of it.”
El Chito Camberos sacrificed himself, but he saved the current and former public security chiefs who were beginning to fret at the turn the case was taking. He produced a giant sketch of the Puente Grande layout, in order to illustrate how he had pushed the cart with El Chapo inside through seven security checkpoints until the exit booth, which they cleared at 7:28 p.m. By the end of his exhausting performance, El Chito hadn’t lost his sense of humor:
“I’ve had enough, bring me a laundry cart so I can get out of here, no, wait, a trailer truck so we can all get out!” he said, to laughter in the court.
Many were relieved by his statement. Although it was a poor lie, well told, the custodians of Mexican justice took it at face value. Yet there is not a shred of evidence for it. On the contrary, there is the solid fact that El Chapo was seen inside the penitentiary after his man left with the cart.
Today, El Chito is serving out twenty-five years in the Reclusorio Oriente. Apparently Guzmán only sent him maintenance money for the first five. If he knows how El Chapo really escaped, his mind is now too drug-sodden to recall it.
In spite of the evidence against them, in January 2002 a federal court acquitted drug traffickers El Güero Palma and El Texas Martínez of helping in the escape of Joaquín Guzmán. The court adduced “lack of evidence,” and also overturned their conviction for organized crime.35 In April that same year, the story of Guzmán’s escape became the center of conversation once again when the Fourth District Judge, José Mario Machorro, called on Pérez Rodríguez and Tello Peón to testify as defense witnesses for some of the prison guards on trial. Neither attended. Pérez was fined, while the former under secretary of public security could never be located in time to notify him of the summons. Nonetheless, the judge persisted.
Tello finally showed up to testify for a second time on April 29, 2002. Once again, he lied to evade responsibility. In front of the judge, Tello declared that Cisen—the intelligence service he had directed in the two years before the escape, precisely the period in which the drug barons took control of the jail—had not monitored the Puente Grande prison.36 This was false. There are dozens of statements by prison guards and administrators in the files on the escape, that even identify the Cisen officers by name—Carlos Arias is one of them. They say quite clearly that one of the tasks of the Cisen officers was to record the prisoners’ conversations, and that their offices were located on Levels B and C of the prison.
Tello declared that only the Intelligence Coordination of the PFP—then headed by García Luna—carried out surveillance in the prison, but that it never got wind of the escape.37 Tello knew that the same García Luna, his ever loyal subordinate, was one of those in charge of the investigation, and that there was no way he would be investigating himself.
Over the course of eighteen questions, the examination covered much of the same ground as the first time. Why had he ordered the “immediate” reassignment of the three felons’ cells on January 19? Because some guards had complained of corruption, and an inspection had been conducted jointly with the CNDH, and the guards had retracted their accusations (though of course those guards had taken their concerns to the Jalisco ombudsman, Morfín). He thought that rehousing the drug traffickers would avoid trouble. Before the court, he repeated that no “concrete information” about any escape had come to light at that moment.
Pérez Rodríguez testified the same day. Judge Machorro heard an identical script: the head of the federal prison service never dreamed that El Chapo was planning to escape.
In the end, there was only one way Tello and Pérez could be linked to El Chapo’s escape: the evidence of Antonio Aguilar Garzón. The retired major was called as a defense witness on behalf of the guards and other Puente Grande staff. However, he was unable to appear: in May 2002 he died in a mysterious car accident as he drove to work along the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway.
After El Chapo’s escape, Felipe Leaños, the first prison officer to denounce corruption there, stayed on at Puente Grande and even became commander of his sector. However, according to a freedom of information request made for this book, his last day on the job was May 15, 2007. Although “the motive is unknown,” his former colleagues say he was found dead in a sack in a Guadalajara back street. As for the other warder to present a similar complaint, Claudio Ríos, the most recent information is that in April 2009 he was still a commander at Puente Grande prison.
In January 2005, Luis Fernández, the former assistant warden of that prison, spoke for the first time from his cell in Mexico City’s Federal District. He had been incarcerated for almost five years and still hadn’t been sentenced.38 Fernández repeated what he had told the public prosecutors in 2001, that it was Miguel Ángel Yunes who had invited him to work in the maximum security prisons. He also talked about El Chapo Guzmán: he described him as tidy and diffident, never overbearing or rude, and “very intelligent.” He said El Chapo read a lot about the history and geography of Mexico.
Maintaining his innocence, Fernández recalled how after the escape “Federal Police took control of the prison, we were all shut into the hall, and armed personnel in balaclavas moved in.” His lawyer, Eduardo Sahagún, emphasized that the PGR had always avoided conducting a reconstruction of the events. Soon after that interview, Luis Fernández was released and allowed to complete his trial proceedings outside jail.
Nine years after Guzmán’s escape, in 2010, only six of the sixty-two defendants charged were still in prison. One of the most shocking cases was that of Leonardo Beltrán himself. For just over nine years the former warden of Puente Grande was lodged in the VIP wing of the Oriente prison. Tall, thin, with grey hair and tired eyes behind his spectacles, he was always very discreet. He paid his dues in silence, and never betrayed those who had really orchestrated and carried out the escape—the escape of a gangster who now has the entire country cowed by a climate of uncontrollable violence. In 2009, the Fifth Criminal Court of the Federal District sentenced Beltrán to eighteen years and nine months in prison, but the Fourth Unitary Criminal Court, in spite of the evidence against him, reduced the sentence to barely eleven and a half years.39 In fact, soon afterwards, on June 24, 2010, Beltrán left the Oriente prison. He didn’t have to escape. Why should he? He was freed by the Federal Administration for Social Rehabilitation, courtesy of the then secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna.40
In 2006, Jorge Tello Peón returned to public office during the handover from the Fox government to that of Felipe Calderón. For some reason the latter wanted him as his secretary of public security. The shadow cast by the escape of the country’s main drug baron did nothing to temper the president-elect’s enthusiasm for the Cemex executive. At the time it was rumored that Genaro García Luna would head the PFP; his disastrous spell in charge of the PJF, which later became the Federal Investigations Agency (AFI), did not suggest he’d get anything better. Tello was cautious. He turned the job down for “health reasons”—apparently an incurable cancer—and pushed the ever servile García Luna to take it instead. Eventually, on November 30, 2006, Calderón announced that García Luna would indeed lead the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP).
Two years later, Tello did agree to return to public office. On October 19, 2008, the president made him his adviser in the fake war on drugs. The fact is that the advice of the former under secretary of public security, whatever it may have been, did not help to win the “war.” The violence only got worse.
The following year, on March 25, 2009, Tello became executive secretary of the National Public Security System, which came under García Luna’s jurisdiction. The pupil had overtaken his teacher. Of course, García Luna had changed a lot since the time he had blocked any investigation of Tello for El Chapo’s escape. Now he didn’t need anyone. His proximity to Calderón gave him unbounded power. When men like García suffer humiliation at the hands of their bosses in order to go up in the world, once they get to the top they want nothing more than to crush their former mentors. At first Tello tried to distance himself from García Luna. He even denied it was he who had recommended him to the president. His offspring had grown more than he’d intended. After a few months under the secretary’s yoke, demoralized by García Luna’s bullying behavior, Tello Peón retreated. He asked to be moved, and his request was granted.
At the beginning of 2009, from his confinement in the Altiplano prison in Almoloya, the one-time drug baron Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo gave a written interview to journalist Diego Enrique Osorno. There is one basic fact in his account that puts El Chapo Guzmán’s escape in proper perspective: “Senior officials came to Altiplano and offered some of the best known inmates to escape. Nobody accepted.”
Some prisoners at Altiplano say one of these officials proposing “escape” was Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares. The politician from Veracruz state had, they suggest, made the offer while Ernesto Zedillo was still president, and he himself was chief adviser to Interior Secretary Diódoro Carrasco, another long-time Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) figure who had recently defected to the PAN.
In 2004, after Yunes resigned from the PRI, the leader of the teachers’ union (SNTE), Elba Esther Gordillo, got him a good job in the sphere of national security. In spite of his poor record as director general of the prison service, on January 1, 2005, Yunes was appointed under secretary for citizen participation in the Secretariat of Public Security; in 2006, Fox made him executive secretary of the National Public Security System, giving him even more power in that area. Contrary to expectations, Yunes survived the change of presidency. Calderón must have seen him as useful in some way or other, making him director of the Public Employees’ Social Security Institute (ISSSTE). Later, in June 2008, Yunes joined the PAN and clad himself in its protective blue mantle.
We should remember that at the time of El Chapo’s escape, Yunes was no longer head of the prison service at federal level. That post had been taken over by Pérez Rodríguez, who had been his private secretary back when Yunes was secretary of the interior for Veracruz state. Nonetheless, it is said that Yunes was well aware of the repeated warnings of a possible escape. After Guzmán’s escape, Pérez waited a prudent time before returning to public office. And when he did, alongside his friend and former boss, it was done with great discretion, almost imperceptibly. In February 2007, Yunes made him ISSSTE delegate in the Federal District. Later he sent him as the ISSSTE office in Veracruz.
At the beginning of 2010, Yunes Linares requested leave from his post as head of the ISSSTE and was nominated as the PAN’s candidate for Governor of Veracruz state in the elections due on July 4 that year—his coalition partner was Elba Esther Gordillo’s New Alliance party. Quite unashamedly, Yunes brought Pérez into his pre-campaign team, and then made him operational coordinator of the campaign itself. In the run-up to the poll, the press asked Yunes about his relation with Pérez and the latter’s links to El Chapo’s escape. He refused to answer, saying he no longer commented on security issues, only on social ones. In fact, there was a clear link between the impunity surrounding El Chapo Guzmán’s escape from Puente Grande and the protection the drug baron enjoyed from the very start of the Fox administration.
The race for governor of Veracruz turned out to be rather more than an electoral contest between the PRI and the PAN. Many people insisted that at root it was a fight between drug cartels for control of the territory. Historically, Veracruz had been seen as belonging to the Gulf Cartel, now led by Ezequiel Cárdenas, brother of the much-feared Osiel. But the Sinaloa Cartel had been disputing that control for months. Yunes did not win the governorship of Veracruz.
In May 2006, the DEA obtained valuable information about the drug trafficking networks in Mexico, after it managed to infiltrate a cell of the organization led by Ignacio Coronel Villareal, one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s main partners and a personal friend of Guzmán. According to the US anti-drug agency, in that year a number of officers were investigating the details of a story involving Vicente Fox.41 It was said that the then president had received a bribe worth $40 million, in exchange for providing political protection for El Chapo’s escape. But Fox’s alleged involvement didn’t stop there. The DEA had direct reports from its informants infiltrated with Nacho Coronel, which stated that the Fox presidency had provided protection to Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel throughout its six years in office.
Mexican military and civilian intelligence sources have told this investigation that the alleged link between the Sinaloa Cartel and Vicente Fox go back to the time when he was first seeking election as governor of Guanajuato state in 1991. At that time Guzmán was still free, and working for Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Pablo Tostado—who had been a member of the group led by El Azul Esparragoza—revealed that traffickers belonging to the Pacific organization had moved into Guanajuato back in the 1980s for logistical reasons. For example, El Azul had interests in the small neighboring state of Querétaro, but he began to use the airport in Irapuato, Guanajuato, for drug shipments because it was better equipped.
When Vicente Fox was governor of Guanajuato—and later as president of the Republic—he was close to Luis Echeverría, allegedly one of the protectors of the Pacific organization ever since his own sexennial in power, 1970–76. Members of both Fox’s campaign team and his government have told how, as president, he often sought advice from Echeverría, either directly or via Marta Sahagún. Their relationship was much closer than it seemed in public.
Given the alleged links between the Fox administration and the Sinaloa Cartel, the privileged treatment given to the narco-business-man Manuel Beltrán Arredondo—El Chapo’s protector—by “the government of change,” as this first PAN administration liked to be known, is nothing less than outrageous. Between 2001 and 2002, the federal government granted Beltrán Arredondo exploration rights at seven mines in Tamazula, Durango state, for a period of six years. This was of course the same Beltrán who had financed much of of the presidential campaign of the PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida, in 2000. The rewards rained down until 2004, when he was given the concession for two mines, La Fortuna and La Fortuna Fracción, in Concordia, Sinaloa state. By then a scandal had already broken out after the drug trafficker and kidnapper, Pablo Tostado, in detention in Irapuato prison, had revealed Beltrán’s real occupation: “I’ll tell you who Manuel Beltrán Arredondo is. He is one of the main leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, which operates in the states of Durango, Jalisco, Nayarit, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa. Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, Julio Beltrán Quintero, Adolfo Beltrán Quintero, Ignacio Coronel, Juan José Esparragoza, El Azul, are all members of the same cartel,” stated Tostado to the court. Even so, the mining concessions granted to El Chapo’s sidekick were not withdrawn.
After his escape, El Chapo Guzmán told friends, and even negotiators sent by the president of the Republic, how it really happened. It was not until the morning of January 20, 2001, when Under Secretary of Public Security Jorge Tello, the head of the prison service, Enrique Pérez, and Humberto Martínez of the PFP arrived to investigate the supposed jail break, that the drug trafficker actually left Puente Grande. The deployment of police officers from the PFP and the PJF created a deliberate confusion, all the more so on a dark winter morning. Dressed in a PFP uniform, his face concealed by a regulation police helmet and mask, Joaquín Guzmán walked out of the prison surrounded by a group of PFP officers. He was then driven a few miles in an official vehicle. At some point down the road, he got out of the car and into a helicopter which flew him to Nayarit. That was where the real legend of Joaquín Guzmán began.
In 1993, when he was betrayed by Carrillo Fuentes and El Güero Palma and arrested, El Chapo was a virtual nobody. However, just eight years after his escape he had become one of the 701 richest men in the world, and Forbes magazine estimated his profits from drug shipments at a billion dollars.42 It put him on a par with Emilio Azcárraga, the main shareholder in Televisa, or with Alfredo Harp Helú, the former owner of Banamex. Only one other person in the history of drug trafficking had ever won a place in Forbes—Pablo Escobar. The long-empty throne of Amado Carrillo Fuentes had finally found a “worthy” occupant.