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| In this Friday, Jan. 8, 2016 photo, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is made to face the press as he's escorted to a helicopter in handcuffs by soldiers and marines at a federal hangar in Mexico City. Guzman's second prison escape in 2015 from a top security prison though a tunnel had embarrassed President Enrique Pena Nieto and made his capture a national priority. |
MEXICO CITY
(AP) -- The capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman followed the most
intensive manhunt in modern Mexican history, with at least 2,500
security and intelligence agents dedicated to getting a man whose escape
had personally embarrassed the nation's president.
The
government says the hunt involved piecing together information from
intelligence, data, interrogations and raids - as well as monitoring
actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo as they came to interview the
world's most wanted trafficker.
While Mexican
authorities had spent decades chasing Guzman, the chase following his
July escape from a top-security prison was different for two reasons,
said a former government intelligence official who spoke on condition of
anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the case.
"One,
El Chapo stopped being clandestine. He left the mountain. He met with
people, as we now know. That made it easier for intelligence units to
find him," said the ex-official, who maintains sources inside security
operations. "The other factor: there were, from the time of the escape,
2,500 people from various security agencies exclusively dedicated ... to
mount a successful operation."
President
Enrique Pena Nieto's office and the attorney general's office didn't
respond to attempts by The Associated Press to confirm the number, but
others who had been briefed said it was at least 2,500.
Even
so, it took six months to catch him, with Mexican news media carrying
repeated reports of marine raids into the mountains of Guzman's native
Sinaloa state.
Guzman was nabbed early Friday
morning after a shootout in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of
his men and wounded one marine.
The former
official interviewed Guzman when he was arrested the first time in 1993
and led operations over the years in the remote mountains of Sinaloa and
Durango states, known as the Golden Triangle, after Guzman first
escaped a maximum security facility in 2001. He said the size of those
operations involved only around 60 troops, not hundreds.
"It
was obviously expensive, but they knew they had to flush Chapo Guzman
out," said Michael Vigil, former head of international operations at the
Drug Enforcement Administration, who also was briefed on the operation.
"The only way was by saturating the area where he was.
"It caused him to go to a safe house in Los Mochis. He knew that was going to make him vulnerable, but he had no choice.
Every
phone call or text, every movement in the region was analyzed, the
ex-official said, including Guzman's Oct. 2 meeting with Penn and del
Castillo.
He and Vigil said that Del
Castillo's phone calls, texts and other communications must have been
monitored since she had her first real contact with Guzman last year,
while he was still in prison. Everyone wanted to tell his story, but he
said he would only work with the Mexican actress, who the ex-official
called "Mexico's Sharon Stone."
"The movie was
secondary. The first motivation was meeting Kate del Castillo and
striking a relationship there," Vigil said, citing intelligence sources.
Four
days after Penn's Oct. 2 interview, soldiers staged fierce operations
in the area of Tamazula, Durango, where the meeting with Penn and Del
Castillo took place. The ex-official said it took that time to put
together the intelligence and mount a raid.
In the end, Guzman narrowly escaped.
Security
teams had kept watch on several properties related to Guzman in and
around Los Mochis since October, he said. But it was only last week that
they started noticing a flurry of activity in one of the houses in an
upscale neighborhood. Intelligence indicated that Guzman's wife, Emma
Coronel, had arrived with their twin daughters to celebrate the Feast of
the Three Kings, a major Christmas-season holiday for Mexican children.
The timing wasn't an accident, the ex-official said. Holidays and birthdays are the best times to catch suspects.
"They try to be with family, and intelligence units take advantage of these contacts to find out where they are," he said.
In the end, the ex-official attributed Guzman's capture to the drug lord "losing his footing."
When
they first met, Guzman was a mid-level capo without the folk hero image
he has today. He was cautious and humble, addressing authorities in the
most formal manner of speech. He could barely write, but is very
intelligent, the ex-official said.
Today, the official said, he sees a man who let his ego take over.
Authorities
found DVD's of Del Castillo's series, "The Queen of the South," in
which she plays a drug lord, when they raided his Los Mochis home. Both
Penn and the government said Guzman hoped to arrange his own movie.
"He fell in love with his own legend," the ex-official said.
