See Tunnel Cartel Leader Used to Escape US

An insider’s live footage (below) and photos of the mile-long US-Mexican border tunnel transnational drug cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman used to escape the U.S. into Mexico have been released. The White House has remained silent about the jailbreak’s tunnel exposure, obviously an embarrassment, considering the U.S. multi-billion dollar war on drugs and billion dollar surveillance system supposedly to catch criminals, such as those repsonsible for carnage across Mexico, taking some 80,000 lives and leaving a further 20,000 disappeared.

Daniel Hernandez reporting for Vice News details the tunnel El Chapo used to escape into Mexico.

The above photo shows the tunnel’s first level. “Near a wall, a rectangular entrance carved with wooden beams in the ground just wide enough for a grown adult’s shoulders calls to a wooden ladder below,” Hernandez reports. “A few rungs of that brings a visitor to just below ground-level, and the discovery that it is actually a ditch with a wooden roof and dirt laid over it to simulate ground above.

“A large electrical regulator the size of tiny car has gathered dust. Piles of dirt, wood, fiberglass insulator, and debris hint that the construction crew here was in a hurry. In a corner in the ground is the second descent, a wooden frame down a second wood ladder fitted to the wall of earth as securely as any other ladder should be. Just above it is a mechanical pulley that must have been used to lift up dirt from the excavation below.

Climbing down approximately 25 feet gains access to the floor of the mile-long tunnel authorities say Guzman used to escape on July 11.

US intelligence led to capturing Guzman in February 2014 in Mazatlan, after days of his eluding authorities through a tunnel system in Sinaloa state capital, Culiacan. Finally, Guzman was caught over thirteen years after escaping from another federal prison in Mexico in January 2001.

Guzman is allegedly the figurehead of the Sinaloa cartel’s multi-billion dollar transnational drug network trafficking marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.

“His influence extends over much of western and northern Mexico and into neighboring countries in Central America, in addition to Europe, Asia, and Australia,” Hernandez reports. His influence is also intense throughout drug-dependent US. The city of Chicago calls him “Public Enemy Number 1.”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all that Guzman would use a tunnel as a means for escaping,” Joe Garcia, a former ICE agent in San Diego, told the Union-Tribune. “The tunnels continue to get ramped up in sophistication.”

And that doesn’t surprise former border patrol agent John Carmen, either. Carmen has told Deborah Dupré that border agents who do their job by blowing the whistle on illicit border crossing events pay the price. He knows that for a fact, having been set up and incarcerated after blowing the whistle on border crimes.

Mexican local press call Guzman “Lord of the Tunnels.”

Wednesday, authorities allowed several journalists to spend only a few minutes in a length of the tunnel about fifteen feet deep. A federal investigator in a forensics suit, declining to be identified, set a plastic pail as a limit to entering further, according to Hernandez. The tunnel is 1,425 meters long, or just 0.88 of a mile, according to the investigator.

Mexico’s interior minister said the tunnel leading from Chapo’s shower stall to this level is 19 meters down (62 feet). This indicates the tunnel designers “must have surveyed the area around the prison to determine what depth to dig. It is much more shallow at the abandoned shed where the tunnel ends,” Hernandez reports.. The tunnel engineers made it just high enough for Chapo — which means “Shorty” — to stand – about 5 feet, 6 inches high, although the ceiling is uneven.

“A ventilation system runs through PVC piping that rises to the regulator area and runs against the ceiling of the tunnel below. There is also an electrical wiring system. A few nails jut from the moist earth of the ceiling, and scattered deep holes mark the uneven walls.” The investigator couldn’t explain nails and holes, but said they might signal heavy machinery used to construct the tunnel.

Hernandez reports that the most striking aspect of the tunnel is the motorized vehicle that authorities say Chapo used to race to freedom.

The modified motorcycle is fitted to a metal railing and was presumably used during the tunnel’s construction to remove tons and tons of earth. It does not have a front tire, and uses both a gas-powered motor and a bicycle mechanism to move backward and forward.

On the Saturday night that Chapo ducked into a tunnel in his shower and disappeared, the motorbike was waiting for him below. Authorities say Guzman smashed the tunnel’s light bulbs along the way to darken the path for anyone who might be chasing him.

Yes, authorities at the site marveled to reporters, the contraption is definitely ingenious.

Numerous investigative writers have documented CIA involvement in drug trafficking, including historian Alfred McCoy, English professor and poet Peter Dale Scott, and journalists Gary Webb and Alexander Cockburn. These led to United States government investigations, including hearings and reports by United States House of Representatives, Senate, Department of Justice, and the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. The subject remains controversial.