The drug lord who left Mexico red-faced

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the world’s most notorious drug lord, has been having trouble sleeping.

The lights in his prison cell are on around the clock. The surveillance video and prison staff watch him 24/7. If a dozing Guzmán even inadvertently covers his face or crosses his arms, prison guards rouse him, his lead defence attorney, José Refugio Rodriguez, said in July.

“The conditions that he’s being held in are very drastic. He’s a victim of cruel and inhumane treatment well below the minimum standards established by the United Nations,” Rodriguez said in an interview. “This is practically torture.”

Guzmán has escaped federal prison twice during his infamous drug-running career and is now awaiting extradition to the United States. As Mexico’s most important prisoner, authorities want to impose the tightest possible surveillance lest they risk another humiliating jailbreak. Guzmán’s legal team has seized on these allegedly poor conditions to try to win a bit more freedom for their client as the case drags on.

Guzmán has been held in solitary confinement since early May, when he was transferred from a prison outside Mexico City to the federal lock-up in Ciudad Juárez along the border with Texas. He lives in an air-conditioned 7-square-metre cell that has a bed and a toilet, inside a new high-security wing that contains about 30 cells. Three times a week, Rodrguez said, Guzmán is allowed out on to a patio for one hour of fresh air.

Eduardo Guerrero Durán, the head of Mexico’s prison system, denied that Guzmán is suffering or in poor health. He said Guzmán has access to relatives, lawyers, books, chess and television, and he can wear an eye mask for sleeping, which affords him “perfect darkness”. Although prison protocol does not allow Guzmán to cover his whole face, he is allowed to cross his arms and move around while sleeping.

Guzmán’s health has also been in order. He has been checked by doctors or nurses on 79 occasions. His blood pressure, taken daily, is currently 120 over 80, or “perfectly normal”, Durán said. Guzmán weighs 76kg, the same as he did the day he arrived.

Born in 1957 to a family of farmers, Guzmán’s first exposure to drug trafficking came while working in marijuana and opium poppy fields.

An apprenticeship of sorts followed under Guadalajara cartel boss Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, also known as the Godfather. Guzmán was tasked with contacting Colombian traffickers.

His rise was swift, setting up his own cartel, the Sinaloa, in the late 1980s, thought to be responsible for a quarter of all drugs entering the US via Mexico.

After narrowly escaping assassination by a rival gang in 1993, he was arrested by Mexican authorities and sentenced to 20 years in jail.

A profile from the Mexican attorney general’s office described him as “egocentric, narcissistic, shrewd, persistent, tenacious, meticulous, discriminating, and secretive”, according to the “New Yorker”.

How did he break out of jail twice?

Guzmán’s first escape came in 2001, from the Puente Grande maximum security prison, reportedly hidden in a laundry basket.

He used his 13 years at large to consolidate his empire before being arrested in Sinaloa state.

But in July 2015, after less than two years at the Altiplano prison in central Mexico he fled again, this time through a 1.5-kilometre tunnel.

The escape was elaborate and carefully planned. A hole was dug inside his cell which led to a tunnel with lighting, ventilation and stairs. A construction site outside the jail hid the exit.

Even for a country that produced numerous drugs lords, Guzmán has a fearsome reputation for violence, with his gang’s rivalries with others leaving thousands dead in Mexico’s drugs war.

But among some in his home state, Guzmán is a folk hero, a popular subject of “narcocorridos” — musical tributes to drug barons.

He is said to be a gourmand, walking into a restaurant with his bodyguards while still at large, asking other diners to give up their mobile phones, then paying everyone’s bill as he left.

“Forbes” magazine has estimated Guzmán’s fortune at about $1 billion (Dh3.7 billion).

“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” he told the “Rolling Stone” magazine in an interview published on January 9 this year.

“I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats,” he said in the interview conducted by Hollywood actor Sean Penn at a hideout while he was on the run in October 2015.

Guzmán defends his entry into the narcotics trade, saying there “was no other way to work in our economy, to be able to make a living”.

As for the prevalence of drug addiction, he denies responsibility. “The day I don’t exist, it’s not going to decrease in any way at all.”

But he is a problem for the Mexican authorities. That one of the world’s most wanted men could escape from his own cell in what was supposed to be a maximum-security prison was hugely embarrassing for the Mexican authorities. His escape came after explicit promises he would not be allowed to flee again.

Questions were raised whether he had help from the inside, with several prison officials arrested.

His success in evading capture during his two escapes points to continuing problems of collusion and corruption as Mexico attempts to wrestle power back from drugs gangs.

The US filed requests in 2014 for his extradition so he could face charges of smuggling vast amounts of drugs into the country before he last escaped from prison.

Guzmán, who was named Public Enemy Number One by the Chicago Crime Commission in 2013, has been indicted by at least seven US federal district courts.

At the time Mexico would not grant the request until Guzmán served the remainder of his prison sentence.

But Mexico announced on January 9 that it would begin proceedings to have him sent to the US, though that decision is likely to be strongly contested by his legal team. Guzmán’s lawyers have already filed six motions against extradition.

If he does end up in the US, he could face racketeering, drug-trafficking, money-laundering and murder charges, according to the Department of Justice.

Mexican authorities may now have concluded that the only way to guarantee Guzmán does not escape again would be to send him to the US.

This column aims to profile personalities who made the news once but have now faded from the spotlight.

Compiled from BBC, CNN and Washington Post.

What he said:

Well, it’s a reality that drugs destroy. Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew up there was no other way and there still isn’t a way to survive.

Drug trafficking is already part of a culture that originated from the ancestors. And not only in Mexico. This is worldwide.

If there was no consumption, there would be no sales. It is true that consumption, day after day, becomes bigger and bigger. So it sells and sells.