The trial of 'El Chapo' Guzman is revealing more details about his daring escapes
- Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's trial in New York has seen a steady stream of shocking revelations.
- Recent testimony has also shed light on his most well-known escapades: his jailbreaks.
- One witness alleged that Guzman's wife had a major role in the planning of one breakout - while she was sitting in the courtroom.
Among many revelations during the trial of Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman are some that shed light on his daring escapes.
This week, Damaso Lopez Nuñez took the stand. Like Guzman, Lopez is from Sinaloa state. The son of a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico for most of the 20th century, Lopez was first a security official in Sinaloa before he became deputy security director at Puente Grande prison in southwest Mexico.
On Wednesday, Lopez told the court he met Guzman at Puente Grande in 1999. He said he resigned in late 2000, deciding to leave when the government launched a corruption probe at the prison. Guzman contacted him soon after, Lopez said, seeking help to maintain the privileges he had gotten through bribery and other inducements.
It long been suspected that Lopez aided the escape, and it is widely believed that Guzman was snuck out in a laundry cart, though others dispute that account. On the stand, Lopez denied involvement in the January 2001 escape but said a laundry cart was involved.
Guzman "told me the only person responsible for that escape had been Chito, who was employed in the laundry," Lopez testified, according to Vice reporter Keegan Hamilton.
Read more: A witness says 'El Chapo' Guzman paid off a Mexican president with a $100 million bribe
Chito, a laundry room worker at the prison, "had taken [Guzman] inside a laundry cart that was picking up dirty laundry and transported him to the parking lot … he put him in the trunk of his car," Lopez said.
Lopez said that Guzman revealed more about the escape months later, in the mountains of Nayarit, a state near Sinaloa in northwest Mexico.
"He told me that really the plan for his escape was spontaneous," Lopez testified, according to Hamilton. "This was because some of his friends in the federal government had notified him that an extradition order had been issued."
After that, Guzman offered Lopez a job, and over the next decade and a half Lopez became deeply involved in the cartel's operations - including efforts to spring Guzman from prison in 2015.
Lopez said he met with Guzman's wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, and his sons in mid-2014, just a few months after Guzman was recaptured.
During that meeting, he said, they discussed buying land near the high-security Altiplano federal penitentiary, west of the capital in Mexico state, where Guzman was held and that Coronel told Lopez that Guzman had asked for him to buy weapons and an armored vehicle to use in the breakout.
It took months to dig a mile-long tunnel under the prison, and Guzman could reportedly hear the excavation in his cell - so loud that other inmates complained. (Footage from Guzman's cell the night of the escape also picked up sounds of his henchmen smashing through the floor of his shower.)
During that time, Coronel was a major player in the plot, Lopez said, carrying messages to and from Guzman.
Coronel has never been charged with a crime, but her role as intermediary for Guzman and his associates during the 2015 escape may explain the tight restrictions the US has put on her contact with her husband while he's been in US custody. In November, as the trial was starting, the judge in the case denied a request to allow Guzman to hug her.
The audacious escape through a mile-long, ventilated tunnel on a motorcycle rigged on rails garnered international attention. Lopez added more detail to the account, saying that one of Coronel's brothers was driving the motorcycle, which had been towed through the tunnel.
Upon exiting the tunnel, Guzman was spirited to a warehouse and then boarded a plane that flew him to neighboring Queretaro state and then to his hometown of La Tuna, in western Sinaloa state.
Lopez said that, like the 2001 escape, his involvement was limited. "I never knew, not even about one shovel of earth that was removed there," he said. "His sons were doing that."
In early 2016, Mexican newspaper Reforma reported that Mexican officials allowed a private company to connect a geolocation-monitoring bracelet to Guzman while he was at Altiplano, but Reforma was unable to find definitive answers about who authorized the device, rising concern it was part of the kingpin's escape plan.
"Some high officials in the federal government consider that, because of the grade of precision in the digging and the excavation," Reforma reported at the time, "the tunnel through which 'El Chapo' escaped could not have been constructed without the help of geolocation device."
Lopez said the excavation was in fact aided by a GPS watch smuggled into the prison for Guzman to wear. (A Mexican official who talked to Guzman after he was recaptured in 2016 said Guzman told investigators that his henchmen dug two tunnels under the prison, the second coming after they arrived at the wrong cell.)
Guzman remained on the run for 13 years after his 2001 jailbreak, but his freedom after the second escape was short-lived. Mexican authorities caught up with him in northwest Sinaloa state in January 2016.
After his capture he was returned to Altiplano, which holds many high-profile criminals. While there, Guzman sent a message through his wife that he wanted to mount an escape again, Lopez said. To carry that out, Lopez said the Sinaloa cartel paid a $2 million bribe to the head of Mexico's prison system.
But that escape never came to fruition. Guzman was transferred to a prison near Ciudad Juarez in May 2016, where he was held until his extradition to the US in January 2017.
Lopez's freedom after Guzman's recapture was also brief.
After the kingpin's arrest in January 2016, a factional struggle emerged within the cartel, pitting Lopez and his son, Damaso Lopez Serrano, against Guzman's sons, who were allied with Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, a cartel figure on the same level as Guzman and who Guzman's lawyers have tried to cast as the true leader of the cartel. (Guzman's brother Aureliano was also believed to be vying for control of the organization at that time.)
The Lopezes were on the losing side, however. The elder Lopez, 52, was arrested in Mexico City in May 2017; two months later, his son crossed the border into California and surrendered to US authorities in Calexico.
Lopez Nuñez is now serving a life sentence in the US for drug trafficking; he has said he's cooperating with US prosecutors in hope of getting a lighter sentence.