Homeless in Arizona

I can tell you how to win the "War on Drugs". Just declare victory and end the "War on Drugs", that's the only way to win it. Or perhaps better said we should pretend to win the "War on Drug" and use that as a lame excuse to end it.

For those of you old end to remember that's how we ended the "War in Vietnam", by declaring victory and removing all the troops.

We had the stupid Paris Peace talks, declared victory in Vietnam, and pulled out the troop.

It didn't matter that South Vietnam fell within a week of the phoney baloney victory. The key was it was a good excuse to end the war. I remember the North Vietnamese tanks storming the Presidential Palace in Saigon, and the evacuation of the US Embassy, both which happened a week or so after we won the Vietnam war.

Now lets do the same thing with the war on drugs.

Of course that also applies to billionaire cartel leader Joaquin Guzman or "El Chapo". Anybody that thinks this guy is going to spend the rest of his life in prison is a fool.

Drug-cartel leader no stranger to escape

Bart Jansen, USA TODAY 2:27 p.m. MST July 12, 2015

It's the second time Joaquin Guzman escaped from prison. Last time, he spent more than a decade on the run before being caught again. VPC

"El Chapo" means Shorty, but a better nickname for Mexican drug cartel leader Joaquin Guzman might be "Slippery."

Guzman, who is so enigmatic that his age between 56 and 60 is disputed, escaped late Saturday from a maximum-security prison called Altiplano by slipping down a mile-long tunnel from his cell's shower area.

Guzman had vowed to escape after his arrest in February 2014 in Mazatlan, Mexico, where he was caught without a shot on a beachfront vacation with his wife and twin daughters.

He wasn't bluffing. In 2001, Guzman had escaped a Guadalajara-area prison called Puente Grande while serving a 20-year sentence by being wheeled out in a laundry cart. He was helped by prison guards who were convicted for their assistance.

Guzman remained free more than a decade and rose to become head of the Sinaloa cartel thought to supply the American surge in heroin use.

Mexican drug kingpin 'El Chapo' escapes from prison (again)

Former Mexican attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam told the Associated Press this year that the risk of escape from Guzman's latest incarceration "does not exist." Karam argued that keeping him locked up was a matter of national sovereignty and that Guzman would get "300 or 400 years" for his crimes.

Besides charges in Mexico, Guzman faces multiple drug-trafficking indictments in the U.S. He was on the Drug Enforcement Administration's most-wanted list before his last arrest, and the Treasury Department labeled Guzman a drug kingpin.

"The U.S. government stands ready to work with our Mexican partners to provide any assistance that may help support his swift recapture," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday in a statement.

One federal indictment in Chicago charged Guzman among nine defendants with conspiring to import heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana for distribution throughout the U.S. from 2005 to 2014.

Since 2008, the Chicago-based investigation of the Sinaloa cartel has seized $30 million, 11 tons of cocaine, 2,200 pounds of marijuana, 500 pounds of methamphetamines and 150 pounds of heroin by January 2015, according to the indictment.

The indictment alleges that the cartel imported to Mexico drugs from across Central and South America by using cargo planes, private aircraft, submarines, container ships and even fishing boats.

After consolidating the drugs, the cartel than allegedly shipped hundreds of pounds of drugs at a time to the U.S. by cars, trucks, trains and tunnels. Destinations included Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Columbus, Ohio, the indictment said.

Guzman is known for the elaborate tunnels that his cartel built underneath the Mexico-U.S. border to transport drugs. The tunnels had ventilation, lighting and even rail cars.

His prison escape tunnel raised questions about how such an elaborate structure could be built without detection. A 20-inch hole in his shower floor opened to a fully ventilated tunnel about 1.5 yards high that led to a half-built house in an area with large construction ditches and metal pipes, Mexico's Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said Sunday.

"It was engineering work very well done," said Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "Now it's very evident that it was a mistake."

In 2014, Guzman's fortune was estimated at more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which listed him among the "World's Most Powerful People" — and ahead of the president of France.

At the time of his capture in 2014, Guzman's empire reached throughout North America and as far as Europe and Australia. Violence to control the drug trade has raged through Mexico for a decade and claimed an estimated 100,000 lives.

Before he was caught, security forces tracked him through Sinaloa state on the west coast of Mexico that gives the cartel its name. Houses where he supposedly stayed had steel doors and were equipped with lighted, ventilated tunnels that allowed him to escape from a bathroom to a drainage ditch.

Contributing: The Associated Press

Source

Mexican Drug Kingpin Known as El Chapo Escapes Prison

By ELISABETH MALKIN and RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLDJULY 12, 2015

Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous Mexican drug kingpin whose capture last year had been trumpeted by his country’s government as a crucial victory in the bloody campaign against the narcotics trade, escaped from a maximum-security prison through a tunnel that led from a shower, Mexican security officials said on Sunday.

The government detailed the escape in a news conference early Sunday. Mr. Guzmán, known by the nickname El Chapo, or Shorty, absconded through a passage tall enough for a person to stand upright and equipped with overhead lighting and a motorcycle on rails likely used to transport digging equipment and haul out dirt.

Though this was perhaps Mexico’s most spectacular prison escape since a previous one by Mr. Guzmán, in 2001, the country has seen many breakouts, which have often occurred with the collusion of the authorities.

Officials said on Sunday that Mr. Guzmán left through an opening measuring about 20 inches by 20 inches that had been dug from his shower. It connected with a broader, more elaborate tunnel that was about a mile long and about 30 feet deep.

Mr. Guzmán was being held in what was said to be Mexico’s most secure prison, the Altiplano, about a 90-minute drive west from the capital. The police were deployed to watch all the roads around the area, and the nearby Toluca airport was closed.

If there were a single prisoner that the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto could not afford to lose, Mr. Guzmán was the one. His crime syndicate extended far beyond the country’s borders, and his arrest was presented as a testament to the Peña Nieto administration’s growing ability to assert stability and sovereignty.

“Yes, they might be great at catching them, but not so much at keeping them behind bars,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst in Mexico and the editor of El Daily Post. “El Chapo’s escape has demolished the ‘efficiency’ image the government has tried to build.”

Eighteen prison employees were taken into custody for questioning, the authorities said.

Officials said the tunnel ended about a mile from Mr. Guzmán's cell, at a construction site southwest of the prison.

By The New York Times

Mr. Guzmán was last seen shortly before 9 p.m. on Saturday on the prison’s video cameras when he entered the shower in his cell. After he did not come out, guards entered the cell only to find it empty.

The tunnel that Mr. Guzmán used to reach freedom was an elaborate construction and about two to two and a half feet wide, Mexico’s security commissioner, Monte Alejandro Rubido, said in the news conference.

There was tubing for ventilation, lighting and the motorcycle. Along its course, the tunnel was equipped with oxygen tanks, fuel canisters and construction materials, including wooden beams.

It opened onto a construction site in the neighborhood of Santa Juanita in the municipality of Almoloya de Juárez southwest of the prison.

Experts who follow the drug underworld were left dumbfounded and predicted the escape could bolster American demands to extradite top crime figures, particularly when United States law enforcement personnel have played major roles in many cases, and not without personal risk.

“It’s shocking, embarrassing, a huge blow, almost everything under the sun,” said Eric L. Olson, a scholar at the Mexico Institute of the Wilson Center who follows crime trends in Latin America. “It is almost Mexico’s worst nightmare, and I suspect many in U.S. law enforcement are apoplectic right now.”

“Mexico is going to be under increasing pressure from the U.S. in terms of extraditing these top people,” he said.

Mexico has long struggled to reshape its police forces and root out corruption, but Mr. Olson said the prison system often takes a back seat as “the last thing in the chain of law enforcement.”

In addition to pioneering the use of tunnels to smuggle drugs across, or rather under, the United States border, Mr. Guzmán built a warren of them in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa, where his cartel was based and where he was believed to have been hiding for years. Days before his capture last year, Mexican marines and American law enforcement officers raided the home of his ex-wife in Culiacán only to find that he had fled though a secret door beneath a bathtub that led to a network of tunnels and sewer canals that connected to six other houses.

Mr. Guzmán was finally caught in an apartment he used in the Pacific resort city of Mazatlán.

Before his capture, Mr. Guzmán presided over a vast network that smuggled cocaine and marijuana into the United States and reached as far as Europe and Africa.

A few days after Mr. Guzmán’s arrest, Mr. Peña Nieto told the Univision television network in an interview that he would be asking his interior minister every day if the prisoner was well guarded. “It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that the escape that occurred a few years ago is never ever repeated,” Mr. Peña Nieto said.

Want to put El Chapo and his ilk out of business forever? Legalize the drugs he sells. Put the enforcement money into treatment and...

Mr. Olson said it was surprising that Mexican officials apparently did not take measures to prevent a tunnel from being dug, considering Mr. Guzmán’s extensive use of them. Or worse, he added, “it is an indication of the ability of someone with his economic power and network to corrupt and buy the silence from people, including obviously the people at the prison itself and law enforcement authorities.”

Mr. Peña Nieto, in France on a state visit, issued a statement calling the breakout “without a doubt an affront to the Mexican state.” Though the president plans to remain in France, he ordered his interior minister, Jose Osorio Chong, to return immediately to coordinate the effort to recapture Mr. Guzman.