A light rain pattered the rooftops of Los Mochis
in Friday’s pre-dawn darkness, the town silent
and still as the Sea of Cortez lapped its shore.
Hardly anyone saw or heard the small force of
police and marines close in on Río Quelite, a
narrow, residential street in the affluent
neighbourhood of Las Palmas.
Hardly anyone, that is, save their quarry:
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and his lieutenants,
hunkered down in a white house just off the
corner of Jiquilpan Boulevard, sensed a trap was
about to spring shut. According to authorities,
the Sinaloa cartel men opened fire first, a blaze
of bullets shattering the silent night.
And so began Guzmán’s wild and bloody and
surreal attempt to evade capture, a six-hour
chase involving helicopters, sewers, a carjacking
and a sex motel which would convulse Los
Mochis and uncork, when it was all over,
jubilation in Mexico City and Washington.
The image of Guzmán which ricocheted around
the world – a shackled, dazed figure in a filthy T-
shirt – may have suggested a spent force and a
fall foretold. But, with a little bit of luck,
Mexico’s most wanted man might once again
have escaped into the wooded sierras of Sinaloa
and continued to run a vast, underworld empire.
Had he done so, the world would be asking anew
about Mexican state corruption and ineptitude.
Instead it is asking if the fugitive’s desire to
mould his image through an interview with the
actor Sean Penn and a possible biopic was self-
destructive hubris.

An impoverished orange seller who rose to
infamy and fortune, a Houdini who made not
one but two spectacular jail breaks, most recently
last July, Guzmán certainly had a compelling
story to tell.
Doing so may have helped betrayed his location.
“He contacted actresses and producers, which
was part of one line of investigation,” said
Mexico’s attorney general, Arely Gómez. She did
not mention names but Penn, along with fellow
actor Kate del Castillo, who acted as the
American’s translator, are the only film people
known to have met Guzmán in recent months.
If confirmed it will be a rich irony: summoning
Hollywood to tell his story only to trigger an
ending he did not want – Argo in reverse.
The denouement began on Friday at 4.30am
when, according to authorities, El Chapo and his
crew started shooting, prompting the marines,
part of an elite, narco-tracking squad, to return
fire. They sealed off the street and summoned
helicopters which whumped overhead, jolting Los
Mochis into the realisation that a siege was
under way.
“It didn’t sound like that many soldiers or
helicopters so we didn’t think they were after an
especially big fish,” said Francisco Pereira, a taxi
driver who lived about a mile away. “But of
course for the big fish they need to keep it
secret,” he added, tapping his nose, a reference
to drug cartels’ infiltration of security forces.
The marines were after Moby Dick, the head of a
criminal enterprise that had alternately
terrorised and coopted the Mexican state while
smuggling huge quantities of cocaine, heroin,
marijuana and other drugs to Chicago, New York
and other US cities.
Five cartel gunmen died in the battle, according
to authorities, fresh statistics to add to the more
than 100,000 Mexicans who have died in a
decade of so-called drug wars. A mortuary
official said the gunmen were not from Los
Mochis but from other parts of Sinaloa, a
territory which rises from the Pacific coastline to
remote mountain ranges.
While his men exchanged thunderous fire,
wounding one marine, Guzmán and his chief of
security, Orso Iván Gastélum Cruz, made their
escape.
Unlike Pablo Escobar, gunned down as he
scrambled over the rooftops of Medellín,
Colombia, in 1993, Guzmán and his associate
took another option – a sewer. It was as if the
earth swallowed them because for the next few
hours they remained hidden, below concrete and
palm trees.
Dawn broke over Los Mochis, revealing the
green-uniformed marines who combed El
Chapo’s lair, seizing two armored vehicles, eight
rifles, one handgun and a rocket-propelled
grenade launcher.
The hunters were prepared for his subterranean
tactic and, according to Mexican media reports,
followed him into the sewer with torches. And
still, for hours, nothing.
Even the man nicknamed Shorty would have had
to crouch as he felt and squelched through the
fetid tunnels, the Guardian can testify, having
joined Mexican reporters who later explored the
escape route.

While tropical sunshine began to heat the streets
above, the dark, dank sludge below transformed
Guzmán, whom Forbes magazine once listed as a
billionaire, and Cruz, who reportedly dated a
beauty queen, into filthy scarecrows.
Some time after 10am they are believed to have
emerged from their labryinth on the corner of
Adolfo Lopez Mateos Boulevard, near Fatima
hospital. They carjacked a motorist stopped at a
traffic light and made off in a red Ford Focus.
The Sinaloa cartel redoubt lay south in the
mountains of Culiacán, where locals shelter
Guzmán as a sort of Robin Hood, but he and Cruz
sped north. Out on highway 15, the landscape
turns semi-rural, maize fields on one side, the
Barobampo mountain peaks the other.
If El Chapo felt any exhilaration that he had done
it again, outfoxed them all and slipped the net,
reality quickly robbed him of that fantasy: black-
uniformed federal police intercepted the outlaws.
They promptly took them to a sex motel. The
police wanted a discreet refuge to await
reinforcements so the world’s most notorious
drug lord found himself handcuffed by a beige
satin bedspread in room 51 of the Doux motel. It
is decorated in pink and purple hues and costs
300 pesos (£11.50) for six hours. A laminated
menu of intimacy gadgets, condoms and lubricants sits by
the bedside, not visible in the photograph of the
captured El Capo.


By the time marines thundered into the motel
grounds and collected their prize, the news was
electrifying officials in Mexico City.
The interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong,
left a gathering of the Mexican diplomatic corps
to take a call from President Enrique Peña Nieto.
When he returned, he read them the president’s
tweet: “Mission accomplished. We have him.”
The diplomats erupted into cheers and applause
and sang Mexico’s national anthem.
The US Department of Justice and the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA), which helped
behind the scenes, hailed the capture and moved
to seek Guzmán’s extradition for drug, murder
and money laundering charges. Mexico’s
attorney general said the government has started
processing the request – a request which could
leave Guzmán languishing in a US jail until he
dies.
For now, he is back in Altiplano, the maximum
security jail from which he escaped in July. It has
been remodelled, and there are tanks, to make
sure he stays put.
Los Mochis is still digesting its role in the drama.
“The government did well. Hopefully this will
calm the violence,” said Gloria Villa, 50, part of a
crowd of bystanders gathered near El Chapo’s
former lair. “I wanted him to see this,” said
Villa, indicating her young son. “We’re all part of
the republic.”
The Doux motel, for its part, now boasts a room
with special frisson. Asked if clients were
expressing particular interest in room 51 a
receptionist nodded. “Oh yeah.”

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/10/how-el-chapo-came-up-short-sex-motel-mexico-joaquin-guzman

Cc: Lalasticlala

YES! Justice! Good For Him.

His money couldnt take him to chillax in mars?

Great news

Good News

Seun, Lalasticlala, Myd44 pls push this to fp.