Docs: Gov't had intel on earlier escape plots by drug lord

Government documents show the Drug Enforcement Administration had intelligence about at least two plots to help Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escape from a maximum security prison.

Internal DEA documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal that drug agents first got information on escape plans in March 2014. That was about a month after Guzman was captured in Mazatlan, Mexico.

The documents show that in March 2014 agents in Los Angeles reported a possible escape operation funded by another drug organization that operates under the auspices of Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel and involved threatening or bribing prison officials. That July, the same investigation revealed Guzman's son had sent a team of lawyers and military counter-intelligence personnel to design a break-out plan.

"El Chapo's" Arrest Packaged for Media Consumption [08/12/2014]
...according to a former DEA supervisory agent who still has a deep network of contacts in Mexico... the retired DEA agent, Hector Berrellez... "Chapo [Guzman] was protected by Mexican federal agents and military, by the Mexican government," Berrellez told Narco News. "He was making [Mexican President Enrique] Peña Nieto look bad, and so the government decided to withdraw his security detail. Chapo was told he could either surrender, or he would be killed." Berrellez, who retired from the DEA in 1996, stresses that he is not speaking on behalf of the US government, but rather as an individual who has decades of law enforcement experience, including serving as DEA's lead investigator in Mexico... Guzman was apprehended early Saturday morning, Feb. 22, in an unremarkable condominium tower in the Pacific resort town of Mazatlan, Mexico, without a shot being fired and no security detail present to offer a fight. "This guy [Guzman] was bigger than Pablo Escobar [the infamous Colombian narco-trafficker whom law enforcers killed in 1993 in a rooftop shootout in Medellin]," Berrellez says. "He [Guzman] ran around with a several-hundred man security detail that included Mexican military and federal agents, yet, in the end, he is arrested like a rat in a hole.

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