Bishops across Mexico have said the escape of the country’s most notorious prisoner highlights the complicity of public officials with drug cartels and the depth of corruption in the country.
Drug kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman slipped out of a maximum-security prison — for the second time in his criminal career — from the shower area of his cell through a nearly mile-long tunnel to a rural settlement.
“Mexicans should make a monument to ‘El Chapo’ because, in a single stroke, he showed the size of our corruption,” Bishop Raul Vera Lopez of Saltillo told reporters.
Cardinal Francisco Robles Ortega of Guadalajara added: “It’s hard to understand an escape by a person like him from an extremely high security centre if there isn’t complicity.”
Guzman is the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, which grew into the most powerful and quite possibly profitable criminal organisation as it moved drugs from the Andean countries of South America through Central America and Mexico to the United States and other countries. The cartel gained fame for its construction of tunnels to move drugs under the US-Mexico border.
The cartel is so culturally and economically ingrained in Sinaloa that Guzman’s escape was greeted with “music” and “guns being fired in the air,” said Javier Valdez, founder of the Sinaloa news outlet Rio Doce. “He continued being a powerful person from his prison cell.”
Guzman was captured in Guatemala in 1993, but he was wheeled out of a Guadalajara-area prison in a laundry cart. Mexican officials captured him in Mazatlan in February 2014 and locked him up in a high-security facility 50 miles west of Mexico City — opting against extraditing him to the United States.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto called the escape “outrageous.” After Guzman’s 2014 arrest, he told Univision that another escape would be “unpardonable.”
“The country’s creditability was scarce, and with these events the creditability that we do enjoy is shaken, in spite of the publicity and all of the promises that are given,” said Bishop Jose Martinez Zepeda of Irapuato. He was quoted in the newspaper Correo in his home state of Guanajuato.
“We have a crisis of creditability, justice, legality and a common effort,” the bishop added. “Criticisms are going to rain down … because (the president’s) publicity has been that, in the country, crime has calmed … and (then) there’s an escape from a high-security prison.”
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.