More on Guzman (ranching) and his escape

On Saturday, Guzmán was captured on surveillance footage at El Altiplano for the last time, approximately just before 9 o’clock at night as he walked toward the showers after taking his medication. After disappearing from the view of the cameras as he walked into the shower area, one of the very few sections of the prison not under surveillance, he disappeared from the prison altogether. From what investigators have pieced together, Guzmán had spent some time digging a large, rectangular hole that he had covered up with a trap door. The bottom of that hole connected to a large pipe that had a stepladder inside. Once Guzmán reached the bottom of the pipe, he walked through a tunnel, one 170 centimeters (5’6″) in height and 70 centimeters (2’3″) in width and built with lighting and ventilation. Some 1,500 meters later, Guzmán emerged through the floor of an unfinished home in Santa Juanita, a tiny settlement south of the prison. Where he went from there is unknown. What is known, however, is that less than 500 meters (0.3 miles) from the home is the Libramiento Nor-Oriente de Toluca 70, a major and modern highway that surely aided in whisking a hidden Guzmán to a safe zone in a getaway car...Guzmán was born in 1957 into a poor, rural family in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, and dropped out of school at an early age to work with his cattle-rancher father. Guzmán soon found out that his father, like many other ranchers in the poor and isolated areas of Sinaloa, also grew opium and marijuana, and after several years, ‘El Chapo’ (‘Shorty’) began growing and selling his own drugs without the influence of his father...more