TVCE [MEXICO] – World’s most notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was rearrested on Friday with U.S. help in a violent standoff on Friday, six months after he humiliated President Enrique Pena Nieto by tunneling out of a maximum security prison.
Guzman, head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel and who Pena Nieto first caught in February 2014, was captured in an early morning raid that killed five in the city of Los Mochis in the drug baron’s native state of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico.
“Mission accomplished: We have him,” Pena Nieto said on his Twitter account. “I want to inform all Mexicans that Joaquin Guzman Loera has been arrested.”
Scant official details were available of the recapture of Guzman, but it involved Mexican marines, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Marshals, a senior Mexican police source said.
The source said Guzman’s capture was part of an operation in Los Mochis announced earlier on Friday by the Mexican Navy in the deadly raid in which five others were captured.
Guzman is wanted by U.S. authorities for various criminal charges including cocaine smuggling and money laundering. An official at the attorney general’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his extradition would “take time”.
Once featured in the Forbes list of billionaires, Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel has smuggled billions of dollars worth of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States and fought vicious turf wars with other Mexican gangs.
The DEA said in a tweet it was “extremely pleased” at El Chapo’s capture.
Guzman was born in La Tuna, a village in the Sierra Madre mountains in Sinaloa state where smugglers have been growing opium and marijuana since the early 20th century.
