Ex-DEA official: "El Chapo" escape is "black eye" to Mexican gov't
Mexican authorities "trivialized" the situation with escaped drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, according to former Drug Enforcement Agency Regional Director in Mexico David Gaddis.
"This one in particular is a big black eye to the Mexican government," Gaddis said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."
U.S. officials announced Monday that it knew almost immediately after Mexico's biggest drug cartel chief was captured in 2014, plots were being hatched to free him, sources told CBS News.
DEA agents passed information it acquired along to Mexican authorities, a law enforcement source told CBS News chief investigative correspondent Pat Milton.
"I think they should have been looking much, much closer at this situation, perhaps even kept him in a military compound where he was under surveillance for 24/7," Gaddis said.
Gaddis, now G-Global Protection Solutions CEO, did not know what that information entailed but said "it would not be unusual for some information to come into the hands of DEA and then DEA would pass that (to) their Mexican counterparts for action."
The Mexican government said Monday it fired the director of the prison where the 58 year-old fugitive, also known as "Shorty," escaped, along with two other prison system officials.
Mexico's interior minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said Guzman likely had help making his escape, reports CBS News correspondent Omar Villafranca.
"We can't omit that, to achieve his goal, the now fugitive must have had the complicity of personnel, and or officials, from the Altiplano Prison," he said.
After Guzman escaped, 32 prison guards were held for questioning.
Mexican police say Guzman went into the shower Saturday night and snaked his way into a 2-by-2 foot opening in the floor. Then he used a ladder to climb down into an elaborate 5 foot-tall tunnel, built 30 feet underground, which leads to a construction site, about a mile south of the prison.
"I think he was choreographing this escape for quite some time. To me it's appalling that he would have been placed in a location by himself, whether he was in the shower or not, in order to make that escape," Gaddis said.
James Dinkins, one of the Americans who helped capture Guzman in February last year, said the likelihood of him being captured again is hard to predict.
"Last time he was a fugitive for over ten years," Dinkins said. "He keeps learning from the mistakes that he's made. So he'll be even smarter than even a well-trained escape artist that he is."
Gaddis said Guzman will remain hidden as long as possible until he can begin running his empire again.
"I think as he's staying low profile he'll be a little vulnerable, and we might have an opportunity to capture him again," Gaddis said. "Perhaps, like was in the case with the Beltran Leyva cartel, he could even be killed."
U.S. officials made a play to extradite Guzman after he was captured in 2014. But Mexican authorities dismissed widespread U.S. concerns about corruption and rejected extradition requests from the U.S. government, and promised Guzman was secure.
Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said the escape would not have happened if Guzman was in U.S. hands.
"He's not gonna have the privileges that he had back in Mexico and you know he's gonna be contained, well contained here in the U.S. side," Cuellar said.
Gaddis said it's disappointing Mexican authorities put him in a position to escape, knowing that he wanted to avoid extradition at all costs.
"That's every foreign trafficker's nightmare, is to have to show up in a judicial district somewhere in the continental United States where they know they'll have no opportunity to be released, to escape, and their penalties would be very severe -- 25 to life," Gaddis said.
Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel is the largest in Mexico, worth about $3 billion dollars. The empire controls almost half of the illegal drugs flowing from Mexico to the U.S. Authorities attribute 10,000 murders to Guzman's gang, hundreds of which happened in the U.S.
The trafficker named to Forbes' billionaires list likely called the shots even while inside the federal prison.
"They're confined in a space, but you know they still continue to do business," Cuellar said.
"His people were tunnel-digging specialists and he used the tunnel to escape. If he was able to do that inside the prison, I'm certainly sure he was able to go ahead and continue his control of the empire from behind bars," Gaddis said.
Mexican authorities are offering a nearly $4 million reward for Guzman's capture.