Our breakfast minister even thought that Chapo had likely walked out the front door of the jail, and that the whole tunnel-and-motorcycle story had been staged to make the feat sound so ingenious that the government couldn’t have foreseen it, much less stopped it.

Aside from the theories presented at breakfast, I was curious as to the law enforcement guys having such a friendly meeting with a 30 year cartel veteran.

Who is the operative? If I had to guess, I'd say it's Antonio Peña Arguelles. Just like the operative in the article, Peña Arguelles served 2 1/2 years on a money laundering charge in the Western District of Texas (San Antonio), was accused by the Zetas of stealing from them, had a brother killed by the Zetas and left on a street, and forfeited $5 million to the Government. [More...]

Peña Arguelles admitted to laundering drug money in the U.S. in exchange for a 2 1/2-year prison sentence, almost all of which he'd already served, and three years of supervised release.

Prosecutors had alleged he was an intermediary between former Tamaulipas state Gov. Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba, a fugitive under indictment in Brownsville, and Miguel “El 40” Treviño Morales, the Zetas' leader who was arrested last year in Mexico.

In 2011, Treviño accused Peña Arguelles of stealing $5 million from him and of being behind the 2010 assassination of leading Tamaulipas gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantú, court records show.

Members of the Zetas killed Peña Arguelles' brother in November of that year and left his body, along with a threatening message, on a street in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. Peña Arguelles fled to San Antonio, where he was arrested in February 2012.

I checked the filings in his case on PACER and not surprisingly, the details match.

So how much do we credit his version, with which the law enforcement guys at the breakfast agreed? On the one hand, he's not claiming any personal knowledge as to El Chapo. On the other, he clearly has the credentials Ginger lists.

So do these three old timers make the case that Mexico was in cahoots with El Chapo and let him escape? Or does Chapo just excel at bribing law enforcement and prison guards?

The one thing that's for certain in this escape is the help he got from those at the prison, and possibly higher ups. How far will the Mexican government go in exposing them? It didn't go very far when he escaped the last time. It arrested 61 workers, and let the big cheese off light. Here's an article naming them all and listing their sentences (use Google Translate):

In July 2006, the judge sentenced 59 involved, and two years later found 2 others involved guilty in the first flight of the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Today there are only four persons serving a sentence in jail for that first escape of Joaquin Guzman Loera, a worker, quartermaster and 3 former mid-level criminal. Higher level officials are already free.

...It turns out that the highest ranking official charged and sentenced for the first escape of "El Chapo", the former director of Puente Grande, Leonardo Beltran Santana, was released from prison for good behavior in 2010 after serving 9 years.

Luis Francisco Fernandez Ruiz, former deputy director of Security and Stewardship criminal, was released after serving 12 years. The last release was Leonardo Jaime Valencia Fontes, identified as one of El Chapo's most trusted prison employees. He left prison in late 2013 after serving 10 years and 2 months.

Only the underlings are still serving time for the first escape. Never charged was Damaso Lopez-Nunez, who resigned as head of the prison 2 months before El Chapo's escape and later became Chapo's partner in the drug business. He's called "El Licenciado" because he went to law school and practiced law for a while.

Born February 22, 1966, in Eldorado, Culiacan township, Lopez Nunez was a Public Ministry agent in Sinaloa in the 1990's. Towards the end of 1999, he began to work as chief of security in the Puente Grande prison.

According to the governments of Mexico and the U.S., a few months after he started there, he was promoted to deputy director of surveillance and custody in the prison as part of a well defined plan to help Joaquin Guzman escape from Puente Grande.

Lopez Nunez resigned two months before the escape, although by that time everything was ready for Guzman Loera's escape.

Once the escape took place, El Licenciado began to work in Chapo Guzman's organization, but not in the top ranks. It was after the arrest of El Chapo Lomas, in prison since 2008, that he became one of the capo's principal men.

Lopez-Nunez has an Indictment pending in the Eastern District of Virginia (Case No. 11-CR-00558.) In 2013, the U.S. put him on the designated kingpin list. The U.S. Treasury Notice says:

OFAC is designating top Sinaloa Cartel lieutenant Damaso Lopez Nunez for his role in the narcotics trafficking activities of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman Loera and for playing a significant role in international narcotics trafficking. Lopez Nunez, alias “El Licenciado,” helped Guzman Loera escape from Mexican federal prison in 2001. He has since become one of the top lieutenants of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is responsible for multiple-ton shipments of narcotics from Mexico into the United States.

Mexico apparently made no effort to catch him since his Indictment and the OFAC notice. (He was charged with a crime in Mexico in 2008 but got an writ of amparo.) He has been reported to be Chapo's choice of a successor (Chapo's sons would only be in charge of their specific areas.) Here's more on him as the designer of the 2001 escape from today's news.

His son, "Mini-Lic", Damaso Lopez-Serrano, is an enforcer/hitman for the Sinaloa groups. Several media cites have reported he will be the successor (Use Google translate.)

There are also reports that Chapo's partner Ismael Zambia-Garcia orchestrated the recent escape(Use Google translate.)

If firing some lesser prison chiefs and arresting some prison workers is all Mexico does in response to El Chapo's escape, all the money we're throwing into joint efforts with Mexico in the war on drugs is money thrown down the drain. Corruption is a much bigger problem than drugs, and so long as rampant corruption exists in countries like Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela and elsewhere, there will always be huge quantities of drugs coming to the U.S. All of these countries should battle the corruption first, if they want to reduce the availability of drugs. Until they do, the War on Drugs will continue to fail. Capturing El Chapo won't make a bit of difference. But I'm still going to follow the hunt. It tells a lot about how law enforcement draws connections and the tools at their disposal.