Earlier this week, Mexican troops entered La Tuna, the hometown of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán in northwestern Mexico, and while it seems the soldiers are still in the town, it's not clear what they've found or what they are looking for.

According to local newspaper Rio Doce, Mexican Marines approached La Tuna, in the Badiraguato municipality of Sinaloa state, from the northeast on Saturday, but did not move into the town itself until Monday afternoon.

The town is still the home Guzmán’s mother, Consuelo Loera, and several of the drug kingpin’s family members. 

At the time of Rio Doce’s report on Tuesday, it appeared that Mexican security forces in the area were not letting people into or out of the town.

Government sources who requested anonymity told Rio Doce that no one had been detained, but did say that "there are dead" people, without offering details. The paper also reported that marines were maintaining a "stake out" on a ranch owned by Aureliano Guzmán, one of Guzmán’s brothers.

On Thursday, Rio Doce reported that eight people were killed on the outskirts of La Tuna. No official source confirmed the deaths, but sources did tell Rio Doce that the eight men, believed to be working for one of Guzmán’s brothers, were shot to death.

While it’s not surprising to see Mexican security forces active in and around Guzmán’s hometown, it still isn’t clear what the goal of the current operation is.

According to Alejandro Hope, the security and justice editor of El Daily Post and a former Mexican security official, they are likely trying to do one of three things. 

They may believe that Guzmán, who probably feels he has support and some freedom of operation in the area, was planning on showing up there — potentially to see his mother, who Hope notes is likely over 80 years old.

Their presence might be intended to pressure Guzmán. "The bet might be that, by squeezing some members of his inner circle … [Guzmán] might make a mistake (make a phone call, send a less than completely discrete messenger, etc.) that could lead his chasers back to him,” Hope wrote on Friday morning in his “Silver or Lead” newsletter.

Finally, the Mexican authorities might just be beating the bushes in hopes of picking up clues about the fugitive drug lord. It’s possible the Mexican government knows Guzmán “is not a La Tuna, but they think there might be someone who might have an inkling of where he might be hiding,” Hope notes.

‘It's all just a circus’

Mexican marines and other security forces have been active in the area for several months. Though many suspected the drug lord would make his way back to his home turf after his jailbreak in July, authorities pursued him to the area by tracking the efforts of his henchmen to return the kingpin’s daughters’ pet monkey, Boots, to the family’s hideout.

Mexican authorities in the area have been accused of conducting a “scorched earth” search for the kingpin, destroying cars and property and displacing hundreds of people from their homes.

“It’s all just a circus,” author and journalist Javier Valdez told TeleSur in October. “And, of course, the worst outcome of all this is the violation of human rights, the displacement of innocent people and the state of terror the federal forces are creating,” Valdez added.

Security forces reportedly had several encounters with Guzmán — arguably the world’s most powerful drug lord and the most wanted fugitive on the planet — in October, but he escaped their grasp each time. In one encounter, Guzmán, who is believed to be around 60 years old, fell down a cliff while being chased.

He reportedly broke his leg and sustained a facial injury, but managed to get away from Mexican soldiers by fleeing into Sinaloa state’s rugged terrain, although two sources with ties to Guzmán and other traffickers told TeleSur that the government’s claims were “all lies,” and that Guzmán had come nowhere near capture.

Whatever the security forces are doing in La Tuna, it’s unlikely that they will apprehend the Sinaloa cartel boss in the near future. If they had precise intelligence about his whereabouts, Hope notes, they wouldn’t be staked out in his hometown.

Moreover, “If and when he is captured, it will happen in a stealthy operation,” Hope writes. “A mass deployment of military troops will simply not do.”

SEE ALSO: Mexico has deployed its army to fight drug traffickers — and the consequences have been brutal

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how much El Chapo’s prison escape cost the infamous drug lord

Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, one of the world’s most wanted men and the boss of the vaunted Sinaloa cartel, broke out of a Mexican prison in bold fashion in July.

Guzmán's latest jailbreak follows a 2001 escape that reportedly saw him wheeled out of prison in a laundry cart.

To some observers, the reason why the Mexican government couldn’t hang on to Guzmán is simple: It doesn’t want to.

A 'mitigating force'

According to some, permitting the release of Guzmán, whose Sinaloa cartel controls most of the drug trade in the US and who has been described as a “mitigating force” in the Mexican drug trade, could allow the Sinaloa boss to bring some stability back to the country's narco scene.

“When I first heard the news, I thought this is either a good thing or a bad thing,” a Mexican cartel operative told Ginger Thompson in the days after Guzmán’s escape.

“Either this is a sign of how far things in Mexico are out of control. Or this shows that the government is willing to risk a certain amount of international embarrassment in order to restore peace for Mexican people."

In this account, putting up with the "embarrassment" of officials who seemingly ignored the sounds of construction work coming from Guzmán's cell and who took 18 minutes to investigate his disappearance from prison cameras allowed the Mexican government to have a major cartel figure back in operation — hopefully to stem a growing problem.

According to the experts Thompson spoke with — a senior Mexican intelligence official, an experienced American counternarcotics agent, and the cartel operative — Guzmán’s absence had allowed new actors to bring rising levels of violence to Mexico.

They referenced the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion. In the months leading up Guzmán’s escape, CJNG had conducted violent attacks against the government.

In April, a CJNG ambush killed 15 police in Jalisco state; in May, the cartel staged 39 roadblocks throughout Jalisco state and downed a police helicopter, killing six soldiers. The cartel was also believed to have infiltrated police forces in Jalisco.

CJNG and Sinaloa's suspected cooperation on some matters (including on some aspects of Guzmán’s jailbreak) suggest that there could be some truth to the belief Guzmán can act as a moderating force, even if there are signs that the cartels — or elements within them— are clashing, with Sinaloa’s turf in Tijuana as a potential battleground.

But even if all that was needed is to bring some wayward factions within the cartels to heel, that’s likely still a task beyond the capabilities of Mexican forces.

“Mexico’s security apparatus is simply not ready to combat organized crime,” the Mexican intelligence officer told Thompson.

'This is all some kind of ruse'

Suggestions that the government has cooperated with Guzmán to ease drug-war violence are based on more than just CJNG attacks in early 2015.

A hallmark of the war on cartels in Mexico was the kingpin strategy, which became closely associated with former Mexican President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012), and earned him criticism, as taking down cartel leadership appeared to stoke more violence.

“Whenever Calderon would take out a top guy, in the aftermath … what we would always see is some kind of internal struggle or some kind of new violence coming from other organizations trying to take advantage of the weakness of the cartel that got hit,” David Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego, told Business Insider during a conversation about Mexico’s militarized response to crime.

Though current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has continued this approach, he “has been able to stave off kind of the worst aspects of the kingpin strategy, and its not exactly clear to anyone how or why that has been the case,” said Shirk, who heads USD’s Justice in Mexico project.

“People think that somehow there's been a pact or a negotiation between the Peña Nieto administration and certain cartel organizations,” Shirk added, noting that there were the same suspicions about Calderon.

That Guzmán, a marquee capture for the Peña Nieto administration, was able to escape just 17 months after his arrest “fuels further speculation that this is all some kind of ruse,” Shirk said.

Mexico's PRI and the narco underworld

The history of Peña Nieto's political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), may also lead some to suspect that security policy isn't the government's only concern.

Peña Nieto took office in December 2012 as the first president from the PRI in 12 years.

His PRI predecessors ran Mexico as a de facto one-party state for most of the 20th century.

In that position, rather than working to eliminate the industry, the PRI permitted some elements of the drug trade to operate.

In the late 1940s, amid growing US pressure to fight drug trafficking, “it quickly became apparent … that PRI honchos … had no intention of striving to eliminate the drug business … [instead] establishing something of a public-private partnership” with cartels, as Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace report in their 2015 book, “A Narco History.”

The government’s periodic crackdowns, Boullosa and Wallace explain, helped centralize the drug trade in the hands of the most organized groups, among them the Sinaloa federation that Guzmán would come to lead in the 1990s.

And details that emerged shortly after Peña Nieto was elected president in July 2012 gave Mexicans a reason to believe his party still had active links to the narco underworld.

In August 2012, police in Spain assisted by the FBI apprehended four suspected Sinaloa cartel members, led by Jesús Gutiérrez Guzmán, ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s cousin, and among them was Rafael Humberto Celaya Valenzuela.

Celaya Valenzuela attempted to run as a PRI candidate for federal deputy in Sonora state in those same 2012 elections, a candidacy that the party tried to block and ended with Celaya Valenzuela badly defeated.

After his arrest, photos that Celaya Valenzuela had posted on Facebook that showed him with Peña Nieto were made public.

Celaya is also reportedly the nephew of Victor Hugo Celaya, an influential PRI figure in Sonora state who was appointed as general coordinator for the secretariat of agriculture shortly after Peña Nieto took office in December 2012.

The PRI insisted that there was no connection between Celaya Valenzuela and the president, and that the photo was a standard part of the campaign.

Celaya Valenzuela isn’t the only connection between the PRI and the Sinaloa cartel. Guzmán’s 2001 jailbreak was assisted by Dámaso López Nuñez, aka "El Licenciado," a subdirector for security at Puente Grande.

López Nuñez, the son of Dámaso López García, a member of the PRI in Sinaloa state, also worked for the government in Sinaloa before joining the cartel, and is now reportedly a high-level leader for the Sinaloa cartel who was rumored to be Guzmán’s successor after his arrest in February 2014.

López Nuñez is also suspected of stealing the blueprints of Puente Grande, which helped Guzmán break out of the nearly identical Altiplano prison earlier this year.

The misdeeds of López Nuñez and Celaya Valenzuela don't prove that PRI national-level leadership is in league with Mexican organized crime, but they do indicate that the boundary between Mexico’s political class and the country’s criminal underworld is easily crossed.

'A perverse game of interests'

“Agents I talked to tell me that Sinaloa has people in every branch of the government,” said David Epstein, whose recent article for ProPublica details efforts to bring down the Arellano Félix Organization in what is now the Sinaloa cartel’s stomping ground in northwest Mexico.

“The people I spoke with who work in that world, both who were in the cartel as well as the agents in law enforcement, suggested … there has never been a single cartel as powerful in Mexico as Sinaloa is right now," Epstein told Business Insider.

As Epstein’s story describes, the Sinaloa cartel rose to prominence in part because of US and Mexican efforts to bring down the Arellano Félix Organization, efforts Guzmán and his associates assisted.

If, as Epstein details and as officials told Thompson, fighting the drug war requires shifting alliances between governments and whichever bad guy might be most helpful at that point in time, then the purported collaboration between the Mexican government and Guzmán may just be the latest partnership — one driven by political imperative rather than by a moral consideration.

"There’s no real fight against drugs," the Mexican intelligence official, who claimed to have recently overseen negotiations with Guzmán’s son, Alfredo, told Thompson. "It’s all a perverse game of interests."

SEE ALSO: Mexican soldiers occupied 'El Chapo' Guzmán's hometown, but they still don't know where he is

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how much El Chapo’s prison escape cost the infamous drug lord

In a fitting end to a prison escape that began with a plane flight to a mountainous hideout, fugitive Mexican drug lord and Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín "El Chapo"Guzmán was ushered onto a flight from Los Mochis in Sinaloa state to Mexico City with a towel draped over his head, as members of Mexico's military and security forces looked on.

Guzmán broke out of a prison in central Mexico on July 11, quickly slipping back into his cartel's traditional stronghold in northwest Mexico, an area known as the Golden Triangle for its extensive drug cultivation.

Once there, he and his henchmen eluded an intense manhunt for weeks before he was apprehended in a Friday-morning operation by Mexican marines.

The operation that finally caught Guzmán was undertaken with the assistance of US DEA agents and US Marshals, Reuters reported, citing a senior Mexican official.

Video of Guzmán being put on an airplane while under heavy guard, which was posted by a Mexican journalist, can be seen below.

The Sinaloa cartel boss was reportedly caught after a shootout between his men and Mexican marines in Los Mochis, in the northwest corner of Sinaloa state.

Mexican security forces had been scouring parts of Sinaloa and Durango states for weeks, reportedly spotting Guzmán several times and even forcing him into a chase that purportedly left him with a facial injury and a broken leg. 

Guzmán's recapture would seem to put an end to six months of torment for the Mexican government, which was embarrassed on an international scale when the cartel boss walked out of his cell, traveling through a mile-long, air-conditioned tunnel and emerging in a partially built house adjacent to the high-security prison where he was held.

The humiliation was double for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who not only hailed Guzmán's capture in 2014 as a victory for a security strategy focused on intelligence, but was revealed to have continued playing a game of dominoes aboard his presidential jet after learning that Guzmán had again escaped custody.

Guzmán's escort onto a plane mirrors his 2014 apprehension, when he was placed under heavy guard on a military helicopter, and soon thereafter jailed on a bevy of charges related to his organization's extensive drug-trafficking activities.

What comes next for Guzmán remains uncertain. While a court order issued in August cleared the way for Guzmán's extradition to the US, that order was overridden in October, when a Mexican judge extended the Sinaloa leader's exemption from being extradited.

Extradition is a thorny issue in Mexico. While many high-profile drug traffickers have been sent to the US for trial and imprisonment, some in Mexico regard the process as interference in domestic affairs.

In January 2015, when Guzmán was still in jail, then-Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam discounted the possibility that Guzmán would be shipped to the US anytime soon, saying the drug lord could be transferred after he served his time in Mexico — in "300-400 years" said Karam.

SEE ALSO: "We have seen a significant amount of deaths": Inside the brutal war on organized crime raging in Latin America

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NOW WATCH: Inside the cartel days of El Chapo — the drug lord who escaped from a Mexican prison six months ago

The infamous drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán has been arrested.

The Sinaloa Cartel leader had been on the run after escaping from a Mexican prison for the second time.

Produced by Lamar Salter

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Mexican officials said that captured drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán will be headed back to the same prison he escaped from last year, according to CNN.

In July 2015, Guzmán — known as the boss of the Sinaloa cartel — used a custom-built tunnel to escape from Altiplano prison, considered Mexico's most fortified. This was the fourth time the drug lord had escaped from confinement.

The 57-year-old Guzmán was captured Friday after a months-long manhunt involving Mexican marines, US Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and US Marshals.

As Guzmán faces multiple federal drug trafficking charges in both the US and Mexico, some American officials are calling for him to be extradited to the US, citing El Chapo's track record escaping from Mexican prisons.

"El Chapo has proven time and time again that Mexican prisons are no match for his network of criminals or his desire to escape prison," Rep. Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement.

"He needs to be brought to the United States where he faces multiple charges and where we know he will not be able to escape from incarceration. We cannot afford to allow this murderous kingpin to slip through the bonds of justice again."

SEE ALSO: Infamous drug kingpin 'El Chapo' has been caught

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NOW WATCH: EX-DEA AGENT: Trump’s border wall would 'serve no purpose’ in the war on drugs

In an exclusive interview with Rolling Stone published on Saturday night, recently recaptured kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán described to American actor Sean Penn his worldview and, in a video interview, defended his role in the international drug trade.

"... From the age of 15 and on, where I'm from ... In that area, and up until today, there are no job opportunities," Guzmán said in a clip of the interview posted with the story.

A video clip of what Penn describes as "the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room," can be seen below, with a visibly relaxed Guzmán sitting near a pickup truck on a ranch, responding to questions calmly, as roosters crow in the background.

Guzmán, believed to be about 60 years old, was born in the town of La Tuna, in the Badiraguato municipality of northwest Mexico's Sinaloa state.

His hometown is the heart of a region known as the Golden Triangle for its extensive cultivation of marijuana and opium, and that has long been a stronghold of the Sinaloa cartel, which, under Guzmán's leadership, has grown to be arguably the most powerful drug-trafficking organization on the planet.

"Well, it’s a reality, that drugs destroy. Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew up there was no other way and there still isn’t … a way to survive," Guzmán replied when the interviewer asks him about the impact drug use has on humanity.

Guzmán added that, as he sees it, there is no other way to make a living in the Mexican economy.

This viewpoint likely resonates with many of his countrymen, since, despite their country ascending to the status of second-largest economy in Latin America, many in Mexico subsist on wages so low that they violate standards set out in the constitution, according to one economist.

Guzmán also disputed the suggestion that he and his cartel are to blame for high rates of drug use and addition, arguing that, should he disappear from the scene, "it’s not going to decrease in any way."

Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel is far from the only organization supplying narcotics to the lucrative US market. But, if DEA maps released in late 2015 are accurate, his cartel has a market share that far exceeds any other organization bringing drugs into the US.

Guzmán's interview with Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo was reportedly conducted in person in October, with follow-ups by phone and messenger over the following weeks. 

Guzmán made it through the end of the year as a free man, but was apprehended on January 8 in the northwest corner of Sinaloa state, after a shootout between Mexican marines and several of his associates.

In the wake of his July escape, some observers doubted that Guzmán would survive his next encounter with Mexican authorities, suggesting that political considerations and Guzmán's own sense of self-preservation (that is, his desire to avoid a US jail) would prevent him from being captured alive.

For Guzmán, the matter was much more simple: "I think that if they find me, they’ll arrest me of course."

SEE ALSO: Video shows armed guards putting "El Chapo" Guzmán on a plane after his arrest

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NOW WATCH: Here's footage of El Chapo being escorted on a plane after being recaptured

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the powerful leader of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, was recaptured on January 8 in a town not far from where he was born in Sinaloa state.

While its leader appears to be out of commission yet again, the Sinaloa cartel is still arguably the largest drug-trafficking organization in the world, and the deep ties to Colombia it uses to influence the global cocaine trade have become more apparent over the last year.

According to a summer 2015 report fromColombian newspaper El Tiempo, the Sinaloa cartel controls 35% of the cocaine exported from Colombia — the largest producer of the drug in the world, which saw a 30% increase in potential-pure-cocaine production from 2013 to 2014, according to the DEA. DEA analysis also found that 90% of the cocaine consumed in the US was of Colombian origin.

Born in the mountains of Sinaloa state on Mexico’s west coast, Guzmán's cartel has expanded throughout the country and around the world over the last several decades.

According to Spanish newspaper El País, the cartel’s marijuana and poppy fields in Mexico cover more than 23,000 miles of land, an area larger than Costa Rica. It has operatives in at least 17 Mexican states and operations in up to 50 countries, Insight Crime reports.

In addition to its reported involvement in the heroin trade in the Middle East, it is active in Europe and in the US, where, according to the DEA in 2013, it supplied "80% of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine — with a street value of $3 billion — that floods the Chicago region each year."

The cartel is adept at sneaking the drug across borders and into the US. Cocaine has been found smuggled in frozen sharks, sprinkled on donuts, and crammed into cucumbers. The cartel is perhaps best known for the hundreds of elaborate smuggling tunnels it has built (the most recent allowing its boss to escape prison).

Sinaloa’s second-in-command, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, reportedly directs the cartel’s Colombian business dealings through two Mexicans based in the country, “Jairo Ortiz” and “Montiel” — both aliases.

'Lacoste,' 'Apple,' and 'Made in Colombia'

Documents from police and security forces seen by El Tiempo indicate the Sinaloa cartel works closely with criminal groups and guerrilla forces to run a trafficking network that exports more than one-third of the cocaine produced in Colombia.

Through an unidentified businessman, the Sinaloa cartel works with the criminal organization Los Urabeños, which was formed by remnants of right-wing paramilitaries in the mid-2000s, according to Colombia Reports.

This unidentified businessman works with Los Urabeños, its leader Dario Antonio Úsuga, and the cartel to coordinate shipments of drug cargos, labeled “Lacoste,” “Apple,” and “Made in Colombia,” to destinations in Europe and Asia, according to El Tiempo.

Los Urabeños, aka Clan Úsuga, is regarded as the most powerful of Colombia's remaining criminal organizations and is the only one with a truly national reach.

Many of the Pacific and Caribbean smuggling routes are controlled by Los Urabeños, and its influence is so extensive that, between 2014 and 2015, 600 Colombian officials had been jailed for supporting the group.

The Sinaloa cartel has also formed an alliance with the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The FARC began peace negotiations with the government in late 2012 (negotiations that have yielded historic results) and agreed to suspend drug trafficking as a part of the talks. Sinaloa then began franchising drug operations from FARC rebels, allowing the cartel to expand its reach into the production stages of the cocaine trade.

The Mexican cartel reportedly works with two FARC leaders in southern Colombia and pays as much as $40,000 per shipment for cocaine that leaves the Pacific coast departments of Nariño and Cauca.

The Sinaloa cartel also works with “La Empresa,” a criminal group based in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura, to direct shipments. La Empresa has, according to Colombia Reports, allied with Colombian criminal group “Los Rastrojos” (with whom the Sinaloa cartel has also aligned) to fight off the Pacific-coast expansion of Los Urabeños.

(La Empresa, El Tiempo notes, has been linked to the “casas de pique” — buildings in outlying areas of Buenaventura used to torture and dismember rival gang members.)

The Sinaloa cartel has also provided weapons and financing to the Oficina de Envigado, a Medellin-based crime syndicate that assumed much of Pablo Escobar’s operations after his death in 1993.

Sinaloa “retained the services of ‘La Oficina’ to support drug trafficking around the world,” the US Treasury Department has said.

According to El Tiempo, “the FARC, ‘los Úsuga,’ and ‘la Empresa’ are keys in Sinaloa's strategy to control eight ports on the Pacific, from Mexico to Peru.”

“In Colombia, [the Sinaloa cartel] already directs 50% of the drugs that leave from [the ports of] Tumaco, Buenaventura, and el Urabá, which form a network with ports in Peru (El Callao and Talara), Ecuador (Esmeraldas and San Lorenzo) and Guatemala,” according to intelligence documents seen by El Tiempo.

Drugs are shipped by fastboat from Colombia, primarily to Guatemala's Puerto Quetzal, which handles almost all of the cocaine coming out of Colombia. The Mexico/Central America corridor handles 87% of the cocaine that reaches the US, according to the DEA.

A kilo of cocaine that reaches Guatemala is worth $10,000, according to El Tiempo. The price hovers around $12,000 to $15,000 at the US border, and a kilo can sell in the low six figures once it reaches the US. (Sinaloa and other cartels typically rely on US-based gangs for most retail-level drug distribution.)

'A possible refuge'

The panoply of ties that the Sinaloa cartel has built throughout the Western Hemisphere led many to believe that Guzmán could seek “a possible refuge” in Colombia. (Local forces also went on high alert in November, when it was reported that he may have been in Argentina, where the cartel gets precursor chemicals for synthetic drugs.)

In fact, on July 19, just eight days after Guzmán rode to freedom on a motorcycle through a mile-long, air-conditioned underground tunnel in central Mexico, El Tiempo reported that officials from the DEA and FBI had requested "all available information on the movements, personnel, and contacts of the Sinaloa cartel in the country."

In the six months prior to Guzmán's escape, the Mexican army captured nearly 2,800 kilos of cocaine — a 340% increase over the same period in 2014. The increase in seizures comes despite UN reports indicating that drug cultivation and trading in Colombia had stabilized.

The hunt for Guzmán also drew in several officials from Colombia itself. In late July, El Tiempo reported that three retired Colombian generals and six active police officials were headed north to assist with the search.

The Colombian generals — two former heads of the national police and the former chief of the now disbanded secret service/intelligence agency — were selected because of their roles in a similar mission: The effort to bring down the Cali cartel and Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel — two of the Colombian drug-trafficking organizations that ran roughshod over Colombian society in 1980s and 1990s.

The generals, who a Colombian police source called the “most effective three musketeers the country has against the narcos,” left Mexico in early August.

But, according to Michael Lohmuller at Insight Crime, whatever advice they left behind may have been of limited use in the search for Guzmán. The 22 years since the controversial killing of Escobar have seen marked advancements in the operations, sophistication, and evasiveness of drug cartels.

Moreover, modern-day Colombian police have failed to catch their country’s own most wanted kingpin: Dario Antonio Úsuga — the head of Los Urabeños and Guzmán’s ally.

SEE ALSO: These DEA maps show that "El Chapo" Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel controls almost the entire US drug market

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NOW WATCH: Inside the dangerous life of Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo'

Mexicans were still processing the news through the weekend that their government had recaptured the world's top drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in a pre-dawn shootout and chase on Friday (January 8).

Guzman has been returned to the same Altiplano prison he escaped from six months ago, in a boost for the beleaguered government.

The movie-like saga that has seen Chapo returned to the government was even aided by an interview conducted by Hollywood star Sean Penn late last year which helped Mexico's government catch the fugitive.

Reaction on the Mexican street to the recapture runs the gamut, from those living by the Altiplano prison located outside Mexico CIty who fear his return will only result in more violence, to his legions of supporters throughout the country who see Guzman as a Robin Hood figure and wish he remained at large.

The head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel was captured in a car wearing a filthy vest after fleeing through tunnels and drains from a raid on a safe house in the city of Los Mochis, in his native northwestern state of Sinaloa.

"Mission accomplished: We have him," President Enrique Pena Nieto said on his Twitter account. "I want to inform all Mexicans that Joaquin Guzman Loera has been arrested."

For Pena Nieto, the capture of a trafficker who twice slipped out of Mexican prisons is a sorely-needed victory after his presidency was tarnished by graft and human rights scandals and the shame of the kingpin's flight from the maximum security Altiplano prison in July.

It also provides relief to US-Mexico relations, strained by suspicion of high-level collusion given the apparent ease with which Guzman gave Mexican authorities the slip after the United States requested his extradition.

Guzman now faces possible extradition to face trial in the United States. That process could take months, although US Republican party presidential hopeful Marco Rubio was among those calling for Washington to immediately pursue extradition.

Residents of Almoloya where the the Altiplano prison is located have already noted an uptick in security as the government tries to save face.

"Well, yes there's been a little more security. There are more reserves in the area. From before to after, you are just seeing more security," said Almoloya resident, Francisco Eleuterio.

Once featured in the Forbes list of billionaires, Guzman led a cartel that has smuggled billions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States and fought vicious turf wars with other Mexican gangs.

He was caught early on Friday after Mexican marines raided his safe house, killing five and capturing six of Guzman's henchman. They pursued the drug lord through the northern city's drains and caught him after a car chase through the outskirts, Attorney General Arely Gomez said.

He was flown to Mexico City and later transferred in a naval helicopter back to the Altiplano.

Many neighbours of the prison are simply freightened.

"Of course. Because he will bring more shootouts. Yes, and it's frightened my niece in Jilotepec who says there have been shootings," said area resident, Francisca.

Guzman, whose nickname means "Shorty," first escaped prison in 2001 by bribing prison officials, and went on to dominate the world of Mexican drug trafficking.

He was recaptured by Pena Nieto's government in 2014 but escaped in July by capitalising on the drug-tunneling skills his cartel honed on the US border. A mile-long tunnel equipped with electric lights, rails and a motorbike came out directly into the shower of his prison cell and he simply slipped away.

The escape heaped embarrassment on Pena Nieto, who had resisted a US request to extradite Guzman and had said previously that an escape would be "unforgivable."

His recapture on Friday involved Mexican marines, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and US Marshals, a senior Mexican police source and a US source said.

After stopping his getaway car, the Marines took Guzman and waited for reinforcements at Hotel Doux, a love motel on the outskirts of town that rents out rooms by the hour.

Los Mochis residents described gunfire and explosions from about 3:30 a.m. (0930 GMT).

Many in the area wish he hadn't been caught.

"My respect for 'El Chapo,' well my respect for all, in all truth, if it was up to me he wouldn't have been captured," said Laura Sanchez in Los Mochis.

Chapo has been recognised for providing opportunities for Mexico's rural poor.

Others simply admire his ability to torment the Mexican state.

"A very intelligent person. That's my opinion of him, because he has known how to manage things in his work," said Eduardo Rubio.

Believed to be 58 years old, 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.

After Guzman's first prison break, violence began to creep up in Mexico. The situation deteriorated during the 2006-2012 presidency of Pena Nieto's conservative predecessor Felipe Calderon, when nearly 70,000 people lost their lives in gang-related mayhem.

After he managed to outmaneuver, outfight or out-bribe his rivals to stay at the top of the business for over a decade, some security experts see in Guzman's capture new hope for Mexico.

SEE ALSO: Infamous drug kingpin 'El Chapo' has been caught

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NOW WATCH: Inside the cartel days of El Chapo — the drug lord who escaped from a Mexican prison six months ago

In this excerpt from El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, journalist Ioan Grillo explains Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera's relationship with federal agents.

The Sinaloan cartel of Chapo Guzmán and Mayo Zambada, they say, became emboldened by an alliance with federal officials to attempt a takeover of all of Mexico's trafficking supported by federal troops.

Chapo Guzmán then helped arrest his rivals, such as the Beard's brother Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, whom soldiers nabbed in Culiacán on January 21, 2008.

In reaction, the afflicted capos hit back against federal forces because they were working with Chapo.

This accusation was put out on hundreds of messages, or narcomantas, written on blankets and dangled from bridges.

A typical note, hung up in Juarez, said:

"This letter is for citizens so that they know that the federal government protects Chapo Guzmán, who is responsible for the massacre of innocent people ... Chapo Guzmán is protected by the National Action Party since Vicente Fox, who came in and set him free. The deal is still on today ... Why do they massacre innocent people? We invited the government to attack all the cartels."

The government decries such accusations as the scrawling of ignorant gangsters who don't even sign their names. [Then president Felipe] Calderón urged the media not to reprint such narco propaganda. And as I have said, no solid evidence links Calderón to the Sinaloa cartel.

But there is certainly evidence that some federal officials supported Chapo Guzmán's offensive. Toward the end of 2008, a government probe code-named Operation Clean House uncovered a network of twenty-five federal officals on the payroll of the Sinola Cartel.

\Among them were soldiers, federal police commanders, and detectives.

However, contrary to the conspiracy theory, evidence suggests that some of these federal forces worked with Chapo Guzmán's rivals.

As part of the same cleanup operation, police arrested fifty agents allegedly working for the Beard Beltrán Leyva.

As I have said, I prefer the cock-up theory to the conspiracy theory.

Calderón may be honest, but he declared war on drug cartels with a rotten state apparatus, one that he could not fully control.

Behind his push, police and soldiers hit gangsters harder than ever before, but these enforcers were still susceptible to bribes.

As a result, Calderón's offensive just threw oil onto the fire.

Drug violence had steadily been rising since 2004. And like water over a flame, this violence finally came to the boil.

Republished with permission from El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency by Ioan Grillo. Copyright © 2011 by Ioan Grillo. Reprinted by arrangement with Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved.

SEE ALSO: 'El Chapo' heads the largest drug cartel in the world — and practically ran the prisons that held him

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NOW WATCH: Here's the actual security footage of 'El Chapo' escaping from his prison cell

Joaquín Guzmán Loera wasn’t the only major organized crime figured captured Friday in Los Mochis. His chief of sicarios — the cartel’s main hitman — was also taken in by elements from the Mexican Navy.

His name is Iván Gastelum Cruz, also known as El Cholo Iván, and he was also a fugitive. Gastelum had escaped from prison in 2009 by using a party taking place inside a state prison as a diversion. And he stayed on the loose until Friday.

He was a hitman, a killer. In fact he was in charge of all the Sinaloa Cartel’s killers.

Like El Chapo, Gastelum is something of a legend in narco circles. The group Enigma Norteño immemorialized him in song, with a part of a corrido in his honor going, “Snitches are never forgiven here, because traitors cannot be tolerated . . . He goes by another nickname, el Cholo Iván.”

But Gastelum is no romantic figure. He is in charge of murders for the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in the hemisphere, the Sinaloa Cartel.

Gastelum was caught the first time in 2005. Ten firearms were found in his possession at the time. The investigation was carried out poorly, however, and el Cholo Iván was released by a court order.

But in 2008, he was arrested again, this time after an armed confrontation with soldiers.

He spent a year in prison. Then, on Aug. 9, 2009, he escaped.

The hunt for him was vigorous, and carried out mostly in Sinaloa. He was spotted at least three times, and in 2010, 2014 and 2015 there were firefights as authorities tried to move in on him.

Each time, it was thought he was injured. But each time he escaped.

In 2013, narco-banners began to be displayed in various parts of Sinaloa, accusing the Army of having killed Susana Flores who had won the Miss Sinaloa crown in 2012. Susana and Iván were a couple. The banners are assumed to be the work of El Cholo.

Gastelum Cruz remained a fugitive until Friday (Jan. 8). He was targeted in the same raid on a Los Mochis home as El Chapo, tried to escape in the same underground drainage system as El Chapo, and soon caught in the same stolen car.

Gastelum’s capture may is not as much of an image-booster for the Mexican government as El Chapo’s, but it is a significant a blow to the Sinaloa organization.

SEE ALSO: Mexico has started the process to extradite 'El Chapo' to the US

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NOW WATCH: Here’s footage from the Sean Penn interview that helped Mexican forces recapture El Chapo

Mexico's government is moving Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman constantly from cell to cell inside the maximum security prison where he is being held, the same lockup the elusive drug lord escaped from through a tunnel six months ago.

Government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said Guzman has been moved eight times at the Altiplano prison after he was recaptured Friday.

The prison also now has 24-hour video surveillance of Guzman including all parts of his cell.

The cell from which he escaped in July had a blind spot around the shower, which officials at the time was intended to protect inmates' privacy.

"He is being changed from cell to cell without a pattern... he is only spending hours or a couple of days in the same cell," Sanchez said late Tuesday night.

July's escape was Guzman's second from a maximum security prison and it deeply embarrassed the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto. It also created friction with Washington, which had sought his extradition to the United States.

This time around, Mexican officials have said they are willing to extradite Guzman but warn the process could take a year. In the meantime, they appear to be taking extraordinary measure to prevent a third escape.

"Since he arrived, he has been in eight different cells," Sanchez said of Guzman's time in prison.

Guzman's recapture followed the most intensive manhunt in modern Mexican history, with at least 2,500 security and intelligence agents dedicated to getting him.

The government says the hunt involved piecing together information from intelligence, data, interrogations and raids — as well as monitoring actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo as they came to interview the world's most wanted trafficker.

Federal officials who were not authorized to be quoted by name said that a significant part of the 2,500-strong force hunting the drug lord were soldiers sent into the mountains where he was hiding, to set up a security perimeter.

While Penn expressed surprise that a soldier at a checkpoint allowed his vehicle through on the way to the meeting with Guzman in October, one of the officials said that action had proved "very useful" in the hunt, suggesting it was part of the plan.

While Mexican authorities had spent decades chasing Guzman, the chase following his July escape from a top-security prison was different for two reasons, said a former government intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the case.

"One, El Chapo stopped being clandestine. He left the mountain. He met with people, as we now know. That made it easier for intelligence units to find him," said the ex-official, who maintains sources inside security operations. "The other factor: there were, from the time of the escape, 2,500 people from various security agencies exclusively dedicated ... to mount a successful operation."

Even so, it took six months to catch him, with Mexican news media carrying repeated reports of marine raids into the mountains of Guzman's native Sinaloa state.

Guzman was nabbed early Friday morning after a shootout in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one marine.

The former official interviewed Guzman when he was arrested the first time in 1993 and led operations over the years in the remote mountains of Sinaloa and Durango states, known as the Golden Triangle, after Guzman first escaped a maximum security facility in 2001.

He said the size of those operations involved only around 60 troops, not hundreds.

"It was obviously expensive, but they knew they had to flush Chapo Guzman out," said Michael Vigil, former head of international operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, who also was briefed on the operation. "The only way was by saturating the area where he was.

"It caused him to go to a safe house in Los Mochis. He knew that was going to make him vulnerable, but he had no choice.

Every phone call or text, every movement in the region was analyzed, the ex-official said, including Guzman's Oct. 2 meeting with Penn and del Castillo.

He and Vigil said that Del Castillo's phone calls, texts and other communications must have been monitored since she had her first real contact with Guzman last year, while he was still in prison. Everyone wanted to tell his story, but he said he would only work with the Mexican actress, who the ex-official called "Mexico's Sharon Stone."

"The movie was secondary. The first motivation was meeting Kate del Castillo and striking a relationship there," Vigil said, citing intelligence sources. One of the federal officials confirmed that Guzman appeared to be infatuated with Del Castillo, apparently referring to her by the code name "Hermosa," or "Beautiful."

Four days after Penn's Oct. 2 interview, soldiers staged fierce operations in the area of Tamazula, Durango, where the meeting with Penn and Del Castillo took place. The ex-official said it took that time to put together the intelligence and mount a raid.

In the end, Guzman narrowly escaped.

Security teams had kept watch on several properties related to Guzman in and around Los Mochis since October, he said.

But it was only last week that they started noticing a flurry of activity in one of the houses in an upscale neighborhood. Intelligence indicated that Guzman's wife, Emma Coronel, had arrived with their twin daughters to celebrate the Feast of the Three Kings, a major Christmas-season holiday for Mexican children.

The timing wasn't an accident, the ex-official said. Holidays and birthdays are the best times to catch suspects.

"They try to be with family, and intelligence units take advantage of these contacts to find out where they are," he said.

In the end, the ex-official attributed Guzman's capture to the drug lord "losing his footing."

When they first met, Guzman was a mid-level capo without the folk hero image he has today. He was cautious and humble, addressing authorities in the most formal manner of speech. He could barely write, but is very intelligent, the ex-official said.

Today, the official said, he sees a man who let his ego take over.

Authorities found DVD's of Del Castillo's series, "The Queen of the South," in which she plays a drug lord, when they raided his Los Mochis home. Both Penn and the government said Guzman hoped to arrange his own movie.

"He fell in love with his own legend," the ex-official said.

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NOW WATCH: IAN BREMMER: Greece is headed for a humanitarian disaster

Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán has been captured, but his story is far from over. Ioan Grillo, author of "Gangster Warlords," sheds light on what's next for the fallen leader of the world's largest drug cartel.

Produced by Eames Yates

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It’s hard to tell from recent headlines, but El Chapo Guzmán was just one of three capos who have been running the Sinaloa Cartel.

But there’s something about the third one, El Azul, that sets him apart from El Chapo and El Mayo: He might be dead.

Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, alias El Azul, has been in prison three times for drug-related convictions.

Each time he secured his release through legal means, serving portions of two sentences and completing a third.

With each release, he has resumed his drug-trafficking career, growing more and more powerful.

Today, El Azul is the third member of the triumvirate that runs the Sinaloa Cartel. The other two are Joaquín Guzmán, alias El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada, alias El Mayo.

Esparragoza is probably the least known of the three, but the Mexican and US governments know very well who he is. The US State Department and Justice Department recognize his influence in the the state of Sinaloa and Jalisco, and are well aware of his ability to move marijuana, meth, and cocaine, thanks to his connection with organizations in Colombia and Peru.

He is wanted by both governments, and is considered one of the most powerful drug lords in the world.

That is, assuming he’s alive.

Rumors of his death have circulated since 2014. He was said to have suffered a heart attack. When José Juan Esparragoza Jiménez was arrested in 2015, he identified himself as the son of “the late Juan José  Esparragoza Moreno.”

But no authority has been able to confirm El Azul’s death.  He remains, officially, a wanted man, though his name was recently removed from Mexico’s most-wanted list.

We know, however, that his financial operator, Mauricio Sánchez Garza, is alive. He was arrested by the Federal Attorney General`s Office (PGR) on Wednesday (Jan. 13) on money-laundering charges.

Esparragoza is known in the narco world as a conciliator, the guy who calms tensions between warring drug gangs. His biggest diplomatic achievement was organizing the summit meeting that put an end to the violent dispute among the Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana and Gulf Cartels. During the 1990s and 2000s, US authorities went so far as to dub him “The Peacemaker.”

But he’s more commonly known as El Azul. It is said that the nickname stuck because of the tone of his dark skin, though it’s more dark purple than blue.

Career moves

It is thought that El Azul was born on Feb. 3 1949, though March 2 is also given as his birthday. His birth took place in Juixiopa, a community of 500 inhabitants that is part of the municipality of Baadiraguato, Sinaloa.

El Azul’s criminal career began just as El Mayo’s did — under the wing of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the “Lord of the Skies” (he used a lot of airplanes to move drugs) who ran the Juárez Cartel until his death in 1997. Through Carrillo Fuentes he became close to such top narcos as Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero.

Those connections served him well when, shortly after he got out of prison in 1993, he played a key role in forming “La Federación,” the alliance that united the Sinaloa and Juárez Cartels.  El Azul was with Juárez before Sinaloa.

Carrillo Fuentes’ death in 1997 ended the formal alliance, but the friendly ties between Juárez and Sinaloa continued. In 2001, the year of El Chapo’s first prison escape, La Federación was resurrected, only to fall apart again three years later. By that time, El Chapo, El Mayo and EL Azul were entrenched as the co-capos of Sinaloa.

Juan José Esparragoza shares with Joaquín Guzmán the distinction of having been put behind bars three times. El Azul’s three imprisonments, however, were from three different convictions.

His first arrest took place in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, in 1970. He had 700 kilos of marijuana in his possession. He served nine months of a five-year sentence, before being released when his conviction was appealed and overturned.

By 1983, his business was based in Mexicali, Baja California. It was there that he was arrested for the second time in March of 1983. Newspaper reports from that time indicated that Esparragoza tried to bribe the judicial police that captured him with 7 million pesos in cash.

He stayed behind bars for only three months before he was released for lack of evidence.

Three years later, in 1986, El Azul was arrested in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City.

This time, things got more serious. The PGR confiscated a number of his properties in the states of Querétaro, Jalisco and Sinaloa. His bank accounts were frozen. He served six years of his seven-year sentence in the Reclusorio Sur prison and the rest in the Altiplano prison in Almoloya, State of Mexico, his partner El Chapo’s current address.

He walked out of jail in 1993, age 44. His most productive years in crime were still ahead of him.

El Azul used his trafficking profits to build a business empire that includes housing units, a shopping mall and an industrial park. The “legit businesses,” considered a money-laundering network by US and Mexican authorities, are operated by members of his organization and family, including his wife María Guadalupe Gastelum Payán and Brenda Guadalupe, Cristian Iván, Juan Ignacio and Nadia Patricia Esparragoza Gastelum.

It was in connection to these business ventures that Sánchez Garza was arrested Wednesday.

Among the Sinaloa Cartel triumvirate, there’s a continuum in terms of publicity. El Chapo seems to like attention, while El Mayo is much more circumspect. El Azul is the shyest of the three. You never hear from him, and not much of him. The fact that authorities aren’t sure if he’s alive or not says a lot about how low his profile is.

“While other Mexican drug traffickers have attracted — and sometimes sought — more attention, Esparragoza Moreno has deliberately maintained a low profile, hoping to avoid scrutiny while he increases his influence and his ill-gotten gains,” said Adam J. Szubin, director of the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, in 2012.

The strategy seems to have worked. Dead or alive, El Azul has stayed clear of authorities for more than two decades.

SEE ALSO: Step inside 'El Chapo' Guzmán's secret hideout

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NOW WATCH: El Chapo was sending flirty texts to a Mexican TV star before he got captured

The highly secretive, daylong law enforcement operation around the Arizona border with Mexico resulted in the arrest of two dozen alleged high-level Mexican drug cartel members, according to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

The sting known as Mexican Operation Diablo Express took place all of Friday as numerous law enforcement agencies converged onto Lukeville, Arizona, which sits on the border with Mexico.

Homeland Security Investigations, a unit of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, helped Mexican authorities nab 24 alleged members of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico's biggest drug-trafficking organizations, who were operating around Sonoyta, Mexico, and the US border, spokeswoman Gillian M. Christensen said.

The DEA, FBI, Customs and Border Protection and Arizona state and local agencies were on hand to assist.

"The targeted Sinaloa cell has been responsible for the importation of millions of pounds of illegal drugs, including marijuana, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, into the United States from Mexico during its existence. The organization is also responsible for the smuggling of millions of dollars in US currency, along with weapons, into Mexico," Christensen said in a statement.

The operation was conducted "with utmost secrecy" and took all day Friday as numerous law enforcement officers worked in both Lukeville and Sonoyta, bordering cities that are on the route to the Puerto Peñasco, the popular beach destination many Americans know as Rocky Point.

ICE helped Mexican federal police into the US to keep them safe during the operation, Christensen said.

The sting also netted the seizure of several assault-type weapons and hundreds of pounds of drugs.

"ICE applauds the Government of Mexico for their bold action in taking down this criminal organization and for their continued pressure on the Sinaloa Cartel throughout Mexico," Christensen said.

The arrests are the latest blow to the Sinaloa Cartel after the arrest of drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán on Jan. 8, six months after he tunneled out of a top-security Mexican prison for the second time.

The Mexican government says it is cooperating with an extradition request for Guzman from the US.

The 24 people arrested on Friday have not been identified. They are in the custody of Mexican authorities, and the US will seek extradition.

SEE ALSO: Here's what may happen next to recently captured drug lord "El Chapo" Guzmán and his powerful Sinaloa cartel

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NOW WATCH: Forget 'El Chapo' — this is Mexico's most powerful drug lord

One of the Sinaloa cartel's highest-ranking woman operatives was arrested in the cartel's home turf of Culiacan on Tuesday.

Guadalupe Fernández Valencia, 55, also known as "La Patrona," served as a lieutenant for one of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's sons and has been indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking.

In November, she was designated a "Foreign Narcotics Kingpin" by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), which said she was "originally from Michoacán, [and] moves both drugs and money for the Sinaloa Cartel."

Fernández, is "responsible for importing large quantities of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana from Mexico into the United States," according to a statement from Mexico's National Defense Commission, cited by Vice News.

The statement added that she had been arrested in 1998 and imprisoned in California before returning to drug-trafficking.

Fernández is one of the Sinaloa cartel's top-ranked women, José Carlos Cisneros, an academic who has investigated the role of women in Mexican cartels, told Vice News. She will be held in federal prison in Mexico until authorities there decide how her case will go forward, according to the statement from the National Defense Commission.

Her arrest comes just a month after that of "El Chapo" Guzmán himself, who is also awaiting possible extradition to the US, though he is reportedly already trying to negotiate the terms of his imprisonment in the US.

SEE ALSO: How a Colombian family allegedly helped "El Chapo" Guzmán dominate the global cocaine trade

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NOW WATCH: This is how Mexican drug cartels make billions selling drugs

Jailed Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is experiencing harsh treatment from authorities at Mexico’s high-security Altiplano prison, said attorney Juan Pablo Badillo, according to El Universal.

Guzmán is being “physically and mentally tortured” by prison officials, who are not permitting the kingpin — a two-time escapee — to sleep peacefully, Badillo added.

“I am loudly awakened every two hours at night. They are turning me into a zombie, they do not let me sleep,” Badillo, quoting Guzmán, said during an interview with Ciro Gómez Leyva of Radio Fórmula.

Badillo also said his client’s right to counsel had been violated.

“The Constitution states that inmates are entitled to have as many lawyers as they want,” Badillo said, “and to have direct communication to address the issues necessary for their defense.”

The lawyer added that officials at Altiplano have only been permitting Guzmán to see one lawyer a week for about a half an hour.

Badillo said the roughly 25 minutes he had to speak with Guzmán on Monday were “insufficient to address so many issues,” according to El Universal.

'Some of those weaknesses are still there'

After Guzmán was recaptured on January 8, reports that he was being sent back to Altiplano prison, which he escaped from in July 2015, were met with some consternation. However, prison authorities have beefed up security for their returning occupant.

New security measures include placing steel bars in cell floors, putting Guzmán in an isolated part of the prison, increasing the number of security cameras, and, as Badillo mentioned, moving the drug lord to different cells.

"He is being changed from cell to cell without a pattern ... he is only spending hours or a couple of days in the same cell," government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said in mid-January, just a few days after Guzmán was reapprehended in northwestern Sinaloa state.

New security procedures are likely to stymie the Sinaloa chief’s efforts to break out again, though, as some have noted, many of the failings that allowed his July escape were of personnel, not just of policy.

“Right now, El Chapo is subjected to draconian prison conditions. He's under really, really tight surveillance,” said El Daily Post editor Alejandro Hope at a panel discussion on Mexican security at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

“It should be remembered,” Hope stressed, “some of the structural weaknesses of the Mexican prison system are still there … one of the persons that is being prosecuted for his escape was the head of the federal-prison system."

"This was not just El Altiplano," added Hope. "This was systemic. And I think some of those weaknesses are still there.”

‘These guys … have rights, technically’

Moreover, the array of harsh security measures deployed against Guzmán to keep him from escaping may give him more ammunition for legal injunctions in his fight against the extradition process.

Guzmán’s legal team has already filed several such injunctions, and won one to force authorities to stop what Badillo described as “pestering actions” against Guzmán.

Given Guzmán’s reputation and resources, it is little surprise that prison officials have such stringent procedures to guard him. But it should also be little surprise that the kingpin has seized on these procedures to gain legal advantage.

“These guys have strong legal defenses,” University of San Diego professor and Wilson Center fellow David Shirk said during the same Wilson Center panel. “And they have rights, technically.”

SEE ALSO: 'El Chapo' Guzmán is willing to plead guilty in the US, but under one big condition

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NOW WATCH: Forget 'El Chapo' — this is Mexico's most powerful drug lord

The once secretive Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán has launched a public-relations blitz, calling on his lawyers and even his common-law wife to keep his name in the news.

Emma Coronel, mother of Guzmán's twin 4-year-old daughters, has given unprecedented media interviews, issuing dire warnings about his health and pressuring the government to improve the conditions he endures his third time behind bars.

His lawyers have gathered the media at Mexico's supreme court and outside the White House in Washington.

On Friday, one of Guzmán's lawyers called a news conference outside the maximum-security Altiplano prison where he's being held — where he says the guards and security measures are turning him into a "zombie"— and which he escaped from through a mile-long tunnel in July.

Wearing an "Extradition Never!!!" sweatshirt emblazoned with a photo of his client, attorney Jose Luis Gonzalez Meza said he planned to begin a hunger strike — water and juice allowed. He called on Mexicans to join him.

'Grasping at straws'

Analysts say the publicity is all part of a carefully planned media strategy.

At the very least, Guzmán hopes to negotiate the terms of his imprisonment in the US, should moves to extradite him succeed.

Another Guzmán attorney, Jose Refugio Rodriguez, says that the drug lord wants to be sent to the US quickly and negotiate a guilty plea in exchange for a "reasonable" sentence in a medium-security prison in the US.

Samuel Logan of the business and security-consulting firm Southern Pulse said he doesn't believe the effort will work.

"El Chapo's folks are grasping at straws," he said. "I doubt the US will negotiate on any level."

The PR campaign has featured Guzmán's common-law wife, a former beauty queen, giving her first public interview ever in February.

Conservatively dressed and poised throughout her conversation with Telemundo, Coronel painted an image of "El Chapo" as a loving family man. She was careful to suggest his innocence, or at least not confirm his guilt.

"I'm not certain that he traffics drugs," she said.

Guzmán's American daughter has also defended her father, and implicated the Mexican government in his cartel's operations as well as her father's escape from prison last summer.

“My dad’s escape was an agreement,” she told Rory Carroll of The Guardian in an exclusive interview.

'I think people are just tired of having him around'

Guzmán's attorneys have publicly expressed concern for his health and criticized his treatment while jailed.

"How long is his body going to tolerate this state of stress that he's submitted to?" Rodriguez said last month after a 30-minute visit at Altiplano prison with Guzmán. "If this doesn't stop, he is going to get sick and his life is at great risk."

Outside the prison Friday, Bernarda Guzmán Loera, who said she was one of the drug lord's sisters, said his family was "very worried."

The drug lord's lawyers have filed several requests for injunctions in Mexican courts to stop his extradition. Rodriguez said Wednesday they won't drop those efforts until they get an agreement with US prosecutors, an unrealistic scenario.

Things were a lot different for Guzmán the last time he was in prison, after being captured the second time in 2014. Mexico's then-attorney general said the drug chieftain would only be extradited to the US "in 300 or 400 years" after serving his Mexican sentence.

In a recent court filing shared by his lawyers, Guzmán described a relatively permissive environment with plenty of access by outside visitors and some freedom to move around.

"Half a year ago I was in this place and had a daily visit of an hour and a half with my defense attorney," Guzmán said in the filing, plus "a four-hour family visit every nine days and a four-hour intimate (conjugal) visit every nine days, a daily hour on the patio to go out and walk in the sun."

Raul Benitez, a security specialist who teaches political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said during that earlier imprisonment authorities "did not violate his human rights, quite the opposite. They practically let him open an office in the prison to run his businesses."

But then "El Chapo" pulled off a brazen escape, coolly stepping into a hole in the floor of his prison-cell shower and whizzing to freedom on a motorcycle modified to run on tracks laid the length of the tunnel.

President Enrique Pena Nieto was embarrassed by the escape in July, Guzmán's second from a maximum-security prison.

The first escape was in January 2001 from a prison in Jalisco state. After Guzmán was recaptured in January of this year, Pena Nieto said the drug lord would be extradited.

Now Guzmán's visits with his lawyer and his wife are shorter and chaperoned. Guzmán complains that frequent bed checks, barking dogs, and regular prison racket keep him from sleeping and drive his blood pressure to dangerous levels.

National Security Commissioner Renato Sales has denied Guzmán's claims that authorities are violating his rights.

"Shouldn't someone who twice escaped from maximum security prisons be subject to special security measures? The common sense answer is 'yes,'" Sales said.

Now, Logan said, "the politics are against him."

"Any backroom deals that he may have cut before are rendered null now that he escaped and embarrassed" Pena Nieto, he added. "He's a king in his own fiefdom in the interior of Sinaloa (state), but nationwide I think people are just tired of having him around."

SEE ALSO: "El Chapo" is behind bars, but his cartel still dominates global cocaine trafficking — here's how they do it

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NOW WATCH: Forget 'El Chapo' — this is Mexico's most powerful drug lord

The Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel — one of Mexico's strongest and fastest-growing criminal organizations — is moving into Baja California, just across the border from the US, according to an official from the Mexican attorney general's office.

It seems increasingly likely that the CJNG, as the cartel is known, is challenging the powerful Sinaloa cartel for control of drug-smuggling territory there.

The announcement from Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez, the head of the kidnapping unit within the Mexican attorney general's office, came after the apprehension of Marco Tulio Carrillo Grande, a former Tijuana policeman who was believed to be working as the head of the Sinaloa cartel's hit men in Baja California.

Carrillo Grande is suspected of organizing deadly attacks on both the Jalisco cartel and the Arellano Felix organization, two organizations with which the Sinaloa cartel is vying for control of the Tijuana plaza, or trafficking territory.

Carrillo Grande "is identified as responsible for coordinating the aggressions of the criminal organization to which he belonged against a rival group with which [Carrillo Grande's organization] is disputing the Baja California zone, which has provoked the current spiral of violence in that region,"Ramírez Gutiérrez said during a press conference.

Underworld alliances

Ramírez Gutiérrez's comments about a possible inter-cartel turf war are "the highest-profile claim yet made by a Mexican official placing CJNG in Baja California,"according to Insight Crime, and come after reports earlier this year that escalating violence in Tijuana was related to cartel competition over territory.

“Nueva Generacion does not have a significant physical presence in [Baja California, where Tijuana is located], but has focused on forging alliances with members of the Tijuana underworld in a challenge to the Sinaloa cartel,” Daniel de la Rosa, the public safety secretary in Baja California, told Sandra Dibble of the San Diego Union-Tribune in late February.

Tijuana’s homicide rate has jumped from 28 per 100,000 residents in 2012 to 39 per 100,000 in 2015, which made it the 35th-most-violent city in the world that year, according to a Mexican think tank.

Drug-related homicides were more than 536 of the city’s 670 homicides last year. Moreover, Dibble reports, 71 homicides in January were the most the city has seen in the first month of the year since 2010.

State officials were confident that the rise in killings (which has occurred alongside a drop in other common crimes) is the result of organized criminal activity — and of CJNG’s ambitions.

Violence has gone "up because a third group" that had not previously been in the city "is in the process of becoming established," the state’s deputy attorney general for organized crime, José María Gonzalez, told Dibble.

'There's the sense that … they're fighting'

The Sinaloa cartel — thought to be the most powerful trafficking organization in the world— and the Arellano Felix organization have competed for control over the Tijuana plaza for most of the last 20 years, with the Sinaloa cartel dominant for much of that time.

The arrival of the CJNG — one of North America's major meth traffickers— on the scene in the northwest Mexican city has the potential to increase the bloodshed, as the recent months have shown.

A relative newcomer on Mexico's narco scene, the CJNG emerged around 2010, reportedly from the remnants of a trafficking organization headed by Ignacio Coronel, an ally of Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel (and reportedly Guzmán’s current wife’s uncle) in Jalisco state in southwest Mexico.

Since then, the CJNG has established itself as one of the most fearsome cartels in Mexico, seizing control of much of southwest Jalisco state, corrupting many police forces, and engaging federal and military forces in bloody shootouts.

There have been rumors that CJNG and Sinaloa have cooperated to some extent. After Guzmán’s escape from prison in July, it was reported that CJNG had helped finance his escape.

While it has been hard to parse exactly what kind of relationship exists between the CJNG and Sinaloa cartels, rumors of CJNG expansion in to Sinaloa territory may be the latest development in a trend toward open conflict.

“It was usually thought they were collaborators, that Jalisco was a junior partner with Sinaloa,"said Alejandro Hope, the security and justice editor for El Daily Post, during a discussion at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in late January.

"But more increasingly there's the sense that they're rivals, and that … they're fighting, at least in some areas.”

SEE ALSO: An overlooked effect of Mexico's drug violence is holding back its economy in a major way

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