Hidden Tunnel Used By El Chapo As Marines Opened Fire To Get Him

Los Mochis, Mexico:  A mirror inside a closet concealed the last tunnel that Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman used to flee as marines battled his henchmen before his recapture.

The house in Los Mochis, a northwestern seaside city in Guzman’s native Sinaloa state, bears the scars of Friday’s fierce pre-dawn gunfight, with dried blood on the floors.

A video released by the government shows the marines firing their assault rifles and tossing smoke grenades before entering the rooms.

One troop was wounded and was on the ground. “Stay calm, buddy,” one marine told him.

As they moved inside, they arrested one man. They screamed at a woman who was hiding in a bathroom, asking her where the kingpin was. “I don’t know, sir,” she answered.

When the dust settled, five gunmen were dead, one marine wounded and six suspects detained.

The 58-year-old kingpin, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. His security chief, Orso Ivan Gastelum, was also missing.

Dvds And Lingerie

The marines frantically searched the house.

In one bedroom, three DVDs of the TV series “La Reina del Sur” were on a bed. The star of the show about a drug queen is Kate del Castillo, the Mexican actress who brokered the notorious October meeting between Guzman and US actor Sean Penn.

The authorities found out about the clandestine meeting and nearly caught Guzman in early October. They eventually tracked him down in Los Mochis, where he arrived on the eve of the raid.
 

Screen grab from a handout video taken on January 8, 2016 and released by the Mexican Navy showing marines assaulting a house during the operation to recapture Mexico’s most wanted drug kingpin, Joaquin “El Chapo Guzman” Guzman. (AFP Photo)

The shrapnel from stun grenades was still in the main room when reporters were allowed to tour the house on Monday. Food was rotting in the kitchen. Authorities said food had been ordered for 13 people on the eve of the raid.

Dried blood stains were splattered in the entrance and another room of the white house.

On the second floor, there were three bedrooms, including one with evidence that a woman slept there, including lace lingerie, makeup and a hairdryer on the ground.

The top floor had a patio with more bullet holes. “Guzman’s gunmen tried to flee through here,” an official from the attorney general’s office said.

Final tunnel

Suspecting that Guzman had fitted the home with a tunnel, the soldiers scoured the house. They moved the refrigerator, which had bullet holes, but no tunnel was there.

“Since we know that his modus operandi is tunnels, the soldiers moved the fridge to see if there was one back there,” the official said.

Their suspicions were justified since he used a 1.5 kilometer (one-mile) tunnel to secretly flee prison in July. Meanwhile, he had an escape hatch into drainage systems in his home in another Sinaloa city.

The 20-meter long passage leads to a steel hatch door, which officials said opens to the city’s storm drain system. (AFP Photo)

In Los Mochis, the drug lord’s last underground escape route was in a bedroom where the bed’s mattress was nearly on the ground and men’s clothing was strewn about the floor.

Inside the closet, a mirror opened into the tunnel. The wall was covered with bullet impacts.

Metal steps led down to the subterranean passage, which was about two meters (6.6 feet) high and one meter (3.3 feet) wide with concrete walls and lights.

The floor was covered with belt-high water, while a dead snake was spotted.

The 20-meter long passage leads to a steel hatch door, which officials said opens to the city’s storm drain system.

Guzman and Gastelum fled through the drainage network for about one kilometer (half a mile) until they finally popped out of a manhole.

They stole a car but were finally intercepted by the marines, flown to Mexico City and taken to the same maximum-security prison that Guzman escaped from six months ago, from which he now faces extradition to the United States.

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The Next Big Thing? ‘Fat Studies’ Courses, Fat Awareness Groups Spread Across …

Described as an “emerging academic field” that focuses on combating “weightism,” “fat stigma,” and the “weight based oppression” of fat people, “fat studies” courses are popping up on college campuses across the country.

Typically found in women and gender studies departments, fat studies courses don’t study obesity as a leading cause of death in America but rather approach fatness as a “social justice” issue, and usually focus on “fat liberation” movements and activism as ways to combat the “stigma” attached to obesity.

During the winter 2016 term (happening now), Oregon State University is offering a three-credit course simply titled “Fat Studies.” According to the university website, the course “Frames weight-based oppression as a social justice issue, exploring forms of activism used to counter weightism perpetuated throughout various societal institutions.”

Fat studies courses typically advocate against the position that obesity is unhealthy or undesirable, instead calling for understanding and acceptance. One such course offered by the University of Maryland College Park, singles out dieting as a “special enemy” that must be defeated. The syllabus for “Introduction To Fat Studies” states that the field of fat studies “is not concerned with the eradication of fatness, but with offering a sustained critique of anti-fat sentiment, discrimination, and policy.” Reading material for that course included reading something called the “Fat Liberation Manifesto.” Similarly, Willamette University offered a fat studies class this past fall titled “Fat!: The science, culture, and politics of weight.” According to the university website, the course “takes the perspective of the growing field of fat studies—an approach that asks us to suspend the dominant culture’s often reflexive and moralistic negative judgments about fat.” A PowerPoint presentation from the course consistently discourages weight loss and denies that being fat is unhealthy.

Over in Boston, Tufts University is offering a fat studies course this spring titled “Fatness: Body Politics in Modern America.” “Using theoretical lenses such as feminism, queer studies, and ethnicity studies, this course will explore social, cultural, and political considerations and constructions of fat bodies, and how lived experiences are mediated and informed by body size,” the course description reads.

Dickinson College, a private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, is offering a fat studies course this winter that “introduces students to an emerging academic field, Fat Studies.” The course description claims that students taking the course “will examine the development of fat stigma and the ways it intersects with gendered, racial, ethnic and class constructions…students will become familiar with the wide range of activists whose work has challenged fat stigma and developed alternative models of health and beauty.”

It’s not just the university employees, either: students are joining the fight against “weightism” too. At the University of New Hampshire, for example, students formed a university organization titled “People Opposing Weightism (POW!).” The goal of the organization, according to the university website, “is to spread education, acceptance, and awareness of people of size. We will allow a safe space for people to talk about the issues related to weightism. We will create events that will help people to think about weightism and fatphobia.”

A tumblr page apparently belonging to the student group features dozens of pictures of clearly obese women, some of whom are only wearing lingerie or swimsuits; one picture shows an obese black woman standing in the middle of an intersection wearing nothing but a pair of white heels.The tumblr page includes a description of the group: “We are a new organization forming at the University of New Hampshire. We’re here to educate and spread awareness about weightism and empower fat people and people of size. Everyone deserves to love their bodies. #UNHFatAcceptance #POW_UNH.”

The UNH website actually advertises an internship position for People Opposing Weightism, with a job description that reads “Address issues related to weight bias, fatphobia and body-policing; size diversity; the promotion of the Health At Every Size (HAES) philosophy; and civil and human rights for people of all sizes.”

Follow Peter Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson

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