The whereabouts of Joaquin Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo? Unclear. His accomplices? Not sure. How long it took to build the tunnel, and how much it cost? For that, there are only estimates.
One is this: More than a year and at least $1 million.
“Listen, it’s a black market for these things,” said Walter Lopez, president of the College of Civil Engineers in Sinaloa, Guzman’s home state. “Getting it exact is impossible.”
His back-of-the-envelope estimate, for instance, did not include the cost of the land where Guzman emerged from the tunnel, or the unfinished house erected over the exit. What Lopez is certain of is that, however it happened, an engineer was probably involved in some phase of the process.
From both ends of the tunnel used to spirit Guzman away, the precision beggars the imagination. From a semiconstructed building in the middle of a cornfield into the bathroom floor of his cell in the Altiplano prison, its length is greater than a mile.
To accommodate the undulations of the land, the workers burrowed more than 30 feet beneath the surface. To ferry some 4 tons of earth displaced by the dig, they used a motorcycle on rails. To light their way, and the eventual passage of their patron, they equipped the tunnel with lighting. They even used ventilation shafts, and tested the air quality with a small bird.
“This was highly technical and accurate,” said one civil engineer working for the government, who asked not to be named because he was not permitted to speak publicly about the escape. “If they had missed the calculation by 1 degree, or made one little mistake, Chapo would have emerged in someone’s kitchen”
Who provided those skills to the operation, for now at least, also remains a mystery.
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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