While NPR’s Carrie Kahn talked Thursday morning about the shame many Mexicans feel at their government’s inability to keep the world’s top narco locked up, elsewhere on the globe people are having a comedic field day with the latest escape of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
A Taiwanese animated comedy station, Next Media Animation TV, made this hilarious parody of Guzmán’s seemingly piece-of-cake escape through a hatch poking up into his shower and leading into a mile-long ventilated tunnel tricked out for a motorcycle on rails.
Note: “El Chapo” means “shorty,” and Guzmán is considered one of the most rich and powerful humans on earth, hence the animators’ depiction of Guzmán as a miniature-sized, suit-wearing (even in jail) monarch.
Despite the outrageousness of Guzmán’s escape, some U.S. media outlets have taken pains to note the apparently tight security of the Altiplano prison from which the drug lord disappeared. This is what The New York Times reported after joining a tour of the prison that the Mexican government offered to journalists earlier this week:
It might seem odd for the government to offer a group of journalists a guided tour of the maximum-security prison where Mr. Guzmán outfoxed his captors. But the motive became apparent the further the tour delved: to show the extraordinary skill and determination required for such a maneuver. The layers of security were reminiscent of prisons in the United States.
As we’ve reported, Guzmán is the king of tunnels. U.S. law enforcement officials along the U.S.-Mexico border say he’s built dozens of them — right under their noses — to shuttle drugs on their last leg of the journey to U.S. markets.
At the Altiplano prison where Guzmán’s people built their latest engineering masterpiece, top prison officials have been fired amid suspicions that guards helped him escape.
There’s one more, small creature that also apparently helped El Chapo escape: Mexican officials discovered a dead bird in the trash can of the drug lord’s cell, the Times reported. They suspect the bird was used to test the air quality in the tunnel.
The deceased has been nicknamed “Chapito.”
