MEXICO CITY— The northern Mexico prison where authorities suddenly transferred convicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is rated as the worst in the federal penitentiary system for inmate conditions and other factors, according to the government’s own reporting.
The Cefereso No. 9 facility on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, which borders El Paso, Texas, did score well on “conditions of governability,” perhaps an indication that authorities believe they can control Guzman’s environment there and limit the risk of him pulling off a third brazen jailbreak.
But Michael Vigil, the former head of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, questioned the logic of sending Guzman to a less-secure prison that’s in territory firmly controlled by “El Chapo’s” Sinaloa cartel after it emerged victorious from a war with the Juarez cartel in recent years.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Vigil said Sunday. “He has that part of his empire, he has the infrastructure there and he has people who would assist him in terms of engineering him another escape.”
A 2015 report by the governmental National Human Rights Commission gave the Juarez prison an overall 6.63 rating on a scale of 0 to 10, the lowest for any of Mexico’s 21 federal prisons. By comparison, the maximum-security Altiplano facility near Mexico City where Guzman was confined before was 10th best with a rating of 7.32.
Altiplano is considered the country’s highest-security prison, and many had thought it to be unescapable. That belief was shattered in July 2015 when Guzman fled the facility through a sophisticated, mile-long tunnel that accomplices dug to the shower in his cell, complete with a motorcycle modified to run on rails laid down in the passage.
