Mexican authorities recount Chapo hunt in epic video

Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman wanted to make a biopic about himself. Instead, authorities produced their own revealing video about his Hollywood-like recapture.
The attorney general's office released on Wednesday a 19-minute documentary-like video with somber background music, 3D animation and a man's baritone voice narrating the investigation that led to his arrest earlier this month.

The video opens with the Altiplano maximum-security prison in central Mexico from where Guzman, 58, escaped in July and ends with images of him back at the penitentiary.

An animation reconstructs the moment he slipped down a hole in his cell shower and rode a carriage pushed by a motorcycle mounted on rails inside a 1.5 kilometer (one-mile) tunnel.

The video shows never-before-seen images of the moment Guzman and his security chief, Jorge Ivan Gastelum, alias "Cholo Ivan," steal a white car while fleeing a military manhunt in the seaside city of Los Mochis, in his northwestern home state of Sinaloa.

The epic video did have a mistake, however, as the narrator said Guzman was captured on January 9, instead of the 8th, prompting the attorney general's office to release a new, corrected version.

Guzman and Gastelum are then seen in a room with white-robed forensic investigators checking their identities. They take Guzman's fingerprints and a blood sample from his ringfinger before he signs a document.

In another image, the Sinaloa drug cartel leader is seated across from a desk and a laptop in a room where he is told that he faces a process to be extradited to the United States. This time, his hair and famous mustache are shaved off.

"The government will continue working to give peace and tranquility to every Mexican and will redouble its efforts to combat criminal organizations," the deep voice says amid images of President Enrique Pena Nieto, whose government had been deeply embarrassed by Guzman's second escape from prison.

Authorities say Guzman met Mexican-American actress Kate del Castillo and US actor Sean Penn in the hope of making a film about his life while he was on the lam in October.

But it was the attorney general's office that got the ending it wanted.

The video finishes with Guzman's mugshot, with the word "Captured" in thick red letters over his face.

Source: AFP