The first attempt to arrest Ovidio Guzman, in 2019, ended in a fiasco. Despite the violent assaults led by members of his cartel, the military managed to intercept the drug trafficker.
interim (Mexico, Correspondence)
For the second time in three years, Culiacan, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, has become a blaze. At dawn, Thursday, January 5, armed men from the Sinaloa cartel attacked civil airport and the air base, blocked the highways, and set fire to dozens of vehicles to sabotage the capture of Ovidio Guzman Lopez , one of the sons of the famous drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera.
This time, however, the chaos strategy did not work: while the criminals devastated the city, Ovidio Guzman was evacuated in a Boeing 737 from the army to the Military Camp No. 1 in Mexico City, a thousand kilometers from Sinaloa. He was transferred to the maximum security prison El Altiplano, from which his father had escaped spectacular in 2015.
armored pick-up
The Mexican government could not repeat the error made on October 17, 2019, during a first arrest of the same Guzman in Culiacan. Mally planned and executed, the military operation had ended in a fiasco killing eight. The men of the drug trafficker had surrounded the soldiers who held their leader, taken hostage from the soldiers, burnt down from the cars, had 51 prison prisoners escaped, and threatened to transform the city into a war zone. President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, “Amlo”, had then personally ordered Guzman’s release to avoid a “bloodbath”. In the army, this failed operation, called “Culiacanazo” – the “Culiacan coup” – by the press, left a deep feeling of humiliation and significantly shaken its image.
At around 4:40 a.m. Thursday, January 5, the soldiers intercepted Guzman while he was traveling in a armored pick-up convoy to Jesus Maria, a locality located about twenty kilometers north de Culiacan and close to Badiraguato, a historic bastion of the Sinaloa cartel. After an exchange of gunshots, the criminal was stopped and transported without delay to the airport.
Groups of heavily armed men then swept over Culiacan and its surroundings aboard vans and SUVs. They blocked 19 avenues from the city with fire vehicles, closed the main highway axes, and attacked civil and military airports in order to prevent planes from taking off. Projectiles were visible on the hull of the aircraft in which Ovidio Guzman was transferred to Mexico, and a civilian plane of the Aeromexico company had to stop an emergency takeoff after being reached by a ball, terrorizing the passengers at the interior. Shops have been ransacked, and intense clashes between soldiers and armed civilians broke out in the deserted streets, with the use of combat helicopters.
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