El Chapo Case Draws Mexico Closer to U.S.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico has started letting American agents carry guns on its soil. A special Mexican unit trained by Americans has been revived after stalling because of mistrust and a sense of national pride. American agents are working with Mexican soldiers to seize guns, and the two nations just agreed on a plan to tackle the heroin epidemic.
Even before Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous drug trafficker known as El Chapo, tunneled out of Mexico’s most secure prison over the summer, the Mexican government had begun rebuilding its strained relationship with the United States. But the drug lord’s stunning escape shrank that distance even more, creating a sense of shared urgency that had not existed in years.
“It has been complicated in the past,” said John Kirby, the State Department spokesman. “But more and more, we’re finding common ground and common cause.”
On the run, Joaquín Guzmán Loera hoped to make a movie, but his plan led to his capture, officials said.
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Mr. Guzmán managed to evade one of the largest manhunts in Mexican history for nearly six months before being recaptured on Friday — and even then, he almost escaped again. He slipped out of a heavily defended compound as Mexican soldiers barreled in before dawn, ducking into an escape route hidden behind a closet and sneaking into the sewers before he was finally caught, officials said
But long before Mr. Guzmán’s embarrassing escapes, the Mexican government had been under pressure to do more against drug violence and impunity.
A jump in homicides last year, including the deaths of eight soldiers after a little-known gang fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a government helicopter, made President Enrique Peña Nieto’s policy of keeping the Americans at arm’s length on security matters much harder to uphold, especially given his plummeting approval ratings.
In particular, the unexplained disappearance of 43 students at a teachers college riled the nation and made international headlines, drawing ire and scrutiny of the president’s attempts to switch the conversation to economics and away from security.
“On the security side, there was initially a nationalistic movement to reset the agenda in Mexico’s terms,” a former American official said. “But it shifted to one of greater pragmatism because the risk of getting it wrong was simply too high.”
Shortly after Mr. Peña Nieto came to office in 2012, Mexican and American officials say, there was a shock within his administration’s ranks at how deeply their predecessors were collaborating with the Americans, including the use of American drones and manned surveillance flights over Mexican soil to track suspects.
“To some extent, they were horrified when they got into office,” a current senior American official said. “It was like: ‘Wow, the Americans are really into everything. Not just in our bedroom, but ruffling through our underwear drawer.’ ”
Instead of focusing on security, catching kingpins and intercepting drugs, Mr. Peña Nieto wanted to make trade and economics the priority. His administration pushed changes in the energy and telecommunications spheres meant to mirror the free-market efforts of its neighbor to the north. At the same time, there was a sudden halt to the level of security cooperation that had existed under his predecessor, Felipe Calderón.
Mr. Peña Nieto’s government, uncomfortable with what it saw as American agents and officials interacting with its people at every level, demanded that all information sharing and collaboration be centralized, choking off lines of coordination with American law enforcement agencies.
His government suspended a Mexican unit trained by American agents. It stopped allowing local and state officials to use an American database of illicit firearms, even though 70 percent of the guns confiscated in Mexico came from the United States, according to a report issued Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
From the beginning, Mexican and American officials say, the Mexican attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, made it clear to his American counterparts that there would be a severe drop in extraditions to the United States.
Mexico was rebuilding its judicial system, Mr. Murillo Karam told several American officials, and drug lords and others should pay for crimes committed in Mexico inside the Mexican system. Extraditions to the United States dropped by nearly half.
“There was a deep frustration with the direction things were heading,” said the senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official did not have the authority to talk to reporters.
But violent crimes, initially down during the Peña Nieto administration, began to climb again. The strategy of smashing cartels and targeting gang leaders was causing them to fracture into more deadly and unpredictable gangs. Violence engulfed parts of the country.
In meetings with government officials, Mexican businesses began complaining about Mr. Peña Nieto’s strategy of ignoring the security problem and keeping the Americans at bay.
“The titans of Mexican business were saying to government officials that they better get a handle on the security situation or their economic reform would be a footnote,” the American official said.
Mexican officials also recalled hearing that the constant negative news was affecting not only the country’s reputation, but also its businesses.
Last February, Mr. Peña Nieto swapped out his attorney general, Mr. Murillo Karam, who had boasted that Mexico would hold onto Mr. Guzmán in Mexican prisons for “some 300, 400 years” before it ever consented to extraditing him to the United States.
In his place, the president put a former senator, Arely Gómez González. Mexican and American officials said that Mr. Peña Nieto had instructed Ms. Gómez to fix the relationship with the Americans, and that she had set to work doing just that.
She met with the American attorney general, Loretta E. Lynch, in an effort to reset the troubled ties. American and Mexican officials say it worked. Paperwork to extradite Mr. Guzmán, which had been collecting dust while Mr. Murillo Karam was in office, was sent to Mexico.
But only weeks later, Mr. Guzmán escaped by slipping through a hole in the shower of his cell, which led to a mile-long tunnel 30 feet below ground. It was the second time he had escaped a Mexican prison, humiliating the president and causing him to further rethink the relationship with the United States.
“The big trigger for the sea change was the second escape of El Chapo during this administration,” a former high-ranking Mexican official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the government.
American officials shared intelligence with their Mexican counterparts, who took the lead on the hunt. Though initially reluctant to accept the offers of help, the Mexican government quickly conceded, and the two nations began working together once more.
Mexico soon sent several other top suspects to the United States, breaking with the stance that holding them in Mexican prisons would demonstrate the country’s sovereignty. And once Mr. Guzmán was recaptured, Mexico announced almost immediately that it would extradite him, too.
Cooperation has increased on a number of other fronts, according to R. Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of United States Customs and Border Protection.
Mr. Kerlikowske, who was the White House drug czar from 2009 until taking over the border patrol agency in 2014, said that despite the stumbles after Mr. Peña Nieto was elected, the relationship had begun improving long before El Chapo’s escape.
He pointed to a legal change the Mexican government made last year that will permit American agents to carry sidearms on Mexican soil. Mr. Kerlikowske said that an American customs facility in Mexico would be his agency’s first use of that new arrangement, which is aimed at speeding up trade.
Officials in Mexico still resent America’s direct role in the violence here. As the new Government Accountability Office report makes clear, the guns that Mexican cartels get from the United States are shipped through the same routes and tactics that traffickers use to smuggle cash and drugs across the border.
But after the friction of previous years, joint efforts between the two countries “have been bolstered and are gaining momentum,” the report found. Meetings to share information have started up again, it said. Information is flowing more freely. The Mexican unit trained by Americans has been rekindled. But that newfound spirit of cooperation is hardly universal, officials warned. While both sides were eager to catch Mr. Guzmán, that is far from true in every case.
“If it’s someone they also want you to look at, the doors fly open and the cooperation is amazing,” said another senior American official. “If not, we get the same stonewalling.”
Reporting was contributed by Charlie Savage and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Washington, Paulina Villegas and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City, Damien Cave from New York, and Frances Robles from Miami.
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