
New unreleased videos show the first hours of the arrest of notorious drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who, among other things, is washing his face, being questioned by Mexican authorities and insisting that his cartel will not launch a rescue operation to free him.
Mexican newspaper El Universal published four videos showing "El Chapo" shortly after he and his bodyguard, Orso Ivan "El Cholo Iván" Gastelum, were captured after emerging from a sewer manhole on January 8, 2016.
The video offers a rare glimpse of the cartel boss shortly after his capture and before his extradition to the US.
In one video, El Chapo can be heard asking for soap.
Then he asks the policeman: "Won't it bother my eyes?"
"You better not get it in your eyes," the policeman replied, before telling him he had permission to remove his mud-stained T-shirt.
Fearing that members of the Sinaloa cartel would try to track them down, police officers took the two arrested men to a hotel, waiting for reinforcements to arrive before transferring them to a military hangar in Mexico City.
In a second video, a despondent and handcuffed El Chapo was seen sitting in the back of a vehicle and answering "No" when asked if he had been mistreated.
Upon arriving in Mexico City, El Chapo was interrogated by the military and admitted that he had "dedicated himself to cannabis cultivation, trafficking since he was a child, but not to theft," according to the video.
Most strikingly, in the third video, the Sinaloa cartel co-founder assured the military that his team of hitmen had been warned not to launch a rescue operation if captured. "I don't like people who fight the government," El Chapo said.
"I told them, this has an end, if one day I fail, I don't want them to fight any policemen, at all. No, there will be no fight, at all. I'm sure there will be no fight," he says in the video.
El Chapo's line of thinking was in stark contrast to the tactics used by his criminal organization on October 17, 2019, when cartel members set up roadblocks, burned vehicles, and carried out a military offensive to secure the release of his son.
Ovidio Guzmán López was briefly detained at his home in Culiacan, Sinaloa, as part of an extradition request from the US before then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered his release.
In the fourth video, El Chapo and Gastelum are seen sitting on a plane with their heads covered. El Chapo was extradited to the United States on January 19, 2017, and was sentenced by a federal court in Brooklyn on February 12, 2019, to life in prison. He is currently being held at ADX Florence, a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado.