As a prelude to Mexico’s national holiday on September 16, the government is organizing an exceptional lottery on Wednesday: the house of drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, better known as “El Chapo” is among the prizes. Seemingly unremarkable, this mansion located in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa, and whose value does not exceed 155,000 euros, is not just a white house with two bedrooms. It has an extravagant detail: a tunnel, which leads from the bathroom and which, on February 16, 2014, had allowed Joaquin Guzmán to escape half-naked as Mexican security forces forced open the door to capture him.
This that day, Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficker, on the run since 2001, escapes again … before being arrested a few days later in a nearby seaside resort.
A CNN reporter was able to visit the house in 2014 before the tunnel was sealed:
For 250 pesos, only 10 euros, lottery ticket price, this house can be won on Wednesday. But without its tunnel, whose entrance was covered with a concrete screed by the Mexican authorities.
How to explain that goods confiscated by the Mexican justice end up in a lottery organized on the occasion of the national holiday? The answer is almost disappointing: because the government has failed to sell them at the traditional auctions. This has been a practice for a very long time in Mexico: property seized by the courts, whether luxury cars, private jets, boats, jewelry or narco-palaces, are sold at auction. several times a year.
In the past, these operations took place in relative discretion, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador decided to publicize them and make them a symbol of the fight against corruption. He renamed the official body in charge of the auctions “the Institute for the return of the goods stolen from the people”, a thunderous name which in reality hides some fiascos, like the failed sale of the presidential plane last year.
Among the other prizes of this “narco-lottery”, as the media have called it, a 20-seat box in the Aztec stadium in Mexico City, to attend Club América matches until 2065. But the jackpot is without no doubt the house that belonged to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a drug lord nicknamed “the Lord of Heaven” because he has long ruled the drug trade to the United States thanks to his fleet of planes. This huge house in a southern district of Mexico City has a much higher value than “El Chapo”, over three million euros, and is much more coveted by lottery participants. It is also linked to the fact that few Mexicans aspire to win the house of “El Chapo” for fear of reprisals from members of his cartel who have remained loyal to him.