“WE PREFER a grave in Colombia to jail in the United States.” That was the slogan of Los Extraditables, a group of 1980s drug lords who mounted a campaign of violence to get Colombia to ban extradition. At home they could run their businesses from behind bars until they escaped or bribed a judge into releasing them. A prison sentence abroad, they feared, meant doing real hard time.
Mexico’s chief extraditable was Joaquín El Chapo (Shorty) Guzmán, the world’s richest trafficker. After his capture in 2014, American officials lobbied in vain for him to be sent to the United States: he had already snuck out of a Mexican jail once. Now that he has fled again, the Americans must settle for saying “I told you so.”
El Chapo’s was not the only recent high-profile jailbreak. A month earlier, two murderers left a maximum-security facility via a steam pipe—in upstate New York. Other daring escapees of recent vintage include the “Texas Seven”, who bludgeoned and connived their way out of prison in 2000, and Kenneth Conley, who rappelled...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Lmg4nL
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