White House blocked DEA plan to kill ‘El Chapo’
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- Published on Friday, 06 September 2013 11:45
- Written by Duncan Tucker
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the billionaire boss of the Sinaloa Federation, has proved an elusive figure since escaping from Jalisco’s maximum-security Puente Grande prison in 2001. Yet the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) knew his whereabouts “on any given day” in recent years and even drew up a plan for his assassination which was eventually rejected by the Barack Obama administration, according to leaked reports from Stratfor, a U.S.-based global intelligence firm.
A series of Stratfor memos published by WikiLeaks in 2012 suggest that the White House refused to sanction the assassination of Guzman, Mexico’s most wanted criminal, under “moral” grounds. The leaked emails, dating from 2007 to 2011, were sent by Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence and its leading expert on Mexico’s drug war.
Burton suggests that the DEA’s plan to kill Guzman was first formulated under the George Bush administration, which was apparently in favor of the operation.