PHOTOGRAPH BY EDUARDO VERDUGO / AP

Mexico’s most secure prison, Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 1, is home to the country’s most violent narcotraffickers. Altiplano, as the prison is known, is located in central Mexico, not far from Toluca. The surrounding air space is a no-fly zone, to prevent an escape by helicopter. So that prisoners cannot communicate by cell phone with the outside, the airwaves are restricted. Nobody had ever escaped from the facility, until last night.

At 8:52 P.M., Altiplano’s surveillance cameras captured the prison’s most famous inmate, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug baron known as “El Chapo,” as he entered the shower area. Guzmán had lived in Altiplano since last February, when he was captured by Mexican authorities in the resort town of Mazatlan. (I wrote an account of that operation, “The Hunt for El Chapo,” last year.) Before his capture, following an escape from another secure prison in 2001, Guzmán had been on the run for thirteen years.

Or maybe not “on the run,” exactly. Guzmán had enjoyed a degree of impunity during his years at large, operating out of a series of mountain hideouts in his home state of Sinaloa. He got married, had children, enjoyed meals at restaurants, and continued to manage, and dramatically expand, his multi-billion-dollar narcotics business. After his arrest in Mazatlan, American authorities, citing the earlier escape, pushed to have Guzmán extradited to the United States. But their Mexican counterparts were offended at the suggestion that having finally caught up with the world’s most-wanted fugitive, they might just turn him over to the Gringos. Instead, the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that Guzmán would face justice for his crimes in Mexico. Peña Nieto’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, joked that he would be happy to extradite Guzmán to the U.S.—“in three hundred or four hundred years.”

When I was reporting my story in 2014, the Mexican officials I spoke with were contemptuous of any suggestion that Guzmán might be allowed to escape again. This was a matter of Mexico’s national credibility, they assured me: with the world watching, they would never permit Guzmán to embarrass the country a second time. When I met with Eduardo Medina Mora, a former attorney general who until this year was Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, he said with an unflappable smile, “Once bitten, twice shy.”

Medina Mora and others insisted that Mexico’s institutions of criminal justice had improved dramatically since Guzmán’s earlier escape, and that the prosecution of someone who had once seemed so untouchable would represent an important benchmark for rule of law in the country—a sort of proof of concept.

But worrisome stories began to trickle out of Altiplano. There were reports in the Mexican press last July that Chapo had organized hundreds of inmates in a hunger strike over the conditions of their confinement. A Mexican official laughed off this story when I asked about it, maintaining that Chapo was being held “in isolation.” But it was not hard to believe that the drug lord might cultivate a following behind bars. (I also couldn’t help noticing that while Chapo, who is a bit of a gourmand, may have spurred other inmates to swear off food, he was not reported to be declining meals himself.)

In April, it emerged that Guzmán’s lawyers had employed a ruse involving a phony birth certificate to sneak a woman into Altiplano for an unauthorized visit. The nature of the visit remains unclear, but some speculated, given Guzmán’s reputation as an inveterate womanizer, that it was conjugal. During his previous stint in prison he played host to the occasional busload of prostitutes. In June, it was reported that the young woman who visited Guzmán happens to be a politician with Mexico’s National Action Party. (She has said that she is not Guzmán’s girlfriend.)

Several of Guzmán’s children maintain an active presence on Twitter. On May 8, his son Ivan wrote in a tweet, in a possible reference to his father,“I promise you, the general will soon be back.” Six days ago, he tweeted, “Everything comes to those who know how to wait.”

After the cameras clocked him entering the shower last night, Chapo did not re-appear. Details are still emerging about the nature of the escape, but, at a press conference this morning, Mexico’s Commissioner of Public Security, Monte Alejandro Rubido, announced that Guzmán had entered a tunnel, which appears to have started inside the shower in his cell. In the tunnel, he hopped onto a motorcycle that was specially modified to run on rails, and escaped. Chapo is not one to dig his own tunnels, and according to Rubido, this passage was an industrial feat. It featured lighting and ventilation, and extended 1.5 kilometers to a house outside the prison walls. By the time authorities searched the house, Guzmán had vanished.

That this escape involved a tunnel is shocking but not surprising. Chapo, famously, has a thing for tunnels: he invented the narco tunnel, decades ago, and his cartel has dug hundreds of these passages under the U.S.-Mexico border to transport drugs. When Mexican marines raided the Culiacan safe house where he was holed up last February, Guzmán narrowly escaped by plunging into a secret tunnel that was hidden beneath a bathtub. As a drug trafficker, Guzmán has always been nimble and innovative. But in escaping from prison a second time, he opted not to devise some out-of-the-box new stratagem, but to stick with his predictable, and effective, M.O.

By this morning, helicopters were scouring the countryside, Toluca airport had reportedly been shut down, and masked commandoes were halting vehicles on roadways. President Peña Nieto is in France on a state visit, and, in an embarrassing development, a rather sizeable fraction of Mexico’s federal government appears to have come along for the ride. (His entourage for the visit includes more than three hundred people.) If his government can scramble the necessary resources in the coming hours, they may be able to capture Guzmán before he gets back to the safety of the mountains in Sinaloa—but I wouldn’t bet on it. After Guzmán’s last escape, it was revealed that he had corrupted the entire infrastructure of the prison that was holding him. Seventy-one members of the staff were subsequently charged with complicity, including the warden. When I spoke with one Mexican official this morning, he acknowledged the obvious: “Anyone who makes a mile-long tunnel from his cell and escapes on a motorcycle is necessarily in collusion with the government.” Who in the government? How many were they? How senior? As El Universal put it: “everyone is under suspicion.”

A few weeks ago, Ted Conover wrote a piece for the Times about the manhunt for two inmates who escaped from a prison in upstate New York. Conover, who once worked as a prison guard, described the “allure” of the prison escape: a jail break is a kind of math problem, and when we read about these incidents there is a tendency to marvel at the ingenuity on display and to start identifying with, and even rooting for, the escapee. This is probably only natural. Chapo is hardly the first anti-hero to seize the popular imagination, and the most reliable formula of the Hollywood thriller is to place your protagonist in a situation from which there is no escape, and then watch while he escapes.

But for all of Chapo’s undeniable chutzpah, this drama turns, in the end, on something sad and prosaic: the almighty power of the bribe. During his last stretch on the lam, Guzmán ran an organization that was responsible for tens of thousands of murders—each one a specific tragedy for the bereaved. If a man like that can buy his freedom in Mexico today, then there is nothing in the country that is not for sale.