The transformation of the house on the corner of Río Quelite street and Jiquilpan boulevard, in the affluent Las Palmas quarter of Los Mochis on Mexico’s Pacific coast, intrigued the neighbours.

A Mormon couple who had lived there sold and left about two years ago, leaving it in the hands of an unknown buyer who did not move in but started making changes.

Workmen planted six olive trees on the pavements lining both sides of the property, pretty additions to a neighbourhood of low, one-storey buildings. The trees grew a thick canopy, obscuring views of the house.

Then the workmen gutted and remodelled the inside and built high walls, painted white, on which they mounted cameras. A satellite dish sprouted over the roof. And still, for a year, it remained empty.

Then a few weeks ago a flurry of activity – cleaners. “They were getting it ready,” said Alejandro Gómez, 54, who has lived in Las Palmas for two decades. Residents were suspicious, he said. “We thought maybe it was for kidnappers. We never imagined it was for El Señor.”

El Señor – also known as as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, the world’s biggest and richest criminal syndicate.

The remodelling, it emerged on Monday, included a ground-floor dressing room with a mirror concealing a secret doorway leading to a tunnel and the city’s drains.

El Chapo felt safe enough here to move in last week. As he and the world now know, it was not safe: Mexican marines stormed the property on Friday, killing five guards and capturing the drug lord after a chase through drains and streets.

Two questions hover over Mexico. Why did Guzmán abandon his rural redoubt to come to this house in Los Mochis? And what happens next in the so-called drug war? Answering the first could shed light on the second.

After escaping from the Altiplano maximum-security jail near Mexico City last July, Guzmán found sanctuary in the “golden triangle”, a swath of mountain and jungle – and marijuana and opium cultivation – straddling the northern states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua.

From here he had risen from childhood poverty up the narco ranks to head his own cartel, spinning a web of cocaine shipments, profits and corruption. Remoteness, hordes of gunmen and support from the community, which relied on his patronage, provided formidable protection.

It saved him even after the actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo inadvertently helped lead authorities to his lair last October. On Monday El Universal published surveillance photographs of the pair apparently taken by intelligence agents.

Soon after they met El Chapo at his redoubt, helicopters and troops swooped into the area, an intense hunt that lasted weeks. Guzmán hurt a leg escaping, but escape he did.

A view of the kitchen inside the safe house in Los Mochis. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

So why, two months later, move to a coastal city several hundred miles north? His chief of security, Orso Iván Gastelum, had reportedly advised against it.

Los Mochis, after all, was in northern Sinaloa – enemy territory. From its base up in Sonora the rival Beltrán Leyva cartel had encroached on to Guzmán’s traditional turf, establishing its own sicarios (hitmen) and patronage and corruption networks.

In his interview with Penn, the fugitive had rhapsodised about liberty. “Lots of happiness – because of my freedom.” So why risk it?

Maybe it was the human factor. He reportedly wished to spend 6 January, the day of the kings, with his twin daughters. It’s also possible he had become cocky – or sloppy. A man on the run hosting a Hollywood star and a soap actor to discuss a biopic, among other things, suggests skewed priorities.

Another explanation is Guzmán knew his web of influence had shrivelled, and with it his long-term survival prospects, and sought to reassert and project control in northern Sinaloa. He came to Los Mochis prepared for a fight: authorities recovered two armour-plated cars and an arsenal with 50-calibre weapons and a rocket-launcher.

“The most likely scenario is that Guzmán had lost the support and confidence of his partners in the cartel, and with it the political influence and power that protected him,” Don Winslow, an author who has researched the drug wars, told CNN.

“Any organised crime figure, Guzmán not excepted, survives only as long as he’s making other people money. Such extraordinary pressure was put on the Mexican government by the United States that, after six months, Guzmán became a distraction that was hurting business.”

Whatever the reason for the move, Mexico’s most wanted man clearly considered the house in Las Palmas a good bet. It was certainly cheeky – police were posted 200 metres up the street, guarding the house of the mother of Sinaloa’s governor, Mario López Valdez.

The tunnel almost saved him: while his gunmen fled through neighbouring houses and terraces, drawing the attention of marines and helicopters, he bolted into the drain with Gastelum. They emerged from a manhole several blocks away and commandeered a car, only to run into a police unit which captured them.

“Mission Accomplished,” President Enrique Peña Nieto tweeted. “We have him.”

Ríodoce, a weekly newspaper which covers the drug war in Sinaloa, said it was not the end of the story. “In fact it’s just the start of the story.”

Chapo’s web of personal influence and protection had atrophied, leaving him vulnerable, but his cartel’s finances and corrupt nexuses sailed on as before, just under different managers. “The criminal and business web of the Sinaloa organisation remains intact.”

Unless he conjures another escape from Altiplano prison, which has been remodelled and reinforced with tanks, Guzmán appears bound for extradition to a small, isolated supermax cell in the United States.

Ed Vulliamy, author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline, warned in the Guardian of a disturbing possibility: that Guzmán was the last old-school “don” to exert control partly through baronial patronage and that more brutal rivals will take his place.

“Just as Cosa Nostra was overtaken first by the Neapolitan Camorra and Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, so there is the chance that the Sinaloa cartel is damaged, buckling under the intensity of the assaults on its hegemony by the ferocious Zetas and their allies.”

In videotaped answers to Penn’s questions El Chapo said drug trafficking would do just fine without him. “The day I don’t exist, it’s not going to decrease in any way at all … because drug trafficking does not depend on just one person. It depends on a lot of people.” Supply, he said, would always meet demand. “It will not end because as time goes by, we are more people, and this will never end.”

Life in Río Quelite street and Jiquilpan boulevard returned to normal on Monday. Businesses reopened and workers scrubbed away the bloodstains of the five men who died. In some places they poured cement, to extinguish any smell.

Marines and police still guarded El Chapo’s house, sealed off with red and yellow tape, but it was morphing from crime scene to local attraction. Children on bicycles circled the block, giggling. Motorists cruised past, taking photographs.



One got out and took a selfie. Asked why, he shrugged. “It’s history.”