Watch El Chapo Get His Butt Checked for Contraband in a Mexican Prison

MEXICO CITY - Infamous drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán knew the routine from his previous arrest in 2016.

A new video released by a local Mexican news outlet shows the world’s most famous living drug lord drop his trousers to reveal his tighty whities during a body search after entering prison. He then drops those to his ankles and proceeds to do several squats that would have dislodged any contraband hidden up his butt.

The video was filmed in Mexico’s maximum-security Altiplano prison in January 2016, the same prison that Guzmán notoriously escaped from six months earlier.

Guzmán, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, broke out of Altiplano in perhaps one of his most cinematic episodes. In July 2015 he fled through an underground tunnel on a jerry-rigged motorcycle that connected the shower stall in his prison cell to a nearby house. The daring escape made international headlines and led to a manhunt throughout Mexico for Guzmán.

It would be revealed after Guzmán’s arrest in an article for Rolling Stone magazine that the actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo met with El Chapo when he was on the lam in his hideout in the Sierra Madre mountains of western Mexico in October 2015.

Authorities allegedly followed the filmstars when they met with Guzmán, and nearly caught him in the days following. He was reportedly able to escape by running off using two women and a child as cover so that Mexican officers wouldn’t fire at him from a pursuing helicopter.

But Guzmán’s time on the run didn’t last much longer.

On January 8 2016 Mexican security forces raided a house in the Sinaloan city of Los Mochis, discovering a pile of Kate Del Castillo DVD’s that Guzmán had likely been enjoying as he stayed out of sight. The drug lord is believed to have had a crush on the film star, which motivated him to allow the visit she choreographed between him and Penn.

Guzmán and an associate fled through the hatch into a secret tunnel about a mile long where it popped back up onto the street. They then hijacked a car by gunpoint but were eventually captured several miles outside of Los Mochis.

Guzmán was returned to Altiplano and stripsearched—a process which can be seen for the first time in the video that recently emerged in Mexican media. He’d later be transferred to another prison, before being extradited to the U.S. and being found guilty in a New York court in 2019. He’s currently imprisoned in a supermax prison in Colorado.

Although the new video shows El Chapo wearing tighty whities, it’s still unclear whether Guzmán is team briefs or team boxers. Most likely, the underwear were prison ordered, along with the strip search.

In the past, El Chapo has escaped wearing next to nothing. During his 2019 trial, a former mistress alleged that in 2014 they once fled persecution through an underground tunnel while buck naked. 

Later that same year Guzmán was finally arrested after more than 13 years on the run while in bed with his former beauty queen wife Emma Coronel. He’d previously escaped from Mexico’s Puente Grande prison in 2001 allegedly in a laundry cart. Images from his 2014 arrest show Guzmán being detained without a shirt on. His underwear isn’t visible.

Photos leaked after his 2016 arrest confirmed other theories about his undergarments, showing Guzmán wearing a filthy tank top undershirt, colloquially (and problematically) known as a “wife-beater”. 

Again, his underwear isn’t shown.