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Mexican security forces descended on a region in the country’s northwest in October as part of a new phase in the search for fugitive Sinaloa cartel chief Joaqu\u00edn “El Chapo” Guzm\u00e1n.<\/p>\n
And now there are disturbing new details about that intensifying manhunt.<\/p>\n
Guzm\u00e1n remains free, but a recent report from Vice News<\/a> details allegations that, in their fierce pursuit of the drug lord, Mexican marines attacked the homes of ranchers in a mountainous and rugged region of Durango state.<\/p>\n “It all happened on October 6,” Gonzalo Pe\u00f1a, a farmer in Tamazula in Durango state, told<\/a> Vice News. “A little before 8 a.m., we heard the choppers \u2026 They arrived shooting, I heard the shots from the choppers.”<\/p>\n “And suddenly they disappeared, and then a plane showed up before me,”Pe\u00f1a told Vice News. “I thought it was going to land, or just circle around. But no. It arrived shooting.”<\/p>\n “I worried about getting killed right there,” he said.<\/p>\n After escaping on July 11, he flew northwest<\/a> to a ranch in the remote, mountainous area of southwestern Durango state, near the border with Sinaloa.<\/p>\n Many, including a top official with the US Drug Enforcement Administration<\/a>, suspected that Guzm\u00e1n returned to Sinaloa after his escape. After Mexican authorities detected efforts to return the drug lord’s daughters’ pet monkey, Boots<\/a>, to Durango, the manhunt was shifted to the region \u2014 a stronghold for the Sinaloa cartel nicknamed the Golden Triangle for its drug production.<\/p>\n