Enrique Peña Nieto was aboard the presidential plane, en route to France on the night of July 11, 2015, when an aide approached him with a message from the then-director of CISEN, Eugenio Ímaz. The text was brief but devastating: “I regret to inform you, but El Chapo has escaped.”
This was revealed by the former president himself in the docuseries *Operación Cisne Negro* (Operation Black Swan), produced by N+ Docs, which premiered this Tuesday, October 27, on the ViX platform.
The aircraft was making a stopover in Gander, Canada, before crossing the Atlantic. The trip had a high-level diplomatic purpose: Mexico was the guest of honor at the French National Day military parade—a ceremony intended to foster bilateral reconciliation following the strain caused by the Florence Cassez case.
Accompanying him were the Secretaries of National Defense and the Navy. The Secretary of the Interior, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, was already in Paris, having arrived a day earlier. El Chapo’s escape occurred precisely when the heads of the country’s security apparatus were not in the country.
Peña Nieto recounts that, after reading the message, he returned to the officials accompanying him on the flight. “I remember going back to the table where I had been sitting with the officials. I said, ‘I have some news for you: El Chapo has escaped.’ And I remember them asking, ‘This isn’t a joke, is it?’ I replied, ‘No, it’s not a joke.’”
What followed, in the words of Osorio Chong, was “consternation, concern, and an immediate shift toward considering the various scenarios that had to be addressed.” The plane landed shortly thereafter in Gander. “We got to work immediately, right there in the small room at the airport. I mean, our first thought was that we needed to send a message,” the former official recounts.
Peña Nieto decided not to return to Mexico upon learning of the escape. He continued his trip to France. “Look, going back wouldn’t have solved anything. Security lapses like this happen—and not just in Mexico, but anywhere in the world. Even the best hunter lets the hare slip away, as the saying goes. And that is what had happened,” he explains in the documentary.
Upon arriving in Paris, he held a seven-minute press conference. He described the escape as “an affront to the Mexican State” and instructed the Secretary of the Interior to coordinate the recapture.
“I remember that our government approval ratings dropped by a full fifteen points—it was a massive blow,” he acknowledges.
