El Chapo Narco Tunnel Found in Front of a National Guard Base in Mexico
An investigator combs through a drug tunnel found in a wherehouse on November 30, 2011 in Otay Mesa, California. The tunnel, which led from the United States to a small business building in Tijuana, was the most sophisticated tunnel ever found in California and included an elevator, wood flooring an lighting. Sandy huffaker/Getty Images

Mexican officials recently discovered a 650-foot tunnel built by Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman across the street from a National Guard base in Tijuana, Mexico.

The narco tunnel includes ventilation, lighting, carts, and rails. It was found after a package of marijuana was left outside a house where the narco tunnel was hidden, New York Post reported.

Law enforcement officials believed that the narco tunnel was planned to connect Tijuana to the San Diego underpass, which was found in 2019, as part of a network built by the now-jailed El Chapo.

Electrical cables were found ready to be installed in the narco tunnel after authorities did a house sweep.

Narco Tunnels Link to El Chapo and his Sinaloa Cartel

Border authorities have found at least 200 narco tunnels, including the one discovered in 2019, Mexico News Daily reported.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) noted that there at least 13,300 narco tunnels in Mexico, most of them were established in areas where the Sinaloa Cartel is doing its operations.

The DEA said that El Chapo was behind the construction of the tunnels. Primarily, the tunnels were used to transport drugs, cash, and sometimes migrants.

El Chapo escaped from two maximum-security Mexican prisons in 2001 and 2015 through a tunnel underneath the shower in his jail cell.

Arturo Fontes, a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent, said that El Chapo could not have done it alone. Fontes noted that El Chapo could have had help inside and outside the prison. Fontes was an FBI agent who investigated El Chapo for years, according to a WNYC Studios report.

El Chapo's Escape Concerns

El Chapo's escape has brought concerns to law enforcement officials. In 2019, a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced El Chapo to life in prison. El Chapo is currently imprisoned in the Administrative Maximum Facility, which is also known as ADX.

Since opening the facility in 1994, no prisoner had managed to escape the maximum facility. A retired federal corrections officer said that he would have to have a warden in his packet for El Chapo to escape.

The retired officer noted that it is a very controlled environment, adding that no two inmates move in the facility at the same time, according to a Washington Post report.

The ADX is housing some of the notorious convicted felons, such as Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Terry Nichols, a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing; Zacarias Moussaoui, al-Qaeda operative and 9/11 conspirator; and Robert Hanssen, the traitorous double agent, are also inside the maximum-security facility.

One prosecutor said that he did not think he saw another inmate while visiting his client, Sal Magluta. Allan Kaiser was representing Magluta, who was convicted of leading a huge drug organization in South Florida. Magluta was sentenced to 200 years.

Deborah Golden, staff attorney at the Human Rights Defense Center, said that the ADX inmates are locked in small cubicles the size of a bathroom for 23 hours per day.

Prisoners were sent to ADX for two reasons: one for disciplinary or management reasons. Other prisons were sent there directly for their conviction or previous history.

WATCH: Record-Length U.S.-Mexico Drug Tunnel Discovered - From CBS Evening News