Backgrounder: "El Chapo" Guzman's criminal empire spreads across Americas, Europe, and Middle-East

Since his escape from Altiplano prison in Mexico on Saturday, the manhunt for Joaquin " El Chapo" Guzman Loera, leader of the feared Sinaloa cartel, has gripped the world.

Guzman could not have escaped prison without inside help, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said Monday, pledging to bring to justice all those involved in the brazen scheme.

The minister is coordinating government efforts to recapture Guzman, who escaped from a maximum security federal prison Saturday night, through a tunnel leading from his cell to a construction site more than a kilometer away.

The government is offering 60 million pesos (3.8 million U.S. dollars) for information leading to Guzman's arrest, announced Chong.

The international interest in his recapture is all the more stoked by not only the probable "inside help" but also the fact that the Sinaloa cartel, known as El Chapo, has links to organized crime in at least ten countries.

Sources have confirmed to Xinhua that Guzman Loera remains the main player in the smuggling of methamphetamines between the Asia- Pacific and the United States.

His operations have cornered around 80 percent of the U.S. market for these drugs and reap an estimated 2 billion U.S. dollars a year, according to the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

The U.S.-Mexico border is a particularly thriving hotspot for the cartel as it uses several major travel routes to smuggle drugs.

From Mexican border towns such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and Chihuahua, the drugs travel by land to major U.S. cities like Los Angeles and San Diego in California or San Antonio and El Paso in Texas. Once there, the drugs are smuggled on board flights to Europe.

LARGEST EVER DRUG NETWORK

In 2011, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) declared that El Chapo had become the biggest drug lord of all time, surpassing the operations of Pablo Escobar.

The economic clout of the Sinaloa cartel is such that approximately 288 front companies are now used to launder its money, ranging from shops and real estate holdings to airlines, gas stations, mines, travel agencies, and even ostrich farms.

The OFAC reported last year that 230 key operators had been identified within El Chapo's network, including six heads of foreign cartels.

Over the years, several of these international operations had been dismantled. In 2010, an American investigation busted a network based in the Mexican state of Jalisco and Bogota, Colombia, headed by a suspected money launderer, Agustin Reyes Garza. Furthermore, it is known that the Sinaloa cartel also runs a network trafficking chemical precursors in Mexico and Panama, used to manufacture drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.

Such discoveries allowed authorities to fully map out the structure of the Sinaloa cartel's empire. A week after his arrest in February 2014, OFAC released the organizational hierarchy of the cartel.

The findings also turned up an international network of financial services and subsidiaries linking Guzman Loera's companies, ranging from Miami, Florida and Madrid, Spain to Bogota, Colombia.

In Colombia, the Cifuentes Villa cartel was shown to be a close ally of El Chapo.

In almost every Central American country, cartel leaders answered to or collaborated with Guzman Loera, with dozens of companies used to launder money.

Airlines such as Linea Aerea Pueblos Amazonicos in Bogota and Lineas Aereas Lincandisa in Quito, Ecuador were also shown to belong to the cartel.

OFAC's findings turned up stranger news still, such as that Guzman Loera had invested in a number of philanthropic organizations in Mexico like "Salva la Selva" (Save the Jungle) and "Bienestar para el Porvenir" (Welfare for the Future).

NEW INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

Since the OFAC revelations, new findings in May 2015 have shown that the Sinaloa cartel has looked further afield to launder its ill-gotten gains.

The zero taxation policies of countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have made them prime destinations for money laundering.

Despite suffering reversals, such as the Colombian police seizing 116 of his properties worth a combined 15 million U.S. dollars, his wealth remains colossal.

In 2013, Forbes named Guzman Loera the 67th most powerful person in the world, with a personal fortune of over one billion U. S. dollars.

However, it is not only his criminal empire that may take on an international dimension.

In 1993, he was captured in Guatemala before being extradited to Mexico.

After escaping in 2001, he spent 13 years on the run, over which time he lived in Argentina and Guatemala.

As Guzman Loera returns to the top of many Most Wanted lists, the international clout of the Sinaloa cartel may give him more than a few boltholes to hide in. Endite