A federal judge denied Mexican kingpin Joaquín Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera his request for phone calls and visits to his young daughters, who wrote in the motion that the Bureau of Prisons is now “solely responsible” for the conditions of the reclusive drug dealer.
“This Court has no power to alter the conditions that the Bureau of Prisons has imposed,” the judge wrote in the motion filed April 10 in the United States District Court in the Eastern District of New York. Calls and visits in place while Guzmán was on trial were replaced once she was found guiltythe judge wrote. Previously, the court had authorized two phone calls a month.
Guzmán, once the leader of the world’s most famous cartel and who was called by prosecutors a “ruthless and bloodthirsty leader,” wrote in a March 20 letter asking the judge for visits from his wife and two daughters. He said that he has not had calls with his daughters for seven months and the lawyers “have decided to punish me by not letting me talk to my daughters. To this day they have not told me if they will no longer give me more calls with my daughters,” he wrote.
The petition was requested by the legal defense of “El Chapo” Guzmán, who stated that He wanted to be able to have personal visits or at least communicate by telephone, this after the prison authorities interrupted this benefit in May 2023.
Guzmán Loera expressed his bewilderment at the lack of response from prison staff about when he could speak to his daughters, and criticized the decision of the prosecutor in charge.
So he asked that his wife, Emma Coronel, could visit him so that “she could bring my daughters, since they can only visit me when they are on school vacations, since they are studying in Mexico.” He asked the judge to intervene in the brief due to the “unprecedented discrimination against me.”
Guzmán is serving a life sentence at a Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, which houses numerous high-profile inmates. He was found guilty in 2019 on charges including drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons offences. Since beginning his sentence in the isolated prison known as the “Alcatraz of the Rocky Mountains,” “El Chapo” has requested numerous ways to make his inner life more bearable.
The founder of the Sinaloa cartel sent an “SOS” last year through his lawyers to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asking him for help due to the alleged “psychological torment” he says he is suffering in an American prison. He previously asked the judge to allow his wife and his twin daughters, then 9 years old, to visit him in prison.
Prosecutors have said thousands of people died or were ordered to kill because of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Guzmán was convicted in 2019 of several crimes, including large-scale drug trafficking and conspiracy to murder, within the framework of his activities at the head of the Sinaloa cartel. This cartel, under his leadership, was responsible for importing more than one million kilograms of cocaine into the United States, as well as large quantities of heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine. Evidence presented during his trial showed that the cartel used violent methods, such as murder, kidnapping and torture, to maintain its dominance.
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– Prosecutors add recordings against Ovidio Guzmán and they will be kept secret.
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