Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the infamous Mexican drug lord, has requested a federal judge to restore his telephone call and visiting privileges at the supermax prison in Colorado. Despite serving a life sentence, Guzmán seeks to regain these privileges.
In a letter dated March 20 and filed Tuesday in a New York district court, Guzmán expressed his apologies for reaching out again regarding the request he previously made about his wife, Emma Coronel, to federal judge Brian Cogan.
He requested authorization for his wife to visit him and bring their daughters along. He explained that the girls could only visit during school breaks as they were currently studying in Mexico.
Guzmán, convicted in 2019 of leading Mexico’s Sinaloa drug organization, sent a handwritten envelope to the judge in the Tuesday file.
Emma Coronel Aispuro received a 36-month jail term in November 2021 after pleading guilty to money laundering and conspiring to distribute cocaine, meth, heroin, and marijuana for importation into the United States. She was also required to pay over $1.5 million in fines.
Prosecutors claimed that Aispuro plotted another prison escape for the drug lord before his extradition to the United States in January 2017. In September 2023, authorities freed her from her halfway house in California.
Guzmán states in the letter dated March 20 that his wife is the only one who can visit him in prison because she resides in California and that other family members would need visas to visit.
“I also bother you to continue giving me the two 15-minute calls a month that you authorized (one call every 15 days), since in May of 2023, the facility stopped giving me calls with my daughters,” he stated in the letter. “And I haven’t had a call with them in seven months.”
“I asked when they were going to call me and my girls, and the personnel here told me that the FBI agent who monitors the calls does not answer.” “That’s all they told me,” he said. “I ask that you continue to provide me with the two calls each month that you have permitted. I don’t understand why the prosecutor in charge of the SAM Rules stopped approving calls to my girls.”
Guzmán claims what is happening to him is “unprecedented discrimination” and has asked the judge to intervene.
In 2019, a federal appeals court found Guzmán guilty of running a continuous criminal operation that included large-scale narcotics crimes, a murder plot, drug trafficking conspiracies, unauthorized use of a firearm, and a money laundering scheme. In January 2022, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction after Guzmán challenged it in a Brooklyn federal court on ten grounds. The appeals court found that “none of these claims has merit.”
Under Guzmán’s leadership, the Sinaloa cartel imported over 1 million kilos of cocaine and hundreds of kilograms of heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine into the United States. Trial evidence revealed that the cartel employed murder, kidnapping, torture, official bribery, and other criminal techniques to control territory and subdue opposition throughout Mexico.
