Jailed cocaine king El Chapo has sent a letter to his former trial judge begging for him to be allowed a visit from his wife and twin daughters.
Joaquin Guzman Loera – serving a life sentence in a US supermax prison – sent the handwritten plea to Judge Brian Cogan from his cell at ADX Florence, Colorado.
El Chapo – once the head of Mexico’s feared Sinaloa Cartel – is being held under the strictest security any prisoner in the US can face.
His wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, is also in jail for drug offences but is expected to be released on 13th September.
In his scrawled, barely-legible note, Guzman begs the judge: “Please authorise me to visit my wife and also bring me the girl.”
The drug boss is reportedly referring to his twin daughters, Emali and Maria Joaquina, who turned 12 on 15th August.
He explains that his 34-year-old wife – a former beauty queen – will soon be free to see him under the terms of her jail release.
Guzman says she “will be able to travel throughout the country, as she will be on probation”.
Coronel was sent to a halfway house in California in June to serve the remainder of her three-year term for drug trafficking and money laundering for the Sinaloa Cartel.
Bafflingly, Guzman – who has twice escaped from jail – says he is entitled to the visit because he has no new charges outstanding.
He tells the judge: “I don’t see why my wife shouldn’t be allowed to visit me and bring the girls.”
Bizarrely referring to himself in the third person, he claims Coronel “is the only person who can visit him, as his sisters and mother do not have visas to travel to Colorado to visit Guzman”.
His twin daughters – he adds – “are studying in Mexico and can only travel to visit their dad during holidays, two times a year, a maximum of three times”.
Judge Cogan may take into account that El Chapo’s wife was heavily implicated in his last jailbreak, when he tunnelled out of a Mexican prison in 2015.
It is not the first letter El Chapo has addressed to Judge Cogan from behind bars.
In an earlier note in July (2023), Guzman moaned about the conditions of his detention.
He also complained about not being allowed to make two monthly calls to his sister and daughters as he claimed he had been promised.
Conditions at El Chapo’s supermax jail are deliberately harsh.
The remote prison is surrounded by razor-wire fences, gun towers, heavily-armed patrols, and attack dogs, with snipers in gun towers ready to take down escapers.
El Chapo lives in a seven-by-12-foot concrete cell with double doors for 23 hours a day in isolation and is granted an hour outdoors to get some fresh air.
Meetings even with other inmates are rare and discouraged by guards.
Judge Cogan is unlikely to show any sympathy.
At El Chapo’s trial, he accused the drug lord of “overwhelming evil”.
The Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels, produces and traffics the opioid drug fentanyl, which has killed thousands of users in the United States.
According to a 2021 report, the Mexican war on drugs had left an estimated 350,000 dead.
