FILE — This photo provided by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman arrives at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., after being extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges on Jan. 19, 2017. (United States Drug Enforcement Administration via AP)
A federal judge this week denied a request by the notorious imprisoned Mexican Sinaloa cartel leader Juan “El Chapo” Guzman for more personal and telephone visits with his wife and daughters at the Colorado prison where he’s serving a life sentence.
In his order, U.S. District Judge Brian Mark Cogan wrote that Guzman had been seeking the visits, believing the Court had authorized two phone calls per month, and “he is not receiving those calls.”
“If defendant is referring to the Special Administrative Measures that were in effect prior to and during his trial, those measures were superseded once he was convicted and the Bureau of Prisons assigned him to his present facility,” Cogan wrote. “After his conviction, the Bureau of Prisons became solely responsible for his conditions of his confinement, and this Court has no power to alter the conditions that the Bureau of Prisons has imposed.”
In his letter on March 20 to Cogan, Guzman wrote, “I address you in the most attentive manner. Sorry to bother you again with the request that I have asked you before with regards to my wife, Emma Coronel. I ask that you please authorize her to visit me and to bring my daughters to visit me, since my daughters can only visit me when they are on school break, since they are studying in Mexico.”
He said some of his close family members, such as his sisters, cannot visit him because they do not have a visa to travel to the U.S.
“The only person in my family who can visit me is my wife, of course, if you authorize her to do so,” he wrote.
“I also bother you to continue giving me the two 15-minute calls a month that you authorized me (one call every 15 days), since in May of 2023, the facility stopped giving me calls with my daughters. And I haven’t had calls with them for seven months. I have asked when they are going to give me a call with my daughters and the staff here told me that the FBI agent who monitors the calls does not answer. That’s all they’ve told me. I ask you to please continue giving me the two calls that you authorized me per month.”
“They decided to punish me by not letting me talk to my daughters,” he continued. “To this day they have not told me if they will no longer give me calls with my girls. That’s why I’m bothering you, since you authorized those two calls a month. That is why I ask for your intervention, since it is unprecedented discrimination against me.”
In 2019, Guzman was sentenced to life plus 30 years for being a principal leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and was ordered to pay $12.6 billion in forfeiture, prosecutors said.
He was convicted, following a three-month trial, on charges of narcotics trafficking, using a firearm in furtherance of his drug crimes and participating in a money laundering conspiracy.
The cartel was responsible for importing and distributing more than a million kilograms of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin in the U.S., prosecutors said.
Authorities said as part of the takedown of the organization, they seized over 130,000 kilograms of cocaine and heroin and weapons, including AK-47s and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Officials intercepted recordings and obtained texts, ledgers, videos, and photos that documented the cartel’s drug trafficking going back 25 years to 1989, officials said.
He was arrested in Mexico in 1993. In 2001, he escaped a Mexican prison by hiding in a laundry cart. He went on to lead his drug empire, transporting multi-ton shipments of narcotics into the U.S. by land, sea and air and underwater in submarines, officials said.
Law&Crime reported that his wife was transferred from a federal prison to a halfway house after serving much of her sentence for helping run her husband’s narcotics empire.
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