Little remains of the bloodthirsty leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who kidnapped, tortured and asked his enemies to be buried alive.
“I have suffered a lot”, “The treatment I receive is cruel and unfair”, “They serve me little food and I often go hungry”, Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán now says about the conditions in which he is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado.
‘El Chapo’ has complained in the first person in an affidavit that is included in a new civil lawsuit that mentions the attorney general Merrick Garland, the director of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Michael Carvajal and officials from the ADMAX Florence prison, to which Guzmán arrived in July 2019.
Constant checks inside his cell, surveillance cameras even in the place where he talks with his legal defenders and a detailed analysis of the letters he has written, are some of the measures that the government takes to prevent him from escaping, as described by the Guzmán in the document.
“I am a 64-year-old Mexican and I was extradited from Mexico to the United States in January 2017,” begins the seven-page document, written in English and signed by the capo, highlighting “Joaquín Guzmán L.”
“Due to the treatment at ADMAX, now I suffer from headaches, memory loss, muscle cramps, stress and depression,” said “El Chapo.” “The treatment I receive is cruel and unfair, and it is causing me to suffer from psychological and health problems. I pray that this court intervenes, ”he mentions, referring to the Denver federal court that received the lawsuit in October 2021.
Until now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has not responded to the complaint, since Judge Michael Hegarty approved a motion on May 12 to do so until June 15 and scheduled a hearing for July 7.
Guzmán’s complaints have been constant since he was held in a Manhattan prison awaiting trial. He came out of this until he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Minutes before hearing his sentence, “El Chapo” read a letter claiming that being in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MCC) in New York “has been 24-hour torture.” But he did not express remorse for any of the crimes he committed.
A Regime for Terrorists
In the ADMAX prison in Florence, Guzmán described, he spends most of the day in a 7-by-12-foot cell with a small window through which he is given a tray of food. The cell is in ‘Unit H’, a high security area where he is accompanied by convicts of terrorism.
When he arrived at that prison, he said, they allowed him to go out to a cage in the patio from 9 to 10 hours a week, but since December 2019 that time has been reduced to 3 hours or nothing. That 10-by-10-foot cage is the only place he can exercise.
The government also does not allow him to have contact with other inmates, limits his phone calls to four relatives (his mother, his sister and his twin daughters), prevents the guards from talking to him and goes handcuffed to a room where he visits him. his lawyer Mariel Colón Miró.
They are the strict rules known as Special Administrative Measures or SAMs, which are imposed on dangerous prisoners to prevent them from doing more damage to society. The SAMs rules, which almost completely limit communications with the outside world, apply primarily to terrorists.
“I am ruled out of having any verbal contact or communication with other prisoners,” Guzmán claimed. “I have no human contact, other than when the guards put on and take off my shackles.”
None of the lawyer’s requests for him trying these measures have been approved. And it is that Guzmán, in addition to having been the most dangerous drug trafficker of his time, escaped twice from Mexican prisons and was preparing a third escape before his extradition.
For helping him, now his wife Emma Coronel is serving a three-year prison sentence in a minimum security prison in Texas. Her release is scheduled for September 13, 2023.
Guzmán was asking to be allowed to speak with her on September 21, 2021, when a Colorado notary public certified her statement. That was three months before Coronel’s sentencing hearing in a Washington DC court. “Since my arrival in the United States, I have not been allowed to speak to my wife,” he claimed.
‘El Chapo’ wants to give interviews
In an interview with journalist María Antonieta Collins for Univision’s Despierta América en Domingo program, ‘El Chapo’s’ lawyer, Mariel Colón Miró, said that although her client was not sentenced for acts of terrorism, the SAMs rules were imposed on him because The Prosecutor’s Office “alleged that he was such a dangerous person that if he did not have those measures imposed, he could have other people killed, such as, for example, those who testified against him in the trial.”
Colón Miró said that Guzmán is willing to give interviews to reporters, “but he cannot” because of the SAMs standard. In relation to this, a video in which this capo answers a series of questions sent by the actor Sean Pean was shown at his trial as evidence of self-incrimination.
“El Chapo” also wants to learn English to be able to communicate with guards, counselors and health personnel, but they have not given him adequate teaching material and have denied that a teacher gives him classes in person.
He doesn’t even understand what he sees on television, since all the channels broadcast content in English. Once he submitted his complaints, they responded in English in a letter sent to his cell, and it wasn’t until she spoke with Colón Miró that he knew they had been rejected.
They also did not respond when he asked for a broom and mop to clean a cell, “for which I have been forced to live and constantly breathe excessive dust,” the capo said.
The diseases of ‘El Chapo’
In his affidavit, Guzmán alleges that they don’t even listen to him when he asks for medical attention. He recounts an incident that happened in July 2021, when he was coughing “uncontrollably” and had a congested chest, but “I never received medical treatment.”
The same would have happened when he asked to be given medicine to cure a toe that contracted fungus, according to him, because he shares the same nail clippers with other inmates. The fungus disappeared when the nail fell off, said Colón Miró in the interview.
“Medical care at ADMAX is scarce,” said ‘El Chapo’, although he acknowledged that he has already been vaccinated against the coronavirus and that he has been treated several times for blood pressure.
“I have suffered a lot being in solitary confinement. My blood pressure has risen, leading to headaches and anxiety. Sometimes I forget things,” said the trafficker.
“They serve me little food and I often stay hungry,” said ‘El Chapo’, who claims to have a sleep disorder because he is woken up after midnight by the “extremely hot” air that comes out of the ventilation for fifteen minutes between four and five times.
“Every night this causes my heart to start beating rapidly, raising my blood pressure. I have raised this issue with staff, but no one has done anything.”
The former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel is uncomfortable when they enter his space to search his things, one of the many actions carried out in ADMAX to prevent him from escaping for the third time. But he says his fear is that the guards will give him the coronavirus.
“Even though I don’t share a cell and am in my cell 24 hours a day, prison officials enter my cell several times a week to do routine searches, when they move and touch all my belongings.”
Another concern of Guzmán is that they only allow him to make up to two 15-minute calls to his relatives and that he wrote a letter to his loved ones in October 2019 and received another in response until August 2020. It was because the Bureau of Prisons read the correspondence to prevent it from carrying hidden messages.
According to the DEA, “El Chapo” inherited his drug kingdom from his four sons: Jesús Alfredo, Iván Archivaldo, Ovidio and Joaquín. These young men lead a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel and their power has grown, becoming important traffickers of fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and other drugs. For the capture of each of them they offer a reward of 5 million dollars.
