Former drug trafficker Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán has had his request to restore his phone call and visitation rights denied as he languishes in the ADX Florence super-maximum security prison in Colorado.
The 67-year-old co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, who once boasted that he was behind the murder of 3,000 people, complained that he feels alone since his rights as a prisoner were taken away in a letter he wrote in March. twenty.
Judge Brian M. Cogan wrote on April 10 that it was not within his jurisdiction to determine Guzmán’s ability to visit and call family members.
“This Court has no power to alter the conditions that the Bureau of Prisons has imposed,” Cogan wrote in the motion filed April 10 in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York.
His visitation rights and telephone privileges (previously two calls a month) were terminated when he was sentenced, Cogan added.
Former drug trafficker Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán has been denied his request in federal court in New York to restore his phone and visitation rights while he languishes in the ADX Florence super-maximum security prison in Colorado.
The 67-year-old co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, who once boasted of being behind the murder of between 2,000 and 3,000 people, complained that he feels alone without his children or his wife Emma Coronel (pictured) since His rights as a prisoner were stripped in a letter he wrote on March 20.
Guzmán was also denied visitation rights to his wife, according to CBS News.
In the letter, which was filed in court last Tuesday, Guzmán pleaded with Judge Brian Cogan to allow his wife Emma Coronel to visit him and asked to be allowed to speak on the phone with the couple’s twin daughters.
‘I’m sorry for bothering you again with the request I made to you before regarding my wife, Emma Coronel,’ Guzmán wrote in the letter.
‘I ask you to please authorize her to visit me and bring my daughters to visit me, since my daughters can only visit me when they are on school vacation, since they are studying in Mexico.’
The former cartel boss showed his softer side despite proudly running a drug empire that saw thousands of people murdered and millions more affected by his illegal wares.
Guzmán also asked Cogan to restore his right to talk to 12-year-old girls twice a month for 15 minutes.
He stated that he had not spoken to them since May 2023, when the jail stopped authorizing phone calls.
‘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 is not answering,’ he wrote.
Guzmán’s visitation rights and telephone privileges (previously two calls a month) were terminated when he was convicted, Cogan added.
Guzmán was also denied visitation rights to his wife, Emma Coronel, who was released from US federal custody in September 2023 after serving 31 months of a 36-month sentence.
El Chapo spends 23 hours locked in a 7-by-12-foot concrete cell at ADX Florence, a maximum security prison in Colorado
‘That’s all they’ve told me. I ask you to please continue giving me the two calls that you authorized me per month. I don’t understand why the prosecutor who is in charge of the SAM Regulation stopped authorizing calls with my daughters.’
The former kingpin spends 23 hours locked in a 7-by-12-foot concrete cell with double doors in a section called ‘Range 13.’
He is supervised 24 hours a day and is prohibited from mixing with the inmate population.
Guzmán has often complained about prison conditions since a federal jury found him guilty in February 2019 of 10 charges that included drug trafficking, money laundering and using a firearm to commit crimes.
In March 2022, his lawyer, Mariel Colón, told the Mexican network Milenio that prison staff were violating his rights.
‘They don’t take him outside, they don’t take him out even for a single day,’ Colón alleged at the time. ‘We have had a lot of problems because they don’t treat him medically if he gets sick. Requests are ignored.’
He claimed that prison staff had also denied El Chapo access to water and dental treatment for his teeth.
Coronel told Univision News in 2019 that he had vision problems and had complained about a bad haircut because barbers could not communicate with him in Spanish.
Guzmán has often complained about prison conditions since a federal jury found him guilty in February 2019 of 10 charges that included drug trafficking, money laundering and using a firearm to commit crimes.
El Chapo is only allowed to spend one hour outside the concrete cell where he will spend the rest of his life.
“He seems much thinner, a little more suffocated. He’s not doing well there,” Colón said at the time. “It’s the saddest I’ve ever seen him.”
Guzmán was once considered the most powerful drug trafficker in the world, after Colombian Pablo Escobar, and was extradited from Mexico in January 2017 after being recaptured in January 2016 following his second prison escape in June 2015 through a tunnel that his organization had built underneath. the jail.
Before that, he had been on the run for 13 years after escaping from prison in a laundry cart in January 2001.
His wife was released from US federal custody in September 2023 after serving 31 months of a 36-month sentence handed down by a federal court in Washington, DC in November 2021 after she pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering.
His son, Ovidio Guzmán, was extradited from Mexico to Chicago in September to face drug trafficking charges.
Guzmán’s three other sons, Iván Guzmán, Jesús Guzmán and Joaquín Guzmán, are wanted by the US government on similar charges.