Not even the highest security US prison has been able to contain the Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. His desire to send messages related to criminal activities to his children, heirs of a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, ended up overcoming the harsh restrictions for terrorists of his confinement in the Colorado prison.
El Chapo bypassed the filters of ADX Florence, where he has been serving a life sentence since 2019. He did it through the only loophole outside of direct surveillance: visits from his lawyers. In a low voice, sheltered from the inquisitive gaze of the federal agents who monitor each of his movements, the capo asked his intermediary to bring secret messages to his children and, in return, he has received communications from them, reveals a report from the United States Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to which EL PAÍS has had access..
Threats directed at government informants, payments related to drug sales and methods for laundering money were some of the messages exchanged by the Guzmáns thanks to an unidentified emissary.
“Investigations revealed that you and several of your family members conspired to evade the communications monitoring requirements of the SAM regulations in order to facilitate criminal acts on behalf of yourself and the cartel,” warns the document dated February 2025.
Chapo’s encrypted messages were addressed to his children Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo, Ovidio, Joaquín and Rosa Alitzel Guzmán; his sisters Bernarda and Armida Guzmán Loera; as well as his ex-wives, Alejandrina Salazar and Griselda López.
All of them, the BOP emphasizes, addressing the boss directly, “sent or received illicit communications from him containing threats against government informants and also directed various criminal acts, including facilitating the trafficking of undocumented workers to the United States, making payments to members of the cartel and using real estate transactions to launder money.”
“In addition to the illicit communications scheme, his four children mentioned above (except Rosa Alitzel Guzmán) have been charged with federal charges in the United States for their participation in narcotics trafficking, violence and other crimes,” the agency added.
The war against La Mayiza
The precise content of Chapo’s messages, their scope, or the period in which they occurred were not set out in the BOP report. To date, no employee of the law firm of Jeffrey Lichtman, who heads the drug lord’s legal defense from New York, has been accused of related crimes. As of this writing, Lichtman did not respond to a request for comment on this topic. The lawyer Mariel Colón Mirówho was visiting Chapo at ADX Florence, told this medium, through an assistant, that he had no knowledge of the courier mentioned by the BOP. “There is no one as an intermediary to visit them (El Chapo’s children) and Mr. Guzmán,” the lawyer’s assistant explained in a text message.
Two sons of Guzmán, Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo, are the new heads of a powerful cell of the cartel known as Los Chapitos. Since September 2024, they have been involved in a bloody war against groups aligned with La Mayiza, the faction of the cartel led by Ismael Zambada Sicairos, alias Mayito Flaco. Los Chapitos were the lords of Culiacán and had the current governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, and other Mexican government officials in their pockets, according to a recent accusation released by the Southern District of New York, which has caused a scandal in Mexico.
The internal conflict of the cartel escalated to rifles after a son of Chapo, Joaquín Guzmán López, He kidnapped his godfather in July of that yearthe boss of bosses, Ismael May Zambada, father of Mayito Flaco. He tricked him into attending a meeting in Sinaloa, forced him onto a private plane, and handed him over to the DEA in Texas. Joaquín also surrendered that day. That is the version given by El Mayo Zambada, who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges and is now awaiting sentencing from a prison in Brooklyn.
In February 2024, five months before Zambada’s surprising fall, US prison authorities detected that El Chapo was secretly exchanging messages with his children. The BOP’s immediate reaction was to prohibit communications between him and his sister Bernarda, the only relative in Mexico with whom he was allowed to speak on the phone. In addition, she demanded that a lawyer be present at each of the visits of her twin daughters born in California (whom she had with his third wife Emma Coronel) and assistants in legal tasks, known as paralegals.
Authorities have not allowed Emma, a former beauty queen, to see her husband since he was extradited from Mexico in January 2017. She was accused of being the messenger between him and her stepchildren in the planning of Guzmán’s escape from a Mexican prison in 2015 through a tunnel, one of his hallmarks in drug trafficking. It was his second escape: in 2001 he fled in a laundry cart from the Puente Grande prison, Jalisco. Emma, who was born in California, served a three-year sentence for involvement in cartel activities and was released in 2023.
Chapo’s complaints
The Bureau of Prisons report responds to one of many letters written by El Chapo and his lawyers asking to relax his prison regime. The capo wrote a few days ago, in his own handwriting, a letter addressed to Judge Brian Cogan in which he requests to be extradited to Mexico. Whoever was the most wanted man in the world has insisted on obtain “equal treatment under the law” and requested “to be prosecuted” in Mexico. The petition was quickly dismissed by Cogan on Monday.
A few weeks ago, Guzmán also complained about the “cruel and inhuman treatment” he has received. El Chapo has spent the last eight years complaining that they keep him in the cell almost all day, that they do not treat his ailments, that the constant checks interrupt his sleep, that they do not give him English classes and that they have even prevented his legal representatives from seeing him.
“The rules are used as torture,” “until today the sun has not given me,” reads some letters he has sent to a federal court in Colorado.
The strict rules for convicted terrorists, known as SAM, almost completely limit prisoners’ communications with the outside world. If anything, they have the right to a few visits from relatives, to make few calls to them and to write them letters, but always under the scrutiny of the authorities.
In the case of El Chapo, his every word is carefully analyzed by agents from the FBI, the DEA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Some of his letters have taken more than a year to reach their destination and others remained in the archives of the aforementioned agencies. One of the few concessions is to take him out into the ADX Florence yard for an hour, but he is placed inside a cage. No one else accompanies him: he is prohibited from speaking with other inmates.
One of the concerns of the Department of Justice is that, through his messenger, El Chapo obstructed the criminal proceedings of his sons, Néstor Isidro Pérez Salazar, alias El Nini, who was the head of La Chapiza’s hitmen, as well as his compadre El Mayo Zambada.
“Given your leadership status, your demonstrated violence toward any threat to you and your organization, and your history of escapes from maximum security prisons, the Southern District of New York believes that, without SAM standards, unrestricted communications with others pose a great risk of death or harm in the community,” the BOP report concludes.
El Chapo could not even relax the severe security protocols of the first American prison in which he was held: the Manhattan detention center. Authorities feared the cartel would attempt a helicopter rescue operation. In the background of these measures was the memory of a failed attempt in 1981, when an aircraft approached the patio located on the roof of the prison, although it failed to take away one of the inmates.
