Former drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has asked Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for help with the “mental torment” he says he is suffering in prison in the United States, where he is serving a life sentence, one of his officials said Lawyers .Defense this Tuesday (17).
“In the six years that Joaquín has been in the United States, he has not seen the sun,” said José Refugio Rodríguez, a lawyer in Mexico who delivered Guzmán’s “verbal” message through Mariel Colón, one of the sisters and legal representative of received the former head of the Mexican drug trade in the United States.
Rodríguez explained that Guzmán only leaves his cell three times a week in a “small enclosure” of about 5m² where “the sun doesn’t reach him” and that he is authorized to receive fewer visits or calls than other detainees.
“He’s in mental and to some degree physical anguish, why not take him out in the sun? […] causes his health to deteriorate, that deterioration may result in him losing his life prematurely,” the lawyer warned in an interview with Formula Radio.
Rodríguez also claimed that Guzmán was not allowed to communicate with other inmates and that guards were forbidden from speaking to him in Spanish. He also stressed that under the agreements signed with the United States, the Mexican authorities are obliged to monitor the former drug trafficker’s detention conditions.
Rodríguez described Guzmán’s situation “like an SOS from someone swimming in the sea, drowning, looking for a piece of wood to hold on to”.
However, he insisted that the request to the Mexican President also aims to address the alleged procedural violations of extradition carried out in January 2017 during the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (20122018).
It also called on López Obrador “to pay attention to this behavior of violation of the law committed by the government of Peña Nieto”.
El Chapo’s plea for help became public after Mexican authorities arrested Ovidio Guzmán, one of the drug lord’s sons and heir to part of the Sinaloa cartel, on January 5 in an operation in Culiacan (northwest) that left 29 people dead.
Guzmán was found guilty in the United States of drug trafficking, money laundering and use of firearms. On July 18, 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison, which he is serving at ADX Florence Maximum Security Prison in the mountainous Colorado wilderness.