Mexican Drug Lord “El Chapo” Barred From Family Visits and Phone Conversations

(NationalUSNews.com) — Mexican Drug Lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán claims he’s not allowed to contact his family via phone or through in-person visits and filed a complaint to Judge Brian M. Cogan, a district court judge for the Eastern District of New York. In his complaint, Guzmán asked Cogan to allow his daughters to visit him at the maximum security prison he’ll spend the rest of his life in and lamented that he hasn’t spoken to his family for more than seven months. Guzmán compared the lack of communication with his family to discrimination, an accusation that failed to convince Cogan to re-examine Guzmán’s permitted communications.

Cogan issued a brief response to Guzmán’s complaint, claiming that since the drug lord had already been convicted, the United States Bureau of Prisons controls his ability to communicate with other people. In his response, Cogan stated that he wouldn’t grant Guzmán’s request to communicate with his daughters and dismissed the complaint from Guzmán. Guzmán’s lack of communication likely stems from his history of escaping detention facilities and his connections with one of the largest international drug trafficking organizations, the Sinaloa cartel.

Guzmán operated the Sinaloa cartel for more than 20 years and made it one of the largest criminal organizations on the planet under his leadership. Federal prosecutors compare Guzmán’s cartel to international “industrial-scale” businesses. Guzmán’s cartel dominated Mexico’s criminal underground for decades and had connections with international criminal organizations and officials within Mexico’s government. Federal prosecutors also allege that Guzmán personally ordered a plethora of deaths, along with orchestrating one of the largest international drug trafficking schemes on the planet.

Authorities have arrested Guzmán for his involvement with the Sinaloa cartel on multiple occasions. Still, the drug kingpin famously escaped from multiple detention centers before federal authorities managed to capture him in 2016. Guzmán first escaped from prison back in 2001 and spent more than a decade on the run before police managed to arrest him for the second time. Guzmán escaped again in 2015 through a tunnel connected to his cell in a daring escape that made international headlines. Following his conviction in 2019, federal authorities sentenced the drug kingpin to a life sentence at a “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.