Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, has sent another letter to Judge Brian Cogan requesting extradition to Mexico. According to the document, the once most-wanted man in the world insisted on receiving “equal treatment under the law” in his case and also requested to be tried in his home country on the pending charges against him. The drug lord has been serving a life sentence since 2019 for various drug trafficking offenses and has been incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax federal prison in Colorado since then.
The letter, sent on April 23 and received on May 1 by the Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York, is not the first that El Chapo has sent denouncing the conditions of his imprisonment or demanding “fair treatment” in his appeal against his sentence. In this new letter, handwritten in English with some grammatical errors, he insisted on the alleged violations of his due process.
“I have written several letters regarding the fairness and validity of my appeal request for my next hearing, to obtain fair treatment under the law. This is a respectful request regarding the court’s violation of the ‘conclusive evidence’ that was not proven to avoid the dismissal of my case. I ask the District Court for my right to be transferred back to my country and face charges for the violation of my verdict in the interest of fairness under federal law,” reads an excerpt from the letter sent by the drug lord.
In his previous letter, sent just two weeks ago, Guzmán requested the “protection” of his human rights as provided for in the U.S. Constitution. In that letter, he asserted that, according to “constitutional law, the court has the right to have [these] applied and used for equal protection” in his case.
The last time the entourage of the former Sinaloa Cartel leader spoke out about his conditions was last February. At that time, his lawyer, Mariel Colón, told the Mexican newspaper Reforma that her client had lost a significant amount of weight and had suffered episodes of tachycardia in recent months. “He is being held in extremely harsh conditions of confinement; in my opinion, they are inhumane and violate the U.S. Constitution. They are cruel,” she asserted.
The drug lord was arrested again in Mexico in January 2016, after two spectacular prison escapes. The last one, from the Altiplano maximum-security prison, took place in July 2015. The escape, worthy of a Hollywood production, was made possible through a tunnel with ventilation, lighting, oxygen tanks, and motorcycle rails connected to his cell, triggering a crisis in the government of then-president Enrique Peña Nieto. His final capture brought his story to an end. In 2017, he was extradited to the United States, from where he has repeatedly denounced the extreme isolation conditions to which he is subjected, the same conditions applied to terrorists.
El Chapo remains incarcerated under the SAMs (Special Administrative Measures and Extreme Isolation) program. This regime houses figures such as Theodore John Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of those responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013; and Richard Reid, trained by Al Qaeda, who attempted to detonate a shoe bomb on a flight between Paris and Miami in 2001, among other prisoners.
Guzmán’s sons, nicknamed Los Chapitos, took up their father’s criminal legacy. Using violent tactics, they have sown terror in the power vacuum left by the notorious drug lord and his once-longtime partner, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was betrayed and handed over to the DEA in 2024. They are now vying for control of his weakened criminal organization, a consequence of bilateral security measures between Mexico and the United States.
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