Court documents made public this week have revealed that notorious Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is formally asking U.S. judicial authorities to move him from a U.S. correctional facility back to his home country to serve out the remainder of his life sentence, which he has described as excessively harsh punishment.
Guzman, once the leader of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, was extradited to the United States in 2017 following two high-profile escapes from Mexican maximum-security prisons. He was ultimately convicted on a sweeping array of charges including transnational drug trafficking and large-scale money laundering, and is currently serving his life term at the supermax ADX Florence facility in Colorado, one of the most secure correctional institutions in the U.S.
Agence France-Presse obtained three separate handwritten letters penned by Guzman, all of which were officially filed with U.S. courts on Monday. In one of the documents, written in English, Guzman stated that his correspondence raised points about unproven critical evidence used to secure his conviction. The letter, addressed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, asks authorities to acknowledge his right to be transferred back to his native country. Guzman did not explicitly clarify that his request is to complete his sentence in a Mexican prison, but the implication of the appeal is clear.
In a second letter dated April 20, Guzman alleged that his repeated formal requests for access to court documents tied to his conviction have been ignored by authorities. He added that even the documents themselves would not justify what he calls his “cruel punishment”, claiming that the guilty verdict handed down in his 2019 trial was fundamentally unfair. Guzman also noted that he has waited three years for a ruling on his appeal, and invoked legal protections laid out in the First through Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution to support his claims.
This latest round of public complaints is not the first time Guzman has pushed back against his treatment in U.S. custody. Past letters released from prison have repeatedly raised grievances about extreme social isolation, inadequate conditions in his cell, and severely restricted access to family visits from his loved ones.