The former drug trafficker Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán asked Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for help in the face of the “psychological torment” he claims to be suffering in the United States prison where he is serving a life sentence, one of his lawyers said Tuesday.
Source: AFP
“In the six years that Joaquín has been in the United States, he has not seen the sun,” said José Refugio Rodríguez, his defender in Mexico and who received Guzmán’s “verbal” message through Mariel Colón, one of his legal representatives in the United States, and one of the capo’s sisters.
Rodríguez explained that Guzmán goes out barely three times a week to a “corralito” of about five square meters where “the sun does not hit him”, and that they authorize fewer visits or phone calls than other inmates.
“He is suffering a psychological and to a certain extent physical torment because not putting it out in the sun (…) It generates a deterioration in his health, this deterioration can lead to his losing his life prematurely,” he warned in an interview with the Radio Fórmula station.
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He also claimed that Guzmán is not allowed to communicate with other convicts and that the guards are prohibited from speaking to him in Spanish. He also pointed out that the Mexican authorities are obliged to monitor their prison conditions, according to agreements with the United States.
Rodríguez described the capo’s claim “Like an SOS of someone who swims in the sea drowning and looks for a piece of wood to hold on to.”
He insisted, however, thatThe request to the leftist president also seeks to address alleged procedural violations during his extradition, carried out in January 2017 under the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
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He asks López Obrador “qpay attention to this behavior of violation of rights in which the government of Peña Nieto incurred ”, Rodriguez asserted.
The claim of “Chapo” is known after the Mexican authorities captured Ovidio Guzmán, one of his sons and heir to part of the Sinaloa cartel, on January 5 in an operation in Culiacán (northwest) that left 29 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 the ADX Florence maximum-security prison in the Colorado mountainous desert.
