DENIED: El Chapo's Plea for Time With Wife and Daughters Rejected by Prison Officials as Cartel Leader Serves Lonely Life Sentence
El Chapo's request for time with his wife and daughters has been denied by a judge.
April 17 2024, Published 5:30 p.m. ET
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman will not be granted the family time he requested behind bars as he serves his life sentence at a supermax prison in Colorado, RadarOnline.com has learned.
The infamous drug lord, 67, is married to California-born former teenage beauty queen Emma Coronel, 34, and they have preteen twin daughters together.
El Chapo has been locked up at ADX Florence since his conviction in 2019 on charges ranging from drug trafficking to firearms offenses. He also prompted international manhunts after his two notorious prison escapes.
Guzman and his wife, Emma Coronel, have twin daughters together.
The Sinaloa Cartel leader petitioned a court last month to allow visits from his wife and resume bi-monthly calls with his children. A U.S. judge denied his request in a motion filed on April 10 in the Eastern District of New York, CBS News reported.
Judge Brian M. Cogan wrote that it was outside his jurisdiction to implement changes to the prisoner's visitation rights.
"This Court has no power to alter the conditions that the Bureau of Prisons has imposed," Judge Cogan wrote, adding that Guzman's familial privileges were suspended when he was convicted.
The Bureau of Prisons is "solely responsible" for the conditions of his imprisonment, he explained.
In May, officials reportedly cut off the kingpin's access to two 15-minute phone calls per month with his children.
El Chapo has been behind bars in Florence, Colorado since his conviction in 2019.
He allegedly believes the calls were taken away as retaliation after his recent efforts to have his criminal case dropped, calling the move "unprecedented discrimination against me."
El Chapo wrote in his letter to the New York judge on March 20 that prosecutors "have decided to punish me by not letting me talk to my daughters."
He went on to say the attorney in his case "was surely upset because in the pro se motion, I exposed the inefficiency of the lawyers who did not fight the anomalies of the prosecutors throughout the process."
"And in response, they have decided to punish me by not letting me talk to my daughters," the Sinaloa Cartel leader claimed.
The judge he addressed in the letter had initially granted the prisoner permission to make the calls.
"To this day they have not told me if they will no longer give me calls with my girls," he continued.
Coronel has been living in Los Angeles since she was released from prison last September.
"That's why I'm bothering you, since you authorized those two calls a month," Guzman wrote. He said his girls live in Mexico and don't have U.S. visas, making visitation difficult. His wife, however, lives in Los Angeles and El Chapo hopes the court will allow her to make in-person visits.
The California-born former teenage beauty queen recently served her own stint behind bars and was released last September.
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Coronel, 34, was convicted in 2021 for dealing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana; money laundering; and helping her husband run his criminal enterprise while he was imprisoned. She was also charged with aiding his elaborate 2015 escape from a maximum-security prison in Mexico.
Guzman was re-captured in 2016 and extradited to the U.S. in 2019. He was sentenced to life plus 30 years at the facility in Colorado.
RadarOnline.com told you last January that the cartel leader made an unsuccessful plea to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) to help him leave the "cruel and unfair" prison in Colorado, hoping to be transferred to one in Mexico.
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