'El Chapo' Guzmán Writes to Sheinbaum, Asks to Be Sent Back to Mexico

Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera wants out of America's toughest prison, and he's got a plan: write a letter to the Mexican president and ask her to bring him home.

The convicted drug lord, serving a life sentence at the ADX Florence supermax in Colorado, sent a letter dated June 2 to Judge Brian Cogan naming Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo as his ticket back to Mexico. He even included her office address, Palacio Nacional, Plaza de la Constitución s/n, in case anyone needed to look her up.

"I am asking the president of Mexico to take some action to facilitate my return to Mexico," Guzmán Loera wrote in the letter, obtained by El Universal. The grammar, he admitted himself, wasn't great. "I will not appear in court by myself, speaking the language of English in the United States."

This isn't the first time El Chapo has tried this move. He's sent more than a dozen similar letters to Cogan over the years, each one asking to be deported to serve his sentence in a Mexican prison instead of the concrete box where he currently sits in near-total isolation. But this is the first time he's name-dropped a sitting Mexican president directly.

The former Sinaloa Cartel boss complained about the conditions at Florence, where he's been held since his 2019 extradition and conviction. No family visits. No contact with other prisoners. The kind of solitary confinement that makes Supermax live up to its name.

"The unproven violence was wrong in my sentence, when the Mexican government caused all the murders and I was blamed for trying to protect my life and my family in Mexico," he wrote, flipping the script on his own trafficking career with a straight face.

In a second letter, dated June 4, Guzmán Loera tried a different angle: family. He asked Cogan to give him "another opportunity to show people that my guilt in 2019 changed my entire life, on behalf of my adorable twin daughters and my wife, who need me in the present." His wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, completed her own prison sentence for drug trafficking connections.

The letters read like a man who's been rehearsing his lines for years and finally found someone to deliver them to. The problem is that Mexico's government has shown zero interest in taking El Chapo back. Sheinbaum's office hasn't responded publicly, and there's no legal mechanism under U.S. law to deport a convicted federal prisoner to serve a life sentence elsewhere.

El Chapo's current setup at Florence is about as far from the golden tunnels of his Sinaloa compound as it gets. The facility, designed to hold the most dangerous inmates in the federal system, has held the likes of Ted Kaczynski and the Oklahoma City bomber. It's the kind of place where the walls are designed to keep people in, not the kind where diplomatic letters get you a transfer.

The timing of the letters is notable. Sheinbaum is barely eight months into her presidency, and Mexico's relationship with the United States on security matters remains tense. Asking her to intervene on behalf of the world's most famous drug lord would be a political grenade with no upside.

Still, El Chapo keeps writing. The letters to Cogan are part of a paper trail that stretches back years, each one a small act of defiance from a man who once controlled billions of dollars in drug traffic and now controls nothing except the pen in his hand.

The Sinaloa Cartel he founded doesn't exist in the form he built it. His sons, the "Chapitos," have carved out their own operations. The empire he ran from behind prison walls using smuggled cell phones and tunnel networks is a memory. The man who escaped from two maximum-security prisons through tunnels is now trying to escape through bureaucracy.

It won't work. But El Chapo has never been the kind of man who lets reality stop him from trying.