Examante Says That El Chapo Fled Naked Through A Tunnel

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, better known as the Chapodiputada, revolutionized the trial of Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán in a federal court in Brooklyn, NY on Thursday, when he told his intimate life with the head of the Sinaloa cartel, who considered himself his wife, and how the narco fled naked through a tunnel in Culiacán with the Mexican Marines on his heels.

The prosecution witness, who suffered a nervous breakdown and had to wipe away tears with a handkerchief on several occasions, rehearsed for more than two hours her alleged professional and sentimental relationship with Guzmán, who avoided crossing her gaze with her. The accused's wife, Emma Coronel, also listened to the testimony from the public benches with a serious gesture, although on one occasion it was seen that a defiant smile escaped her.

"To this day I am confused because I thought it was a couple relationship," the former deputy from the state of Sinaloa, who sounded resentful and suffered from a tic disorder, answered questions from the prosecution.

Sanchez, 29, who is now awaiting sentencing for drug trafficking in the United States, said she was passing Guzmán the night of February 16-17, 2014, when an operation by the Mexican Marines and the US DEA began to knocking on the door of the residence in the Guadalupe de Culiacán neighborhood, Sinaloa, where they were.

She assured that she was awake when at around 3 in the morning she heard loud knocks and the noise of helicopters. On the screens of the security circuit of the house you could see figures with helmets and their faces covered trying to knock down the door with a battering ram. At that time, always according to his testimony, Miguel Hoo Ramírez, alias Cóndor, one of El Chapo's secretaries, approached the room.

A black hole

"Uncle, uncle, open up, we fell, we fell," said Sánchez, who yelled at Condor. Guzmán jumped out of bed and started running across the room. He then went to the bathroom with Cóndor and the servant of the residence, called Chaparrita, and urged Sánchez to join them.

Once in the bathroom, he watched the bathtub rise and reveal the entrance to a tunnel that led down a wooden staircase, down which they descended. "For me it was horrible," she said. "It was a humid place, full of water, full of mud."

After five meters they found a steel door with a wheel that had to be turned to open it. Condor and the "Chepis", as he affectionately called Guzmán, managed to open it, and they all ran out of what appears to be a sewage pipe. "He was naked, I was wearing clothes, Condor too, and the maid was wearing pajamas," he said.

He described the conduit as a dark hole 1.5 meters high, concrete walls and filled with water, through which it took "more than an hour" to reach an exit. "[I was] long enough to be traumatized," he acknowledged. In the end they met in the Humaya River, which runs through Culiacán. That was the last detail he told before Judge Brian Cogan ended the day.

El Chapo only managed to postpone his capture for a few days, since he was finally arrested in a hotel in Mazatlán by the same Marines who had chased him down Culiacán. The following year he carried out a spectacular escape, through another tunnel, from a Mexican prison. Authorities managed to recapture him in early 2016 and he was later extradited to the United States.

Sánchez, who starred in a notorious scandal in Mexico when his ties to Guzmán were discovered, pleaded guilty last October to drug trafficking in federal court in Washington DC. She had been arrested at the border in San Diego, CA, when she was trying to enter the United States.

He is currently awaiting sentencing, which can be a minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum of life in prison. With his collaboration with authorities, he said, he hoped the judge would be lenient.

El Chapo's other wife

In the first part of his testimony, he said that he met El Chapo in late 2010, when she was 21 years old and he had already been married to Coronel for three. Soon after, they began a sentimental and labor relationship, since Guzmán first commissioned him to dedicate himself to buying marijuana from the peasants in the mountains and then to the creation of a front company in Mexico City in which to hide the benefits of drug transfer..

That company, which was dedicated to marketing juices and which was put in charge of an easily manipulable "low-income person," never sold a gallon, but they managed to wash domestic life with the accused, which he referred to on several occasions as "her husband". He bought her underwear, shirts and lotions, among other things. Chapo's favorite shoes? The Nike sneakers, in black or blue and black. The size of your pants? The 32 × 32, although "due to their height" they had to be cut. "I treated him like a housewife."

That closeness also allowed him to know the most sinister side of the capo, according to what he said, as when on one occasion, hurt by a complaint, he turned around and told him that "from then on" he would kill anyone who betrayed him, even if he were family.

The relationship began to get into trouble at the end of 2013. "We had our difficulties and we distanced ourselves," said Sánchez, who the following year was elected state deputy in Sinaloa by "many votes."

Despite everything, they continued to see each other sporadically when El Chapo contacted her through his communication system, in which she had the name of "Hermosura" and then "the deputy".

"It seemed like [the relationship] never ended." So when the Marines knocked on El Chapo's door that early February morning, Sánchez was in bed with the capo.