Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the convicted Mexican drug kingpin, has had a Christmas visit from his kids, Telemundo reports.
One of his lawyers, Mariel Colon, told the network that he was allowed to see his twin daughters in the flesh at his “Supermax” prison in Colorado.
Colon said the girls, aged eight, had travelled from Mexico to see their father for Christmas. El Chapo is denied contact visits, so he was separated from his daughters by a glass wall, she added.
According to the lawyer – who was also part of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team – the visit still gave El Chapo “an air of positivity [and] joy” and encouraged him to “keep fighting for his freedom in order to be with [his children]”.
El Chapo (Mexican slang for “shorty”) gained notoriety as the decades-long leader of the murderous Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s largest and most powerful drug cartel, where he had accumulated a $14-billion fortune. He escaped from two prisons in Mexico in 2001 and 2015, but was captured again in 2016 and extradited to the United States the following year.
The drug lord was put into ADX Florence, the most secure prison in the United States, in July 2019 following a two-year trial in which he was convicted by a jury on 10 criminal counts including drug trafficking, money laundering, and the use of firearms. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
His lawyer said that he is allowed five visits per month, whether legal, religious or social, but is barred from seeing his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, a former teenage beauty queen who married him at the age of 17.
Guzman’s lawyers are currently preparing to appeal his sentence, which is expected to be filed in mid-January or early February.