THE mum of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has died aged 94 after begging for the release of her son from a US prison.
María Loera was reportedly unwell and had spent weeks in hospital in Mexico before her death.
Her cause of death has not yet been confirmed but local reports suggest she may have died from natural causes.
El Chapo’s lawyer José González told Milenio news that staff at the hospital called emergency services around 2.30pm on Sunday to report her death.
Unlike her infamous drug lord son, Loera apparently led a quiet life.
In 2020 she lobbied Mexican president López Obrador begging for El Chapo‘s return to Mexico to serve the rest of his life sentence there instead of in the US.
The president told media at the time that Loera had not seen her son in five years and “didn’t want to die without seeing him”.
And in 2019 she tried to secure humanitarian visas for herself and two of her daughters to visit him in the maximum-security prison in Colorado where he is now.
Her petition was denied.
Mexico’s state media agency Jenaro Villamil dubbed her: “a simple woman from Sinaloa”.
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They added “always denied publicly that (her son) was the head of the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico, despite the hundreds of deaths caused by the drug war”.
El Chapo, 65, was the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and built an international criminal empire trafficking cocaine, heroin, and marijuana.
He was caged for life in 2019 after he was convicted of orchestrating countless brutal crimes – and in January this year his son was also arrested.
After escaping two Mexican prisons in 2001 and 2014, he was sent to ADX Florence in Colorado, where no inmate has ever escaped.
The remote prison is surrounded by razor-wire fences, gun towers, heavily-armed patrols and attack dogs, with snipers on guard in gun towers.
He apparently lives in a 7-by-12-foot concrete cell with double doors for 23 hours a day in isolation and is granted an hour outdoors to get some fresh air.
El Chapo became the country’s top drug lord in 2003 after the arrest of his rival Osiel Cardenas of the Gulf Cartel.
He was considered the “most powerful drug trafficker in the world” by the US Department of the Treasury and “one of the most powerful people in the world” by Forbes between 2009 and 2013.
Guzman was a “principal leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a Mexico-based international drug trafficking organization responsible for importing and distributing more than a million kilograms of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin in the US,” according to the US Office of Public Affairs.
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