El Chapo’s sons killed Mexican journalist for reporting on drug cartels

The sons of former drug kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman killed a journalist who covered Mexico’s drug wars, a court hears.

Guzman’s wife Emma Coronel outside court in New York yesterday. Picture: Getty

The sons of former drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman killed Mexican journalist Javier Valdez because he insisted on publishing an interview with a drug trafficker, who told of the murder in court yesterday.

Damaso Lopez Nunez, known as “The Lawyer”, testified that the slain journalist — who specialised in reporting on drug trafficking — “disobeyed the threatening orders of my compadre’s children and that’s why they killed him”.

The testimony came as part of Guzman’s trial in New York, where he faces charges over drug trafficking, firearms and money laundering. Valdez was co-founder of the weekly Riodoce de Sinaloa. One of the most prominent chroniclers of the drug war, he was gunned down in May 2017. He was 50 years old.

Lopez worked for the ultra-­violent Sinaloa cartel and was convicted last year of trafficking by a federal court in Virginia. He had been arrested days before the journalist’s murder.

According to the US Department of Justice, Lopez was the deputy head of a Mexican maximum security prison in 2001 when he helped Guzman escape. He then joined the cartel as Guzman’s lieutenant.

He told the jury that another Mexican journalist had mentioned his name in connection with an operation against Guzman’s children — an accusation he said was “totally false”. To disprove the information, he decided to grant Valdez a telephone interview, which Guzman’s children discovered and were against.

They threatened Valdez and commanded him not to published it. “But he, complying with his ethics, published it anyway,” Lopez said.

Earlier, Lopez pointed to Guzman’s much younger wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, as playing a role in the cartel leader’s second spectacular escape from prison in 2015. He said Coronel, 29, relayed several messages from Guzman to Lopez as the drug lord plotted his breakout. The former beauty queen listened in the courtroom.

Guzman, who is accused of trafficking more than 155 tonnes of cocaine and other drugs to the US, was first jailed in 1993 and spent eight years behind bars, where he met Lopez. After his first escape in 2001 in a dirty laundry cart, he was again arrested in February 2014 at a hotel, where he was with Coronel and their twins, born in 2011. Through Coronel, he asked Lopez for help bribing prison guards, along with securing weapons and an armoured truck.

The pair met with Guzman’s eldest sons, who bought land close to the prison and began constructing a 1500m tunnel into their father’s cell.

Lopez also spoke of Guzman’s request that the sons buy a GPS watch with exact co-ordinates. He did not say who gave the device to Guzman, but Coronel had visited him at the prison.

During the construction of the tunnel, the noise of drills against the jail’s concrete floor “caused discomfort” to other prisoners who complained of the din, according to Lopez’s account of what Guzman later told him.

Months after his jailbreak, Guzman was arrested again in January 2016. He was transferred to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and a plan to bribe an official to return him to the first prison failed.

Guzman was extradited to the US in January 2017 and faces life in prison if found guilty. Lopez, 52, is hoping a judge will reduce his sentence in exchange for his testimony in Guzman’s trial.

As he began his testimony, Lopez — the godfather of one of Guzman’s twin daughters — looked at his former boss and fist-bumped his chest.

Asked why he made the gesture, Lopez said: “Because I love him.”

Then why testify?

“I chose to think about my family,” Lopez said.

AFP