Suspected ‘El Chapo’ associate in jail
Judge denies bail to a former Mexican legislator accused of laundering money for Sinaloa drug cartel.
SAN DIEGO — An alleged mistress of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, under arrest on accusations of helping launder money for his Sinaloa cartel, was denied bail Thursday by a federal judge in San Diego.
Several factors weighed into the judge’s decision to keep Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, 28, behind bars: She has no ties to the U.S., her visa had been revoked, she is alleged to have close links to Guzmán and his inner circle, and she is accused of acting corruptly during her stint as a Mexican legislator. A prosecutor also described in court how Sánchez tried to flee shortly after being arrested at the Cross Border Xpress, a secure passage connecting Tijuana’s A.L. Rodríguez International Airport to San Diego.
Sánchez already had been fingerprinted and photographed at the facility after her June 21 arrest and was sitting on a bench, not handcuffed, when she ran out of the room and up a flight of stairs toward Mexico, Assistant U.S. Atty. Joshua Mellor said. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers yelled at her to stop, chased her and tackled her. She resisted, Mellor said.
Sánchez faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison if convicted of the charge, conspiracy to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine. On Thursday, dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit, she listened to the arguments with her head down. At times she wiped away tears.
She is accused of facilitating communications between Guzmán, the top tier of his cartel and the lower operatives. In an affidavit supporting her arrest, a Homeland Security Investigations agent alleged Sánchez was behind different code names in text messages that coordinated the flow of money to the cartel.
The messages were intercepted as part of a wiretap investigation by federal authorities in Arizona. At the time the messages were sent, in 2013 and 2014, Sánchez was a legislator for the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Guzmán’s stronghold.
Sánchez — the wife of a veterinarian and mother to three children in Mexico, according to her San Diego attorney — has long been rumored to be romantically linked to Guzmán, an allegation further outlined in the affidavit.
She has denied those reports, as well as rumors that the drug lord fathered one of her children.
Her former husband, a journalist, was gunned down outside a home in Sinaloa in 2014.
Sánchez left her legislator position in September, after being stripped of legislative immunity, and soon after she was charged with using false identification to enter the Altiplano prison during a September 2014 visit to see Guzmán.
Sánchez asserts she is not the one captured on video visiting Guzmán that day, and on her Facebook page she has repeatedly professed her innocence.
“I’m confident that justice will be done, and everything will be resolved,” she wrote in June 2016.
She was out on bond in Mexico on that case and had been complying with the terms of her release when she crossed into the U.S. last week, her San Diego federal defender, Joshua Jones, said in court Thursday.
Sánchez’s border crossing card was canceled by the U.S. State Department because of her alleged involvement with the cartel, although she was not aware of that when she tried to enter the country last week, Jones said.
Her Mexican lawyer, Francisco Verdugo, said that she had received death threats in Mexico and came to the U.S. to investigate the possibility of getting government protection for her and her children. She left the children with family members.
Verdugo said Sánchez did not know she was under investigation.