America’s toughest jail ready for El Chapo
The notorious Mexican druglord will find it impossible to escape from his new jail cell
HE ONCE bribed guards to smuggle him out of a top-security prison in a laundry basket. Another time he wriggled through a tunnel complete with air vents and lights dug under the shower in his jail cell – then zoomed off on a waiting motorbike to continue his life as the most notorious druglord in the world.
But illicit freedom is a thing of the past now for Joaquín Guzmán Loera, or El Chapo as he’s known the world over.
This time he won’t be able to bribe staff or enlist his sidekicks in his complex breakout schemes – because this time he’ll be in a jail so secure and restrictive
it’s described as hell on earth. Only worse.
El Chapo will be sentenced in June for running the international Sinaloa drug-smuggling cartel which earned more than $14 billion (R197 billion).
And the authorities won’t take any chances. The 61-year-old Mexican is likely to serve out the rest of his days at the so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies: Colorado’s Administrative Maximum Facility, also known as ADX Florence or simply the Supermax.
The super-maximum (supermax) security prison, 185km south of Denver in the middle of nowhere, is home to some of the most infamous and violent criminals in the world.
“They’ve been in jail. They’ve killed staff. They’ve killed a visitor,” former ADX warden Robert Hood says. “They’ve earned, if you will, the right to go to Supermax. These are terrorists. These are disruptive gang members. They’re spies.”
Among ADX’s prominent inmates are Al Qaeda operative and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who’s serving six life sentences, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who’s awaiting execution for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
“El Chapo fits the bill perfectly,” Cameron Lindsay, who served as a warden in three federal lockups, told the Associated Press. “I’d be absolutely shocked if he’s not sent to the ADX.”
Since the facility opened its doors in 1994 no one has escaped. The perimeter
‘The Supermax is life after death. In my opinion it’s much worse than death’
of the 15-hectare property is surrounded by pressure pads that instantly detect unauthorised movement and is constantly patrolled by heavily armed guards, attack dogs and vehicles.
Twelve imposing gun towers rise above the squat red-brick buildings within the complex, which is ringed by 3,7m razorwire fences that almost obscure the distant snow-capped mountains.
“As soon as prisoners come through the door you see it in their faces,” Hood says. “That’s when it really hits you. You’re looking at the beauty of the Rocky Mountains in the backdrop. When you get inside, that’s the last time you’ll ever see it.
“The Supermax is life after death. In my opinion it’s much worse than death.”
EL CHAPO was on the run for six months after his second jailbreak in July 2015, before being caught fleeing a hideout in Sinaloa, Mexico, in 2016. He was extradited to the USA in January 2017 and earlier this month he was found guilty of all 10 charges against him.
“For more than two-and-a-half months the jury sat through testimony about unspeakable torture and ghastly murders, epic corruption at nearly every level of Mexico’s government, narco-mistresses and naked subterranean escapes, goldplated AK-47s and monogrammed, diamond-encrusted pistols,” CNN reports.
The courtroom was closed to the public and camera equipment was banned to keep the jurors’ identities a secret, for fear of retaliation by El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel.
The druglord, who lived a life of unbridled luxury, will probably have to get used to a reinforced cell the size of a bathroom. The 1,67m-tall cartel boss, whose nickname means Shorty, will sleep on a concrete slab topped with a thin foam mattress and blankets.
The rest of the cell holds a desk and a stool made of concrete, fixed to the wall and floor to prevent prisoners using them to harm themselves. A metal toilet with a cistern that doubles as a basin and water fountain stands against one wall and a minuscule shower against another.
The only sound inmates are likely to hear is the crackling audio of a small black and white TV showing carefully chosen educational and religious programmes.
The soundproofed walls ensure there can be no contact between prisoners, and the 10 x 122cm windows are designed so inmates can see only the sky.
Supermax prisoners spend 23 hours of the day locked up, with just one hour allocated for exercise outside.
They wear handcuffs, leg irons and stomach chains when marched by guards to the recreation area, which is a cage built into a concrete pit. From inside the cage, only the sky is visible.
Even El Chapo’s contact with guards will be limited – a wise choice, considering he managed to bribe guards at a maximum security prison in Mexico in 2001.
He won’t even leave his cell for meals. “Everything the inmate needs comes and goes through the door slot,” inmate Eric Robert Rudolph, also known as the Atlanta Olympic Park Bomber, wrote in an essay in 2008.
“The basic setup is for long-term solitary confinement. The purpose is to gradually tear a person down mentally and physically, through environmental and physical deprivation.”
AND that’s not the worst of it. There’s also the special security unit or H-unit, reserved for terrorists and other inmates whose contact with the outside world must be limited even further.
Given El Chapo’s history of Houdinilike escapes, he could well find himself here, prison sources believe.
H-unit inmates often don’t even have contact with their guards – their cells have automated chutes that open onto private yards for their caged daily walkabout.
The only visitors El Chapo will be allowed are his lawyers and immediate family – his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro (29), and their seven-year-old twins, Emaly and Maria.
He won’t be permitted to touch them and their conversations will take place through a telephone on either side of an impenetrable window.
His wife didn’t miss a day of El Chapo’s trial in New York. The American-born beauty is the daughter of Inés Coronel Barreras, a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel.
Emma, who married El Chapo on her 18th birthday, attended court dressed to the nines in expensive items by designers Carolina Herrera, Louis Vuitton and Gucci.
“I think it’s what any wife would do in my place – be with her husband in difficult times,” she said in a rare interview with Telemondo in December last year.
She maintains he’s just a “simple, humble guy”. And recently she insisted he’s “an excellent father, friend, brother, son, partner”.
“I don’t know my husband as the person they’re trying to show him as. I admire him as the human being I met, the one I married.”
From now on her admiration is going to have to be through bullet-proof glass.