Witness says El Chapo raped 13-year-old girls

The prosecutors of Joaquín el Chapo's trial, Guzmán Loera, have spent more than ten weeks presenting the drug dealer as a heinous criminal. According to prosecutors, Chapo allegedly trafficked tons of narcotics, bribed virtually all officials in Mexico and once ordered his henchmen to cremate the bodies of two of their enemies in a bonfire.

However, on Friday night, two days before the scheduled start of the jury's deliberations, the prosecutors revealed secret documents relating a series of even more shocking allegations against Guzmán. Most troubling were the charges that the corporal had once raped one of his mistresses and that he frequently abused women so young that they were sometimes only 13 years old and that He sometimes used drugs. who put them "powdered substances."

Eduardo Balarezo, Guzmán's lawyer, immediately rejected the charges and issued a statement on Saturday stating that "Joaquín denies the charges".

In his statement, Balarezo warned that the charges "lacked corroboration and were considered too biased and unreliable to be admitted to trial." "It is unfortunate that these documents were made public just before the jury began its deliberations," he added.

The date of publication of these documents was set for January 23 when Judge Brian Cogan issued an order authorizing a schedule originally proposed jointly by the defense and the Crown. The order of Judge Cogan came in response to letters from The New York Times and Vice Media expressing complaints about the extreme secret of the case.

The disclosed documents establish that the statements that Guzmán allegedly raped underage girls would come from Alex Cifuentes Villa, who was his personal secretary and who testified during the trial that he was living with the drug dealer in the camps rural Sierra Madre while he was hiding Mexican authorities. According to Cifuentes, a woman known as Comadre María constantly sent photographs to Guzmán to choose women so young that they were only 13 years old. For $ 5,000, Cifuentes said he often took young women to the mountains for the capo and members of his escort, including Cifuentes, to rape them.

According to the documents, Guzmán considered that the youngest were "his vitamins" because their abuse gave him "life".

Cifuentes had previously mentioned Comadre María during her testimony at the trial. On January 15, he informed the jury that a woman known as Comadre María had also served as an intermediary for the drug dealer after allegedly paying a $ 100 million bribe to the former president Enrique Peña Nieto.

The documents also contain an unclear reference to another violation committed by Guzmán. Prosecutors have indicated that Judge Cogan had withdrawn from the trial evidence that Guzman had badually badaulted a witness who had cooperated in the case before "having started a romantic relationship with her and made her". She is a person involved in her criminal activities ".

The documents do not identify the witness, but the only woman who collaborated to testify against Guzmán was his ex-wife, Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López. In a story on the bench, Sánchez described the jury as having escaped with the drug dealer in a tunnel hidden under a bathtub in 2014, when elements of the Mexican Navy arrived at the door of the house. where they were.

The documents also contain information about Cifuentes.

They say, for example, that Cifuentes has already beaten him with his wife because he had "badually harbaded" the nanny of his children. It is also stated in the documents that Cifuentes had formerly obtained "snake oil" from a healer and that he was interested in "the Illuminati Order, to Freemasonry, other planets, other galaxies, UFOs and the idea of ​​the impending apocalypse of 2012 ".

How was Cifuentes interested in these questions?

"For Internet Videos and Discovery Channel", is included in the documents.

* Copyright: 2019 The New York Times News Service