El Chapo is now locked inside one of the most secure prisons in the world, and many say the way he’s being held is worse than death.
He spends up to 23 hours a day alone in a concrete cell with almost no human contact and barely any connection to the outside world.
On the night of July 11th, 2015, security cameras inside Mexico’s Aliplano Federal Penitentiary recorded a man pacing in his cell.
Guzman was last seen by security cameras at 2052 hours near the shower area in his cell.
The shower area was the only part of his cell that was not visible through the security camera.
He drifted toward the shower and then he was gone.
After the guards did not see him for 25 minutes on surveillance video, personnel went looking for him.
When they reached his cell, Guzman was gone.
What they found next was staggering.
It was discovered he had escaped through a tunnel leading from the shower area to a house construction site 1.
5 km away in a Santa Wanita neighborhood.
The tunnel lay 10 meters deep underground and Guzman used a ladder to climb to the bottom.
The tunnel was 1.
7 meters tall and 75 cm in width.
It was equipped with artificial light, air ducts, and highquality construction materials.
In addition, a motorcycle was found in the tunnel, which authorities think was used to transport materials and possibly Guzman himself.
The escape tunnel took an estimated 12 to 16 months to build and cost approximately $5 million.
This wasn’t even his first vanishing act.
He bribed multiple prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum security prison in 2001.
Some accounts said he left the lockup hidden in a laundry cart, but more recent accounts suggest he walked out dressed in a guard’s uniform accompanied by corrupt officers.
His escape exposed widespread corruption in the Mexican prison system with dozens of guards and officials implicated in helping him flee.
The man born in poverty in Sinaloa in 1957 had made a career out of doing the impossible.
He pioneered the use of distribution cells and long range tunnels near borders which enabled him to export more drugs to the United States than any other trafficker in history.
Forbes ranked him as one of the most powerful people in the world between 2009 and 2013.
While the Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that he matched the influence and wealth of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, for years the world watched Waqin Guzman treat maximum security walls like suggestions.
Mexican authorities threw him into their tightest lockups and he slipped out with tunnels, bribes, laundry carts, motorcycles on rails.
El Chapo escaped prison twice in 2001 and 2015 while being held by Mexican authorities.
But after his recapture in January 2016, the Mexican government fasttracked his extradition to the United States, knowing their prisons had failed to hold him, the message was clear.
If Mexico couldn’t cage El Chapo, the Americans would.
And what awaited him on American soil was a facility designed with one purpose.
To make sure no human being ever leaves.
100 mi south of Denver, tucked into the high desert of Fremont County, Colorado, sits the United States Penitentiary, administrative maximum facility, commonly known as ADX Florence, Florence Supermax, and the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
ADX Florence, constructed in 1994 and opened the following year, is classed as a supermax or control unit prison that provides a higher, more controlled level of custody than a regular maximum security prison.
This is not an ordinary prison.
This is the prison that was built after prisons themselves failed.
Fatally stabbed correctional officers Merl Klutz and Robert Hoffman at the United States Penitentiary, Marian.
The stabbings took place only a few hours apart and were blamed on inadequate prison design.
Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson proposed a new facility to isolate the most dangerous uncontrollable inmates for security and safety.
So, ADX Florence was engineered from the ground up to contain individuals whom every other prison in the federal system had failed to hold.
People with absolutely nothing left to lose.
The prison has 1,400 steel remote controlled doors and is surrounded by pressure pads and barbed wire fences.
100 m south of Denver, sprawled across 37 acres in the Colorado high desert and surrounded by 12 gun towers, lies the nation’s only federal supermax prison.
The inmates who live here read like a roster of the most infamous criminals in modern American history.
along with El Chapo, the Boston Marathon bomber, Jokar Sarna, and shoe bomber Richard Reed all call ADX home.
The unabomber Ted Kazinski served part of his sentence at ADX Florence Prison before his death.
These are people the United States government has decided should never breathe unmonitored air again.
And that is exactly where on July 19th, 2019, Wen Guzman arrived.
Only hours after receiving a life sentence, convicted Mexican drug lord Weaqin El Chapo Guzman was forced to make a sudden departure to the highest security prison in the US.
A government helicopter whisked the narco, notorious for his daring jailbreaks, out of New York City on Wednesday after the sentencing in federal court in Brooklyn.
There was no waiting period, no evaluation window.
The Bureau of Prisons did not take any chances with a man who had embarrassed two nations with his disappearing acts.
In July 2019, Guzman was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years after a 12-week trial in the United States District Court, where he was convicted of dozens of charges, including 26 drugrelated violations and one murder conspiracy.
But it wasn’t just ADX Florence awaiting him.
It was something worse, something even most ADX inmates don’t experience.
Range 13 is a special four-cell wing within the special housing unit for inmates in need of the tightest control.
As of 2022, the only inmates publicly known to have been incarcerated in this unit are Ramsay Yusef and Waqin El Chapo Guzman.
Range 13, a wing with only four cells, a prison within a prison within a prison.
Guzman and Sabatino are housed in a special wing of supermax known as the suits.
They are not allowed to communicate with any other prisoners and have limited interactions with prison staff.
They are also not allowed to speak to anyone outside of prison except for their attorneys and one or two family members.
Former ADX warden Robert Hood, who oversaw the facility from 2002 to 2005, put it in terms that haunt anyone who hears them.
He described life in ADX in stark terms.
As soon as they come through the door, you see it in their faces.
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 is the last time you will ever see it.
The Supermax is life after death.
It’s long-term.
In my opinion, it’s far, much worse than death.
Life after death.
A warden, the person who ran the place, said that.
So, what does a day inside ADX Florence actually look like for El Chapo? Every inmate sticks to the same rigid schedule, spending 23 hours a day within the solitary confines of a 7 by 12 ft concrete cell that is roughly the size of a parking space.
Inside that space, the cells are 7 ft dax 12 ft and contain a desk, stool, and bed made of concrete.
They also contain a toilet that shuts off if it is clogged in some way, a shower on a timer to prevent flooding, and a button controlled sink.
Every surface is poured concrete.
The walls, the floor, the furniture, the walls, floor, the desk, the sink, even the bed, a slab of concrete.
No softness, no warmth, no comfort.
The room is soundproof.
The rooms are said to be soundproof.
The window, if you can call it 4 in of reinforced frosted glass, a window, points toward the sky at an angle that deliberately prevents inmates from knowing where in the facility they are located.
You cannot see the mountains.
You cannot see the horizon.
You see a sliver of daylight if you’re lucky and that’s all.
Meals are delivered through a narrow slot in a heavy steel door.
The likes of El Chapo won’t meet up in a dining room for their meals.
Instead, they have their meals given to them through a slot through their cell door.
There is no communal dining.
There is no cafeteria.
There are no conversations over breakfast.
There is a tray pushed through a slit in a door.
And then there is silence again.
They are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
They are kept under restraint, handcuffed, shackled, or both.
The hour outside of the cell is for exercise and a phone call if they have earned the privilege.
You get a little fortified recreation cage that’s outside that you get to walk around in for an hour a day.
It’s a small enclosed concrete pen, sometimes described as little more than an empty swimming pool with a cage over the top.
You pace, you look up, you see a strip of sky through metal grading.
That is your entire experience of the outside world.
Despite an occasional visit from prison staff, such as a correctional officer, teacher, or chaplain, the prisoners are deprived of human interaction, and they might not ever see friends or loved ones again.
They are kept under 247 surveillance.
Every movement watched, every sound monitored.
Each 12 frame AX7 cell is equipped with a bed, desk, bathroom, shower, and a separate recreation cage.
The cell has a camera equipped with night vision and sound.
This subjects inmates to 247th audio and visual surveillance, which is monitored and recorded by both the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI.
For El Chapo specifically, the isolation cuts even deeper because of the language barrier.
Guzman is a 67year-old man who speaks no English, only Spanish.
He has had a very difficult time acclimating to life in the supermax and his severe communication restrictions.
Even the Spanish-speaking guards are instructed not to interact with him or talk with him.
Imagine that for a moment.
You speak only one language.
The handful of staff members around you who also speak that language are told they cannot talk to you.
He is alleging that he is in complete and total isolation with virtually no human contact of any kind.
So this is complete isolation from any human contact.
The man who once commanded an army of tens of thousands, who once had presidential level security details, who moved billions of dollars and had the personal phone numbers of generals and governors.
That man now goes days, sometimes weeks, hearing the sound of no voice but his own, echoing off of concrete.
former warden Hood explained, “The punishment that they’re receiving is far beyond just doing time.
” One former ADX inmate who was released after 15 years inside described it in bleeer terms.
It’s more like you’re in hell.
You’re at the bottom and there’s nothing else.
He called it the death penalty on a payment plan.
The physical parameters of El Chapo’s existence are grim, but the psychological toll is where the story becomes genuinely harrowing.
It started before he even reached ADX Florence.
When Guzman was held at a Manhattan federal jail awaiting trial, his attorneys raised alarms about his mental state.
Guzman was suffering from hallucinations, depression, and paranoia, which his lawyers said may soon be serious enough to find him unfit to stand trial.
His attorney, Eduardo Balerzo, told reporters, “We have noticed that his mental state has deteriorated.
Not just his memory, but the way he understands things.
He’s not the man he was when I first met him.
That was 2017 and 2018 before he was even sentenced before ADX Florence, before Range 13.
By the time he had spent years in the supermax, the deterioration had accelerated dramatically.
She said while she’s obviously not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, she has known Guzman for almost a decade and has noted significant changes.
Colon went on to say the changes are a result of the complete isolation he’s subjected to.
The US government keeps him under inhuman conditions.
They don’t let him leave his cell.
Guzman himself has written letters from inside ADX Florence that paint a desperate picture.
I have no access to group therapy.
He wrote, “I have no one to help me cope with the effects and trauma of solitary confinement.
” The BOP staff at ADX Florence have ignored all my requests for regular visits from a mental health professional.
He has also written, “I have complained several times about being woken up every night after midnight by a sudden blast of extreme hot air that lasts about 15 minutes.
It happens four or five times a night and causes my heart to race.
I have experienced depression and memory loss, which are also symptoms of severe sleep deprivation, he wrote in eight letters dated between 2023 and 2024, which are part of a legal complaint he filed in a Colorado court against the US Department of Justice, the Bureau of Prisons, and Prison Officials.
Guzman claimed his capttors are trying to kill him or poison him.
He has written directly to the judge who sentenced him, complaining that the conditions here are inhuman.
In the letter to Judge Kogan, El Chapo sent a sorrowful postcript stating that his letter was delayed because it’s been more than one month since I’ve been able to get a stamp.
I hope that something is deposited in my commissary so that I can submit my letter.
A man who once had access to private jets and submarines.
His communication with his own family has been severed.
He labeled it unprecedented discrimination against him.
In one of his letters, he wrote, “The SAMs are punitive and I am getting sick.
I ask that they please remove the SAMs before I have a heart attack or go insane.
Because under the conditions I am currently living in, which are so cruel and inhumane, that is what will happen.
This is not a man posturing for sympathy.
Forensic records tell the same story, spoke in a low voice and at a slow pace and displayed a flat emotional tone inconsistent with his speech.
I’m not feeling well, he told the expert.
Since my arrest in Almaloya, everything has become hell, he said.
Every four hours, they woke me up to put me in front of the camera.
The science corroborates the claim that prolonged isolation of this nature rewires the human brain.
Symptoms resulting from being held in isolation for extended periods include anxiety, depression, insomnia, hypertension, extreme paranoia, perceptual distortions, and psychosis characterized by paranoia, panic attacks, aggression, and psychotic symptoms.
The United Nations has weighed in too.
The United Nations established the Mandela rules governing the treatment of prisoners, which prohibits the use of prolonged solitary confinement, defined as 22 hours or more per day, and equates it with torture.
By that definition, what El Chapo is experiencing, 23 hours a day in a soundproof concrete cell meets the international threshold for torture.
In 2024, Guzman filed his own civil rights complaint in federal court, alleging that the conditions at ADX Florence violate the ETH amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
The lawsuit alleges that the all-encompassing isolation is cruel and unusual punishment, and Guzman will suffer irreparable harm as a result of the unconstitutional isolation.
The amended filing asserts that Guzman suffers from near constant severe sinus, ear, nose, and throat pain for years without adequate medical care and has experienced severe sleep deprivation for years due to the conditions of confinement in his cell.
In December 2024, Guzman was appointed pro bono counsel.
Prominent Colorado civil rights attorneys David Lane and Daryl Kilmer entered the case in February.
Attorney David Lane described it as a civil rights case that Guzman filed on his own.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Prisons maintains that these extreme security measures are entirely justified.
Given Guzman’s escape history and risk profile, and they are not entirely wrong, this is a man who escaped prison twice.
This is a man whose organization spent $5 million and over a year building an underground highway beneath a maximum security prison.
This is a man who once ran an operation that corrupted entire swaths of Mexican law enforcement.
But even within ADX Florence, Guzman exists in a tier of isolation that sets him apart from nearly every other inmate, segregated from all other prisoners in the highest security prison in the United States.
Although in separate cells, Sabatino and Guzman have communicated freely for over 5 years, day and night, by talking loudly through the doors.
Sabatino, an American mob connected con artist, became the closest thing Guzman has to a companion.
Most importantly, Sabatino often serves as a translator between the guards and Guzman.
Two men trapped in adjacent concrete boxes, shouting through solid steel doors.
That is the sum total of El Chapo’s social existence.
His only human relationship is conducted at a scream through inches of metal.
In 2025, Guzman’s legal team claimed that conditions in the prison had led to a steep decline in his health, including high blood pressure, insomnia, and anxiety.
His wife, Emma Coronel, was released from prison in 2023 after serving her own sentence related to the cartel.
She was freed after serving her three-year prison term, most of which was served in a Texas prison for her role in her husband’s vast drug empire.
Before being transferred to a low security halfway house in California, “She’s out.
He will never be.
” Citing a lack of legal grounds, his sons are now making their own headlines.
His sons, collectively referred to as Los Chapitos, remain active in various legal and criminal investigations.
Alvidio Guzman Lopez was captured in 2023 and extradited to the US the same year.
Yuain Gubman Lopez was arrested in Texas in 2024 and is currently awaiting trial.
Although El Chapo is imprisoned, the Sinaloa cartel continues to operate, though with internal instability.
Following the arrest of Ismael Elmo Zambada in 2024, the cartel has reportedly splintered into factions.
The empire is crumbling.
The family is fractured.
At least nine inmates have died or are suspected of having died by suicide at the facility, while Alcatraz had 14 escape attempts during its 29-year run.
ADX Florence is said to have had zero successful attempts since opening nearly three decades ago.
There’s no tunnel to dig.
There is no guard to bribe.
There is no motorcycle on rails waiting underground.
There are only concrete walls, a concrete slab for a bed, and silence.
Thomas Silverstein, an inmate who spent decades at ADX before his death, described the experience this way.
Sitting in your very own personalized coffin, watching yourself rot away day by day, minute by minute, wondering which part of yourself is first to decay.
Renee Ladner, the fiance of a convicted ADX inmate, described the place as a clean version of hell.
The man who Forbes once listed among the most powerful people on the planet, the man who matched Pablo Escobar’s empire, the man who escaped twice and humiliated a nation, now sits.
No access to a mental health professional who speaks his language.
As of 2025, he is still alive.
El Chapo is still alive.
He is currently serving a life sentence under highly restrictive conditions.
The former warden of the place where he will die already answered it.
The supermax is life after death.
It’s long-term.
