Mystery surrounds bizarre 'El Chapo' letters sent to federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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Set us as preferred As the top boss of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán ran a multinational drug-smuggling enterprise despite being functionally illiterate, having dropped out of school around the third grade.Evidence presented at El Chapo’s trial, which ended in 2019 with his conviction and a sentence of life in U.S.prison with no parole, showed that he tended to scribble messages to underlings in broken Spanish.

So when a series of letters, handwritten in English and allegedly signed by El Chapo, recently began arriving at the federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., they posed a mystery.Did El Chapo really write them? And if not, who was writing on his behalf?More than 20 letters attributed to El Chapo have been received by the court, with the first dated April 10 and the latest posted Tuesday on his case docket in the Eastern District of New York.

They have voiced a litany of complaints about the unfairness of El Chapo’s prosecution and requested that he be sent back to Mexico.“I did no harm to no one,” said one, dated April 25.“I was known in my country not for bad things, the good things I’ve done.”The letters have drawn mockery and outrage online, with Mexican citizens fuming over the notorious drug lord, who twice escaped from prison in his home country, apparently having the gall to think he could be set free.

World & Nation The U.S.case against a Mexican governor is entwined with the mysterious kidnapping of Sinaloa cartel kingpin Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada.

That betrayal may have triggered a political and criminal reckoning on both sides of the border.Others wondered whether El Chapo somehow managed to learn English behind bars, or whether he was perhaps using the public court filings to send coded messages that enabled him to continue calling the shots for his cartel.The me...