The 94-year-old mother of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera passed away in Culiacán, Sinaloa, on Sunday.
María Consuelo Loera Peréz died in a private clinic in the state capital approximately two weeks after she was hospitalized, according to reports.
The newspaper El Sol de Sinaloa reported that she was suffering from a range of ailments, but the cause of her death wasn’t specified.
Loera lived most of her life in La Tuna, a community in the Sinaloa municipality of Badiraguato, where “El Chapo” and his five siblings were born.
She made the news a few times in recent years, including in 2019, when she sent a letter to former United States president Donald Trump to request a humanitarian visa to enter the United States to see her imprisoned son.
Guzmán Loera, a former Sinaloa Cartel leader who was convicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges in February 2019 and sentenced to life in prison later the same year, has been incarcerated in the U.S. since his extradition in 2017.
His mother never got the opportunity to visit him in Colorado’s “Supermax” prison as U.S. authorities denied her visa request.
Loera was back in the news in March 2020 when she briefly met with President López Obrador during a visit he was making to Badiraguato. López Obrador was criticized for shaking hands with the elderly woman, from whom he had received a letter asking for the government’s assistance in her quest to visit her son in the U.S.
Loera, who had four sons and two daughters with Emilio Guzmán Bustillos, staunchly defended “El Chapo” and advocated his repatriation. In addition, she “always publicly denied that he was the boss of the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico,” according to Jenaro Villamil, a journalist and president of Mexico’s public broadcasting agency.
Speaking about Loera’s passing at his regular news conference on Monday, López Obrador said that “any human being who loses his or her life deserves respect.”
Her grieving family members deserve “consideration,” he added.
With reports from El Sol de Sinaloa, El Universal and El Financiero
