Joaquín Guzmán Loera is distressed. Or at least, that is what he has conveyed to Judge Brian Cogan in the 23 letters sent between April 10 and July 13. “Chapo”—the nickname for the former Sinaloa Cartel leader serving a life sentence in the U.S. since 2019 for various drug-trafficking offenses—has insisted in every missive on the “unfair treatment” he receives in prison and his desire to be extradited.
Despite his repeated requests, the judge has denied them all. However, this correspondence has raised questions about whether he is truly exploring a new facet as a writer or if someone else is impersonating him. Documentation and evidence reveal that the actual author of at least two of the letters is a U.S. citizen named Aubrey Gideon, who has been posing as the Mexican kingpin in pleas for judicial leniency north of the Rio Grande.
Each of the letters—purportedly written by the kingpin—emphasized the “unfair treatment” he receives in prison and his desire to serve his sentence in Mexico; one even claimed that President Claudia Sheinbaum has a “safe place” for his incarceration south of the border. In one letter, Chapo argues that “the Mexican government was responsible for all the violent crimes; I didn’t hurt anyone […] In my country, I wasn’t known for bad things; the good things I did in Mexico were wanting my family to eat together and have a wonderful life.” Despite his repeated requests—each handwritten and written in broken English containing grammatical errors, yet flaunting legal jargon—Cogan responded to a series of five missives with the following message: “Some of these letters are unintelligible and none have a legal basis. Therefore, these requests have been denied.”
However, with each letter, glaring details raised doubts about the sender’s true identity. Each envelope, logged in the court record, bears a return address from ADX Florence—the maximum-security federal prison in Colorado where he has been held since 2019. Yet, the envelopes bear postmarks from Jackson, Mississippi, nearly 2,000 kilometers away from where Guzmán Loera is incarcerated.
The letters were initially signed “Joaquín Guzmán,” then “Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán,” while the most recent ones listed the sender as “Joaquín El Chapo Loera Guzmán”—with his surnames inverted, given that the kingpin’s legal family names are Guzmán Loera, in that order. The name of Aubrey Gideon—a 46-year-old resident of Greenwood, Mississippi, according to available records—appears for the first time in a letter sent from Jackson on June 10.
In this missive, in which he impersonates the former Sinaloa Cartel leader, he complains about his “health situation” in prison and objects to confinement policies that deny him the “privilege” of family visits. “The letters being received in court are my legal petition from Aubrey Gideon in Greenwood, MS 38930 [Mississippi], regarding his rights and the connection with my lawyer in the fight for my freedom in the United States,” reads a handwritten paragraph in English in which Gideon inadvertently reveals his own identity.
Additionally, on June 27, Gideon uploaded a video to one of his three Instagram accounts showing a hand—presumed to be his—depositing two envelopes into a blue public mailbox on the street, the kind typically used for outgoing mail. One of the envelopes bears the return address of “Joaquin El Chapo Loera Guzman,” along with his inmate number (89914053) and the address of the ADX Florence prison. A comparison of the handwriting and ink color with letters on file in his court records reveals a match with a letter written on June 12, which was received and logged six days later by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
