Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz responded to claims by drug lord Joaquín Guzmán’s wife questioning her family link: ‘I have a document which says I’m his daughter’ 
 
 The eldest daughter of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has offered to take a DNA test to confirm her identity, after the imprisoned drug lord’s common-law wife claimed that his family did not know her. 
 
 El Chapo entered US twice while on the run after prison break, daughter claims Read more 
 
 Last week, the Guardian published an interview with Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, in which she alleged that her father had bankrolled the election campaigns of Mexican politicians, and claimed that El Chapo had visited the United States twice while on the run. 
 
 The explosive allegations caused opposition politicians in Mexico to call for an inquiry into campaign financing, but also prompted Guzmán’s partner, Emma Coronel, to issue a statement in which she denied any family link and demanded that Guzmán Ortiz take a DNA test. 
 
 Speaking to the Guardian on Sunday, Guzmán Ortiz said that Coronel and lawyers acting for El Chapo had told her to retract her claims in order to help speed up the drug lord’s extradition to the United States. 
 
 
 
 But Guzmán Ortiz said she stood by her allegations. “I’m not going to deny anything at all,” she said. 
 
 Asked whether she would be prepared to take a DNA test to confirm her relationship with El Chapo, she said: “Let them do it – I’m ready for it. 
 
 “I have a document which says I’m his daughter; [Emma Coronel] should show me the paper which says she’s his wife,” she said. 
 
 
 
 The Guardian has seen Guzmán Ortiz’s birth certificate, which names both parents, as well as several other identifying documents. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz suggested that Coronel’s response reflected a difference of opinion within her father’s legal team over whether the head of the Sinaloa cartel should attempt to fight the charges against him in Mexico or instead seek to make a deal with US authorities in the hope of a lighter prison sentence. 
 
 Last week, one of Guzmán’s lawyers, José Refugio Rodríguez, said that El Chapo wanted to accelerate extradition because he could no longer tolerate conditions in prison. But previously other lawyers acting for the capo issued a string of injunctions in an attempt to prevent him being sent abroad. 
 
 On Monday, Jose Manuel Merino of the Mexican attorney general’s office said the government had no knowledge of a request to speed up El Chapo’s extradition. 
 
 Last month, Coronel gave her first ever public interview, in which she depicted her husband as a loving family man, and said she feared for his life after he was placed under a harsh prison regime. 
 
 
 
 In the interview with Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández, Coronel described her husband as a loving family man and claimed to know little of his professional life. “I’m not certain that he traffics drugs,” she said. 
 
 But speaking to the Guardian, Guzmán Ortiz said: “We all know what my father did.” 
 
 According to Guzmán Ortiz, this is not the first time Coronel has fought with other members of the family: she said that a similar row broke out when Alejandrina Gisselle Guzmán, who is believed to be another of the drug lord’s daughters, attempted to trademark his name for a range of merchandise. 
 
 Separately, the Mexican government on Monday appeared to launch its own attempt at damage control. Without naming Guzmán Ortiz, the national security commissioner, Renato Sales, denied her allegations that El Chapo had bought protection from prominent officials and politicians. 
 
 “Not treaties, nor alliances, nor pacts with [organised] crime,” he said. “We will not give in to speculation whose only objective is to divert attention, make this subject a victim to loosen his security.” 
 
 
 
 Meanwhile, prosecutors said that they would seek to interview Guzmán Ortiz over her allegations. ||||| ‘My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,’ says Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, whose drug lord father is awaiting extradition from Mexico to the US 
 
 A balmy southern California afternoon, tourists and locals mingling in the coffee shop, and at first glance there was little to distinguish the 39-year-old American from other regulars. 
 
 Dressed casually in a black and white dress with black leggings and boots, she sipped her coffee and talked about work, kids and the importance of staying in touch with family. Her small chain of carwashes, beauty salons and cafes was going well, she said. 
 
 
 
 El Chapo wants extradition to US after Mexican guards deny sleep, says lawyer Read more 
 
 Very well, judging by the Rolex on her wrist, the Louis Vuitton bag at her feet and the Mercedes Benz parked outside. 
 
 
 
 There was another hint of a life less ordinary. Her features bore a distinct resemblance to a man whose face had long gazed from newspapers and televisions – a man hated and feared and admired for creating the world’s biggest and richest criminal syndicate. 
 
 
 
 She was Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz, the eldest daughter of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and she was sitting down with the Guardian in the United States, her adopted home, to give her first ever media interview. 
 
 
 
 “Did you know he’s called Archivaldo and not Joaquín?” she said. “My dad isn’t a millionaire like Forbes says. The magazine said you could count all the millions my old man supposedly had. That’s not true, the Mexican government invented that.” 
 
 
 
 In the three-hour interview and subsequent telephone and Skype conversations, Guzmán Ortiz revealed her hitherto unreported life in the US and made striking claims about her father, including the allegation that he visited her in California. 
 
 
 
 “He came twice,” she said. Asked how one of the world’s most wanted fugitives crossed the heavily guarded border she smiled. “I asked him the same, believe me.” 
 
 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz granted the interview in July 2015 on condition her exact location in California not be disclosed to protect her and her children’s privacy. Verification of certain details – and the hunt and recapture of her father, whom she consulted about the interview – delayed publication until now. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Recaptured drug lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is escorted by soldiers in Mexico City on 8 January 2016. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters 
 
 A taskforce of navy marines and police caught Chapo in Los Mochis, a town on Mexico’s Pacific coast, on 8 January after a wild gun battle and chase through sewers and streets. He is now in Altiplano, a maximum security jail north of Mexico City. 
 
 
 
 Earlier this week, the drug lord instructed his lawyers to stop fighting efforts to extradite him to the US, apparently in the hopes of a lighter sentence. But at 61, Guzmán may well end his days in a US prison cell, the final chapter to an extraordinary life which saw an impoverished orange-seller rise up the narco ranks to infamy and fortune. 
 
 El Chapo, which means Shorty, allegedly ran tonnes of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to the US from the wooded sierras of Sinaloa, a redoubt protected by corrupt officials, an army of gunmen and inhabitants who considered him a narco Robin Hood. 
 
 El Chapo is a family man being 'slowly tortured' in prison, says wife in first TV interview Read more 
 
 His organisation – the most powerful trafficking group in the Americas – has exerted its influence from New York to Buenos Aires, and while the Sinaloa cartel is broadly considered less sadistic than some of its rivals, El Chapo’s group is believed to be responsible for thousands of deaths. 
 
 In the interview Guzmán Ortiz ranged over cartel restructuring and betrayals, the alleged bribery of senior politicians, and El Chapo’s plan to retire. She also spoke of her friendships with a younger generation of “narco juniors” – the second generation of cartel families who have grown up enjoying extraordinary wealth and privilege. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz showed private family photographs of her father, plus letters he sent from jail. The Guardian independently corroborated some details but could not verify her allegations against senior Mexican politicians or her accounts of her father’s business dealings. 
 
 
 
 The picture that emerged was of a family inhabiting a strange netherworld of notoriety and anonymity, proud and defiant yet also coy and – since Chapo’s capture – resentful. His illicit empire bonded them as social outcasts while at the same time separating them from the patriarch when he was in hiding or in jail. 
 
 Despite El Chapo’s fearsome reputation, Guzmán Ortiz depicted her father as a family man who built a successful business with Mexican government approval, only to be betrayed by rival cartel members and politicians. 
 
 “My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,” she said. 
 
 Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, son of El Chapo and half-brother of Rosa. Photograph: Handout 
 
 She did not confirm or deny her father smuggled drugs (something he admitted to Sean Penn in January’s Rolling Stone interview) but said he lived humbly and had retired from the family “business” in 2014 before being captured. “My dad had passed the torch to my brother Iván Archivaldo and planned to step down and rest.” 
 
 Her account cast new light on a story shadowed in rumour and myth. 
 
 The short, stocky young man known Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera was beginning to make a name as a courier and enforcer for the then dominant Guadalajara cartel when he had a relationship in the mid-1970s with a schoolteacher named María Luisa Ortiz, which produced their daughter Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz. She was born in Zapopan municipality in Jalisco state in November 1976. 
 
 The Guardian has viewed several identity documents including her birth certificate. Guzmán Ortiz’s identity was also confirmed by Francisco Villa Gurrola, an evangelical minister in El Chapo’s hometown of Badiraguato, who met El Chapo in 2012 and is a close friend of his 87-year-old mother Consuelo Loera. 
 
 Of Rosa, he said: “I know her and I can tell you she’s a good woman – she’s the first daughter that Joaquín had with a woman in Jalisco.” 
 
 
 
 After her parents’ relationship ended Guzmán Ortiz was raised by her mother and a stepfather. He was abusive, she said, and at the age of 10 she stabbed him, landing her in a juvenile treatment centre in Tijuana. 
 
 
 
 Upon release she reconnected with her father. In 1992, aged 15, he sent her to Scripps Mercy, a private Catholic teaching hospital in San Diego, to be treated for potentially cancerous tumours on her back. 
 
 
 
 El Chapo's lair: the secluded house at the heart of Mexico's drug war Read more 
 
 In a sign of the closed – and arguably feudal – narco world, Chapo told his daughter he wanted her to marry Vicente Zambada Niebla, also known as El Vicentillo, the 16-year-old son of another drug lord, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Both fathers were annoyed, however, when she became pregnant before the marriage. Guzmán Ortiz had a second child with El Vicentillo after they married. 
 
 In May 1993 her father’s profession almost cost both their lives. They were in a parking lot at Guadalajara airport, she said, when a group of hitmen dispatched by the rival Tijuana cartel targeted the wrong car, killing a Roman Catholic cardinal, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, and six other people. 
 
 
 
 “On the day of the assassination I was in a car with my father when they started shooting from every direction. We didn’t know who it was that got killed, but later we heard it was the cardinal. My father had nothing to do with it,” she said. 
 
 
 
 Amid national outrage over the massacre Chapo sent his daughter to live with an aunt in California, who she had visited regularly from an early age. He was caught a few weeks later and spent the next eight years directing his growing empire from behind bars. 
 
 
 
 When extradition to the US loomed in 2001 he broke out from Puente Grande prison near Guadalajara, reportedly in a laundry cart, and spent the next 13 years on the run, mostly in his Sinaloa heartland. From here he oversaw a complex business which flooded Chicago, Dallas and other US cities with narcotics and was repeatedly ranked by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful people in the world. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán with one of his grandsons – the child of his daughter Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz. Photograph: Courtesy of Rosa Isela Guzman Ortiz 
 
 In contrast to her father’s dramas, Guzmán Ortiz said she spent two quiet decades across the border, becoming a US citizen and learning English, which she speaks fluently, though with an accent. 
 
 
 
 She said she studied computer science at the University of Phoenix, hairdressing and cosmetology at the Marinello Schools of Beauty in Riverside, and used money from her father to open several businesses. 
 
 
 
 This attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for suspected money laundering, resulting in 15 days’ detention and a $50,000 bond, she said. She insisted the funding and businesses were legitimate. “My businesses are all in order – the FBI could not prove anything,” she said, before adding: “The hair salons, the soda fountains, the carwashes aren’t in my name any more.” 
 
 
 
 Asked to confirm that Guzmán Ortiz had been apprehended and detained in San Diego in 2011, special agent Amy Roderick, an FBI spokeswoman, said: “The arresting agency on that case was US customs and border protection.” Ralph DeSio, a spokesman for US customs and border protection, said the agency could not discuss specific cases due to privacy laws. 
 
 
 
 Meanwhile, said Guzmán Ortiz, El Chapo was hoping to retire, and intended to hand the reins to her half-brother Iván Archivaldo. But, she said, the plan dismayed his cartel colleague El Mayo – one of the last surviving veterans of the Sinaloa cartel. 
 
 Chapo was supposed to meet him at a hotel in Mazatlán in February 2014 when authorities swooped and recaptured him. 
 
 “He had already retired, it was just a question of smoothing it with El Mayo, but it seems the old man didn’t much like the idea,” she said. “We’re completely sure El Mayo betrayed him. They used to always meet in private places and my dad found it strange that he had suggested that place.” 
 
 
 
 The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto trumpeted the capture as a triumph and flew Chapo to Altiplano high-security prison. 
 
 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz said she visited her father in the maximum security facility and that he expressed confidence about getting out – he vowed to attend a family reunion in November 2015 at his mother’s house in Sinaloa. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma Coronel, the wife of El Chapo, interviewed on television in Mexico. Photograph: Telemundo.com 
 
 In July 2015 the drug lord escaped again – this time fleeing Altiplano near Mexico City through an elaborate tunnel. It was widely interpreted as a humiliating blow to the government but according to his daughter, senior officials had approved of the breakout. “My dad’s escape was an agreement,” she said. There was no way to verify that claim. 
 
 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz said that after the escape, her father visited the US in late 2015. The motive, she said, was family: in addition to her and her children, who live south of Los Angeles, he wished to see his own twin daughters and wife Emma Coronel, a former beauty queen, who live in LA. 
 
 Chapo also wished to view his gift to Guzmán Ortiz: a house with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a game room, a large garden and a garage with space for four cars. “My dad deposited the money in a bank account with a lawyer and a while after he came to see the house, his house.” She declined to elaborate, saying she did not have Chapo’s permission. 
 
 Breezy and cheerful at the interview in the coffee shop, Guzmán Ortiz presented herself as a loyal daughter and successful entrepreneur. When her phone buzzed she smiled. “Sorry, it’s my employees. They call me all the time.” 
 
 
 
 She is separated from El Vicentillo – who was arrested in Mexico City in 2009 and subsequently extradited to the US – and is now partnered with the nephew of another drug lord, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, with whom she has had two children, bringing her total to four. 
 
 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz said her father was generous – he told her to buy a Ford Explorer as a Christmas gift for her partner. She repeated that any funds she received were licit. Asked about her father’s drug fortune, she laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.” 
 
 
 
 But reached via Skype in January, after Chapo was recaptured and sent back to Altiplano, her tone was darker. 
 
 
 
 “The government broke its promise,” she complained. “If there’s an pact, they don’t respect it. Now that they catch him they say he’s a criminal, a killer. But they didn’t say that when they asked for money for their campaigns. They’re hypocrites!” 
 
 
 
 El Chapo now seems intent on negotiating a deal with US authorities in exchange for a lighter sentence, but with several cases against him and hundreds of individual charges, it seems likely that the orange seller who built an underworld empire will die in jail. 
 
 His daughter considered it a cruel twist. “In this business there are no friendships, only associates.” 
 
 ||||| In an exclusive interview, Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz says Mexican officials helped him evade US patrols and that he bankrolled the election of senior politicians 
 
 El Chapo entered US twice while on the run after prison break, daughter claims 
 
 The drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán bankrolled the election of senior Mexico politicians and twice secretly entered the United States to visit relatives, according to his eldest daughter. 
 
 Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz said that shortly after an interview with Hollywood star Sean Penn last year, her father dodged a massive manhunt with the complicity of corrupt Mexican officials and evaded US border controls to sneak into California – despite being one of the world’s most wanted fugitives. 
 
 
 
 She also accused senior Mexican politicians of accepting donations from El Chapo when they ran for office, and said that in return officials turned a blind eye to his escapes from prison. 
 
 
 
 “My dad is not a criminal. The government is guilty,” she told the Guardian. 
 
 
 
 Californian, businesswoman, 'narco junior': El Chapo's American daughter Read more 
 
 The explosive allegations made by Guzmán Ortiz could not be independently verified and are likely to be vigorously contested by Mexican and US authorities. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz, 39, made the claims in a series of interviews which she said were given in consultation with her father. 
 
 El Chapo was recaptured in January after seven months on the run, and sent back to the Altiplano security jail near Mexico – the same prison from which he escaped in July 2015 through a tunnel which opened into his shower stall. 
 
 Earlier this week, he instructed his lawyers to drop their attempts to fight extradition to the United States in the apparent hope of negotiating a lighter sentence. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz. Photograph: Courtesy of Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz said the drug lord had planned to hand the reins of the Sinaloa cartel to her half-brother, Iván Archivaldo, but was betrayed by a cartel colleague, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada – and by the Mexican government, which she said had broken an agreement to protect El Chapo. 
 
 
 
 It is the first time the cartel leader’s daughter has spoken to the media. The Guardian has seen several documents confirming her identity, including her birth certificate and Mexican voting card. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz’s identity was also confirmed by Francisco Villa Gurrola, an evangelical minister in El Chapo’s hometown of Badiraguato, who is a close friend of the drug lord’s 87-year-old mother Consuela Loera. 
 
 Her claims about El Chapo’s visits to California will raise questions about US intelligence and border security. As head of the world’s biggest and richest criminal syndicate he was the drug war’s most prized target. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz said her father crossed the border in late 2015 to visit relatives and to view her home, a five-bedroom house with a large garden which he bought for her and her four children. She granted the interview on condition its location not be disclosed. 
 
 “My dad deposited the money in a bank account with a lawyer and a while after he came to see the house, his house. He came twice.” 
 
 
 
 She declined to specify how he criss-crossed the heavily guarded frontier, saying only: “I asked him the same, believe me.” 
 
 
 
 El Chapo has other family ties to the US: his third wife, the former beauty queen Emma Coronel, is a US citizen and in 2011 gave birth to twin daughters in southern California. 
 
 
 
 At the time, El Chapo had been on the run for a more than decade, and then president Felipe Calderón speculated that the fugitive drug kingpin could be hiding north of the border. 
 
 
 
 “He’s not in Mexican territory, and I suppose El Chapo is in US territory,” he told the New York Times. 
 
 José Reveles, the author of a string of books about the Mexican underworld, said that “nothing is impossible” for El Chapo, pointing out that Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel pioneered the use of sophisticated tunnels to smuggle drug shipments – and cartel members – into the US. 
 
 
 
 “Everything indicates that El Chapo would be able to visit the US: he’s very smart, he has well-trained operatives and he has experts in building tunnels,” said Reveles. 
 
 El Chapo’s rise from impoverished orange seller to Forbes-listed billionaire funnelling vast quantities of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to the US has long been the subject of intense speculation. 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz’s explanation is that he bought protection at the highest official level, dispatching representatives to meetings with senior politicians and their representatives. 
 
 
 
 “All I know is that my dad told his lawyer to deliver some cheques to [a politician’s] campaign, and asked that he respect him.” 
 
 All I know is my dad told his lawyer to deliver some cheques to [a politician’s] campaign, and asked that he respect him Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz 
 
 She said the family was considering releasing copies of the cheques along with names of officials and politicians who accepted his support. 
 
 
 
 Guzmán Ortiz is not the only member of El Chapo’s family to have approached the media, suggesting a concerted attempt by the capo to promote his version of events – or exert pressure on Mexican authorities. 
 
 El Chapo’s meeting with Penn was enabled by the actress Kate del Castillo, who hoped to produce a biopic of the drug lord, and his lawyers contacted at least two authors over a possible biography. In recent weeks his third wife, Emma Coronel, has granted a string of television interviews. 
 
 El Chapo earned worldwide notoriety with his dramatic jailbreaks from high-security prisons: in 2001 he reportedly left Puente Grande prison near Guadalajara hidden in a laundry basket, and in July 2015 he left Altiplano on a modified motorbike which carried him through a mile-long tunnel. 
 
 The second breakout was widely seen as an especially humiliating blow to the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, but according to his daughter, senior officials had already given the green light for the escape. 
 
 
 
 “My dad’s escape was an agreement,” she said. 
 
 
 
 At least 34 people have been charged with helping El Chapo escape, including the former director of Altiplano prison and the head of Mexico’s federal prison system. 
 
 
 
 Towards the end of last year, the net appeared to be closing in on El Chapo after he arranged a meeting with del Castillo and Penn, who were under surveillance by intelligence agents. In October, the Mexican military launched a massive operation in the mountainous region between Sinaloa and Durango states, but failed to capture the cartel boss. 
 
 
 
 The following month, another attempt to capture El Chapo – during a planned family reunion at the home of El Chapo’s mother in the village of La Tuna, Sinaloa – was also foiled after a high-placed source in the secretariat of national defence tipped off the family, said Guzmán Ortiz. 
 
 
 
 El Chapo’s luck finally ran out in January, when he was cornered in the coastal town of Los Mochis. The daughter attributed her father’s capture to a betrayal by senior Mexican officials and politicians. “If there’s a pact, they don’t respect it. Now that they catch him they say he’s a criminal, a killer. But they didn’t say that when they asked for money for their campaigns. They’re hypocrites.” 
 
 
 
 A US citizen, Guzmán Ortiz runs a chain of small businesses in California and speaks fluent English. She compared herself to narco juniors – a Mexican term for the privileged offspring of the country’s drug lords – but said any money she received from her father was clean. 
 
 “My businesses are the result of my own efforts,” she said. 
 

– Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán's oldest daughter is ready to take a DNA test to prove her identity following a bombshell interview with the Guardian published last week. In the interview, Rosa Isela Guzmán Ortiz claimed—among other things—that her father snuck across the border twice to visit her and other family in California despite the major manhunt on his tail. But the Guardian reports that following the release of its interview, El Chapo's common-law wife, Emma Coronel, denied that Guzmán Ortiz is El Chapo's daughter and says the family has no idea who she is. Guzmán Ortiz tells the Guardian Coronel and lawyers working for El Chapo told her to retract the claims she made in the interview, but she refused. “I’m not going to deny anything at all,” she says. Coronel has demanded Guzmán Ortiz take a DNA test, which Guzmán Ortiz says she is happy to do. “I have a document which says I’m his daughter; [Coronel] should show me the paper which says she’s his wife,” she says. According to the Guardian, it has already seen a birth certificate, a Mexican voting card, and other documents that prove Guzmán Ortiz is who she says she is. Those other documents reportedly include family photos of El Chapo and letters he sent Guzmán Ortiz from prison.