El Chapo's mistress describes his 'naked escape from authorities' as wife 'cackles' in courtroom

Drug lord's mistress says he took off naked through a secret tunnel as Mexican marines raided his safehouse

Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez described her extramarital love affair with Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman — and his wild escape from authorities through an underground tunnel — during an explosive testimony at the El Chapo trial under way in New York.

The mistress and former politician says she found herself fleeing with El Chapo and others in 2014 from a safehouse that had been uncovered by Mexican marines, telling a crowded courtroom Thursday the drug lord “was naked” during his escape.

“He took off running,” she said. “He left us behind.”

The account of the mad dash and her tortured romance with Guzman while he was on the run came at a drug trafficking trial that has detailed El Chapo’s rise and fall as a near-mythical cartel boss.

Guzman’s lawyers say the allegations have been fabricated by cooperators seeking leniency in their own cases.

Sanchez, a 29-year-old former local politician in Sinaloa, took the witness stand in jail smocks after pleading guilty earlier this year to drug charges following her arrest last year. She told her tale with Guzman’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, sitting in the gallery.

The petite and soft-spoken witness said she met Guzman in 2010 and by 2011 was visiting him at his hideouts in Cabo San Lucas and elsewhere, and texting with him on cell phones protected by encryption he gave her. Over time, they began mixing business with pleasure that caused her distress, she said.

“Until this day, I’m confused because I thought we were in a romantic relationship,” she said toward the start of her testimony before she began sobbing and needed a break to compose herself. Later, she said of Guzman, “Sometimes I loved him and sometimes I didn’t.”

As Sanchez continued crying outside of the courtroom, her lapel mic captured her sounds and continued transmitting them through the room’s speakers.

Meanwhile, the New York Post reported Ms Coronel Aispuro — who has regularly attended the hearings — was gleeful and even “cackling” at one point.

For Sanchez, the trouble began when El Chapo drafted her to purchase marijuana for him, with instructions to ready 400kg (882 pounds) for each plane used to transport it from the countryside. Prosecutors showed the jury intercepted texts where the pair called each “love” as they plotted how best to move drugs, though some of Guzman’s messages sounded more menacing.

During the 2014 escape, Sanchez testified that Guzman led her into a bathroom where the bathtub was lifted with hydraulics to expose a fortified trap door leading to a dark, damp sewage tunnel. It led to a more remote part of the city, where they made their escape, she said.

She was asked how long she was in the tunnel. “Long enough to be traumatised,” she said, before her testimony ended for the day.

El Chapo was later captured at a hotel in the resort town of Mazatlan, though he escaped from a Mexican jail in 2016 before being recaptured once again.

Reporting contributed by AP