El Chapo: drug kingpin’s mother says US has approved visa to visit son in prison

She says she'd like to take him a dish of enchiladas as present

(AP)

The mother of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán has been granted an American visa allowing her to visit her son in prison in New York.

Consuelo Loera told reporters she and her two daughters were both approved for travel by the US embassy in Mexico City.

The 91-year-old – who is thought to have last seen her son in 2015 – said she would like to take him his favourite meal of enchiladas.

The US has neither confirmed or denied if such a visa has been approved.

But it is known that the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had lobbied for such a visit to be permitted.

He said he had done so out of empathy for an elderly woman.

El Chapo was, until his jailing this year, the world’s most powerful drugs lord leading the famously vicious Sinaloa Cartel in running an industrial-scale smuggling operation between Mexico and America.

When he was finally extradited to the US, his three-month trial – held amid unprecedented security in New York City – heard tales of grisly killings, political payoffs, cocaine hidden in jalapeno cans and jewel-encrusted guns.

Guzmán's lawyers did not deny his crimes but argued that he was a fall guy for government witnesses who had more blood on their hands than he did.

The 62-year-old is due to be sentenced this month and faces a life term in a maximum-security US prison, selected to guard against the sort of jail breakout he twice executed in his home country.

Guzmán escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 after serving eight years. He moved between hideouts for more than a decade until he was imprisoned again in 2014 - only to escape a year later through a tunnel dug from his prison cell shower.

The US Department of Justice is now seeking forfeiture of his estimated $14bn [£11bn] fortune.

Of Ms Loera’s visa, her lawyer Jose Luis González, said she had proven to authorities she had the means to travel to the US and reason to return to Mexico.