Woman linked to cartel kingpin ‘El Chapo’ arrested at San Diego border, charged in drug conspiracy

San Diego —  A former Mexican legislator who has been linked to notorious cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán was charged Thursday in San Diego federal court with conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

The U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego said Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López was detained Wednesday at the Otay Mesa Cross Border Xpress, a bridge that connects Tijuana’s A.L. Rodríguez International Airport with San Diego.

According to the complaint, wiretaps from 2013 and 2014 show Sánchez communicating with cartel operatives about laundering drug money and coordinating delivery of drug money proceeds.

It also said she admitted to being Guzmán’s girlfriend — and even was with him when he famously escaped arrest in 2014 by accessing a tunnel in his home in Sinaloa concealed under a bathtub and then fleeing through the city’s sewer tunnels.

Sánchez is a former legislator in the state of Sinaloa, home base for Guzmán and his powerful drug-trafficking organization.

And while court documents said she was under investigation for her role in the cartel for several years, her lawyer said in an interview Thursday that she apparently was coming to the U.S. to seek asylum after receiving death threats in Mexico.

Sánchez left her two sons behind with family members when she flew to Tijuana with intentions to cross to the United States and investigate the possibility of obtaining protection for all three from the U.S. government, lawyer Francisco Verdugo said.

“Neither she nor we had any idea that she was under investigation,” in the U.S., Verdugo said. “If she had, she wouldn’t have gone there.”

Sánchez has denied reports she was Guzmán’s girlfriend. However, in a probable-cause affidavit supporting her arrest and attached to the federal criminal complaint, a cartel member who was secretly cooperating with U.S. investigators said he met in Mexico with a woman using the name “Tere.”

She told the informant she also was known as “Maico” — another alias that the complaint said Sánchez used.

Sánchez told the informant that she was Guzmán’s girlfriend, and told the informant of the tunnel escape in 2014.

The complaint said that Sánchez’s claim of being with Guzmán when he fled was confirmed by Homeland Security agents in Nogales, Ariz., who “had intercepted communications corroborating this.”

Sánchez, who was known in the Mexican media as the “Chapodiputada” or “the Chapo legislator,” previously represented the Cosala district in the Sinaloa legislature.

At the hearing Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Major, Sánchez was wearing a yellow jail jumpsuit and swallowed nervously, bit her lip often, and at one time wiped tears from her eyes.

She was ordered held without bail because she posed a flight risk.

According to the complaint, Sánchez was arrested when she tried to enter the U.S. and a Customs and Border Protection officer checked her name in a database and found her visa had been canceled by the State Department.

The complaint detailed two separate series of communications — apparently text messages — captured under court-approved wiretaps of Sinaloa cartel members’ cellphones as part of the investigation of the organization by U.S. authorities.

The first from Sept. 24, 2013, allegedly showed Sánchez — using the code name “Piedra” — coordinating with a top cartel lieutenant the payment of $500,000 to another cartel drug trafficker. At the time, she was a “legislator-elect” in Sinaloa, having won election to a three-year term in July. She was not sworn in until Dec. 1, 2013.

In a second transaction on Jan. 20, 2014, Sánchez — this time using the code name “Maico” — allegedly communicated with an unidentified Guzmán lieutenant to coordinate delivery of $380,000 in laundered Mexican pesos that were the proceeds from drug trafficking.

Guzmán was extradited to the U.S. in January and is awaiting trial in New York City under a sweeping indictment charging him with leading a continuing criminal enterprise.

greg.moran@sduniontribune.com

sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com

Moran and Dibble write for the San Diego Union-Tribune