Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman tortured then murdered at least three members of rival cartels in cold blood, including one he had buried alive, a former bodyguard testified Thursday.
Isaias Valdez Rios detailed for Brooklyn federal jurors how the Sinaloa kingpin shot a captured member of the Arellano-Felix cartel in 2006.
The captive was handed over to Chapo already “severely tortured,” with burns so bad “the T-shirt he was wearing was stuck to his skin and he had lighter marks all over his body,” Valdez said.
Chapo left the man outdoors in a blindfold for three days, then interrogated him for 20 minutes — before throwing him in a hen house for several more days until workers began complaining about the smell.
“We told Mr. Joaquin that this person had … smelling bad odor because he was decomposing in a way,” Valdez said.
Chapo ordered Valdez and others to dig a hole in a nearby graveyard and bring the man there — where he started interrogating him again and then suddenly “grabbed his gun and shot him cold.”
“‘You motherf- -ker,’ Chapo yelled,” he said.
The man was still gasping for air when they dumped him in the hole and then piled dirt on top of him, Valdez said.
Around the same period, Chapo also captured and killed two other men — because they were from his home state of Sinaloa but working for the rival Zetas cartel, he said.
Guzman first had some of his men beat and torture the captives, before taking a large stick and belting them with it for three hours.
“The people were pretty much like rag dolls. The bones in their bodies were fractured. They couldn’t move,” Valdez recalled.
“He was telling them, ‘You motherf–kers, how is it possible that you are working for them and betraying us?’”
He then instructed his men to “dig a very large hole” and light a bonfire inside it — then brought the captives there and shot them.
“He came up and put the rifle to the head of one of them and said, ‘F–k your mother,’ and boom, he shot him in the head,” said Valdez.
Chapo’s lackeys stayed all night adding lumber to the fire so the bodies were destroyed, then ground up their bones, he said.
Later, Guzman almost offered Valdez the same treatment when he thought the guard had betrayed him.
Chapo had given him $250,000 to buy some airstrips in Honduras for drug smuggling — but it wound up not being enough, and rumors began spreading back in Mexico that he had blown the cash on cars, houses and Rolexes instead.
“I was scared, I hid, I turned off all communication,” Valdez said.
“I even faked having broken my leg. I had a cast put on my leg, he asked for pictures, I sent him some.”
But Chapo’s people found him, and he was thrown “inside a pick-up, tied up, handcuffed. In fact it was an armored pick-up. And I was blindfolded.”
Valdez managed to talk down the gunman sent to kill him, and he said Chapo later called to say there was no beef.
“They told me everything Panchito (Chapo’s secretary) was telling me were lies,” Valdez said, imitating Chapo’s sing-songy voice on the stand.
“We’re family.”