Joaquin  "El Chapo" Guzman Loera arrives Jan. 19, 2017, on Long...

Joaquin  "El Chapo" Guzman Loera arrives Jan. 19, 2017, on Long Island to face trial on drug charges in New York. Credit: Getty Images / U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

A former henchman of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera gave grisly details of the alleged cocaine kingpin’s personal role in torturing and killing three members of rival Mexican gangs as prosecutors neared the end of their case Thursday in his Brooklyn federal court drug trafficking trial.

Isaias Valdez Rios, a guard, personal assistant and pilot for Guzman known as “Memin,” was the last of over a dozen informants — from drug suppliers to a mistress — to testify as government witnesses since trial began in November, but the first to describe Guzman’s killings, including burying one man alive.

Valdez, 39, a former Mexican special forces soldier, said he began working in 2004 as a guard at one of the mountain encampments of the alleged leader of the Sinaloa cartel for the paltry sum of 2,000 pesos a week, joining about 30 other heavily armed gunmen who slept outside the cabin where the boss lived.

At their first meeting, he said, Guzman was chummy. “He started telling me, ‘Dude, how we doing? I was told you used to be part of the special forces . . . Here, you have to be really on the lookout.' ”

But he saw another side of his boss a couple years later when he was ordered to pick up a man from a rival gang — the Arellano-Felix cartel — who had been caught and tortured by Guzman’s cronies. The man, he said, had been burned all over his body with an iron and a cigarette lighter.

“The T-shirt was stuck to his skin,” Valdez said. “He couldn’t walk.”

Guzman, he said, was annoyed at the extent of the damage when the man was brought to his camp. “Why don’t they just kill him?” Guzman said, using a curse word to describe the man. “Why do they send him like that?”

Valdez said the man was left in pain for three days, then interrogated briefly by Guzman for 20 minutes before being moved to another mountain hideout a few kilometers away where he was stuck in a wood structure “like a henhouse” and left for days until the guards started complaining about a “bad odor.”

Guzman had the man taken to the edge of a small graveyard nearby, Valdez testified, and ordered the guards to dig a hole some distance away. When all was ready, Guzman came out with a small caliber pistol and had the man, bound and blindfolded, taken to the hole.

After briefly interrogating him again, Guzman shot him, cursed at him, and then shot him again. “Still the guy was gasping for air,” Valdez testified. “That’s when we dropped him in the hole and buried him.”

The second incident also occurred in 2006 or 2007, Valdez said, and included two captured men from a different gang — the Zetas. After making a call to one of his lieutenants, Guzman announced to his guards, “Hey guys, they’re sending us a gift!

Valdez said Guzman was particularly incensed about the two Zetas because they came from his home state of Sinaloa, instead of patriotically working for their hometown drug cartel. “They were betraying the people of Sinaloa,” Valdez explained.

When they arrived at the camp, Guzman ordered them to be taken to a shed where grass for cows was stored, telling his men, “You can start heating them up.” It was a term for inflicting beatings to get them talking and providing intelligence, Valdez explained.

Later, after the beatings had progressed, Guzman ordered his men to find a location “a little more secluded” where he could take a personal role. They found a spot in the trees about 500 meters away, and Guzman requested a “large branch” when he arrived.

“That’s when he started torturing them,” Valdez said. “The stick, he didn’t request it to be affectionate. He started beating them up with that stick.”

The beatings by Guzman and a lieutenant known as “Bravo” went on for hours, with Guzman using his rifle as well as the branch and berating the men for “betraying us.”

“The people were like ragged dolls,” Valdez recalled. “All the bones in their bodies were fractured so they couldn’t move. Mr. Joaquin kept beating them up with the stick and beating them with his firearm.”

Eventually, Valdez testified, Guzman ordered his men to dig a big hole, and fill it with wood to make a bonfire. Then he had the men slung onto two ATVs, and personally drove one of them to the hole. The men were thrown to the ground, and Guzman chambered a bullet in his rifle.

The men, still conscious, cowered. Guzman, Valdez said, approached one with his rifle, cursed his mother, and “Boom! Shot him in the head.” Then he did the same to the other, and both bodies were tossed into the bonfire.

“I don’t want any bones to remain,” he told his men, who later reported back that they had “ground up” the two men’s bones.

Valdez will retake the stand on Monday when the trial is expected to resume, and prosecutors may rest their case. U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan told jurors he believed evidence would finish next week.

SUBSCRIBE

Unlimited Digital AccessOnly 25¢for 6 months

ACT NOWSALE ENDS SOON | CANCEL ANYTIME