By Mark Vester

No longer dancing around the subject, WBO welterweight champion Miguel Cotto believes that Antonio Margarito had loaded gloves during their fight last July. Margarito stopped Cotto in the eleventh round in brutal fashion, leaving the fighter’s face grotesquely swollen and bloody.

Margarito’s hand wraps were confiscated about thirty minutes prior to the bout with Shane Mosley on January 24. Two hard inserts were discovered in the wraps. On February 10, both Margarito and trainer Javier Capetillo had their licenses revoked by the California State Athletic Commission. Documents from the Department of Justice laboratory revealed that Margarito's hand wraps contained calcium and sulfur, two of the primary elements of plaster of Paris. A report dated March 19 disclosed that the two found elements, when mixed with oxygen - make plaster of Paris.

Cotto believes that Margarito, like Panama Lewis, should be banned for life. He doesn’t believe a punishment of one-year is enough.

“They attacked not only me, but my health. God only know how many they used it, with Mosley, me and before me. They must bear the full weight of the law. During my career, I have received punishment in a number of fights, and I’ve never been so swollen as I was when I left the fight with Margarito. In the heat of battle everything felt normal, but my face didn’t say the same thing. And for a few weeks afterwards half my face was swollen,” Cotto said to El Nuevo Dia. “Like I’ve said, the case of Panama Lewis was exactly the same and he was suspended for life.”

Cotto may file some of sort of an action, he is going to talk it over with his team and figure things out.

“We will get together to see if we are going to engage in some form of an action. Things will be discussed during the course of the week. From now on, all the victories and all the good that he did in his career is tarnished. What I regret is that we always climb into the ring confident that we are going in on equal footing but that did not happen here," Cotto said.

And Cotto told the paper that he refuses to buy Margarito’s excuse of “not being aware of what his trainer placed in his gloves.”

“We [as fighters] are all aware of what we place in our hands and we watch the process in the dressing and would know if [the wraps] were adjusted or not,” Cotto said.

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