Mexico has extradited 29 drug traffickers on Thursday that were in different prisons in the country, as reported by the Prosecutor’s Office. Among the first names that various sources have confirmed to El País are the historic Capo, leader of the Guadalajara poster claimed by the United States for decades for the murder of an AGA of the DEA; The former leaders of the Los Zetas cartel, Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, known as, and José Ángel Canobbio, aka El Güerito, one of the greatest architects of the distribution of fentanyl in the Sinaloa poster and lieutenant of the Chapitos, the faction of the children of El Chapo Guzman.
This massive extradition operation, unprecedented in the recent history of the country, occurs in the midst of negotiation between Mexico and the United States for the intention of the northern neighbor of applying a 25% tariff to Mexican exports. Since he began his mandate, on January 20, the US president, Donald Trump, has threatened the entry of Mexican products into the country, threat that bases the incessant drug trafficking north of the border, mainly fentanyl, and the migratory flow that reaches the southern states. This same Thursday, the president reiterated that the tariffs, after a one -month moratorium.
It is difficult to know if the tax will enter into force on the date Trump has announced. The Mexican government has done everything possible to reach an agreement and conjure the threat of rates. The commercial exchange between the two countries exceeds 800,000 million dollars a year. The announcement of the huge number of extraditions has been given within the framework of a meeting in Washington between senior officials of the Security Cabinet of Mexico and the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
The results of the strategy implemented by the administration of Claudia Sheinbaum in terms of security. Since October of last year, the month in which Sheinbaum took office, the army, the Navy, the National Guard and the Prosecutor’s Office have captured more than 13,000 people for high -impact crimes, secured more than 6,500 firearms and seized 1.2 tons and 1.3 million fentanyl pills. “Mexican officials presented the significant advances achieved in the field of seizures, arrests and operational,” said the Mexican Foreign Ministry after the bilateral meeting.
The debts of Caro Quintero
Rafael Caro Quintero, NARCOS NARCOrecaptured in July 2022. The historic capo is required in the US for, in the 1980s. He was a first time in prison in 1985 for that crime, and was released in 2013 in a scandalous judicial decision, when he lacked for 12 years of conviction. The United States assumed the homicide of the DEA agent as a deep affront that he never forgot, and for years he pressed Mexico to recapture and extradite him to judge him mainly for that crime.
The historic capo was arrested in the Sierra de Sinaloa in an operation headed by the Navy, in which the Mexican government boasted that a single shot was not made. However, shortly after the news of his capture, a marina helicopter with 15 soldiers who had participated in the operation collapsed on the Coast of Sinaloa, at the height of the Mochis. . The causes of the possible accident, mysterious at the beginning, led to the Prosecutor to open an investigation to clarify what happened.
In addition to the historical debts for the murder of Camarena, Caro Quintero has at least three other judicial causes open in Texas, Arizona and New York for drug trafficking. Although after his arrest in 2022 an extradition trial began against him, the process was bogged down for months due to the amparos and other legal resources promoted by their lawyers before the Mexican courts.
The Zetas brothers
Among the extradited ones are also the bloodthirsty leaders and atomized Los Zetas poster. Born as a group of deserting military, hired as bodyguards of the old Gulf cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas. The Zetas became independent to the arrest of the latter, in the early 2000s. By then, the Treviño Morales brothers, both civilians, barely left the criminal shell. They had been part of Criminal Bands of Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas. But it was with the Zetas when they grew and grew, until their capture. The Z-40 fell in 2013 and his brother, the Z-42, the following year.
While they were free, especially in the first decade of the century, Omar and Miguel Ángel Treviño rose to the Olympus of the Mexican criminal world. Under their command, Los Zetas opened new criminal items in the country, beyond drug trafficking, none as lucrative as extortion. His promotion during the years of President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) Orilled the Government to face them with blood and fire, as explained several times the intelligence chief of his government, Guillermo Valdés. During the last years of the Calderón mandate, the clashes between the Army and the criminal groups of Tamaulipas, mainly the Zetas and the Gulf poster, raised violence to historical peaks.
The battles of the Zetas with other criminal groups in Tamaulipas, Michoacán or Veracruz raised the tone of horror in Mexico, with massacres, dismembered bodies exposed to society, corpses waste in acid … in other regions, such as northern Coahuila, where their control was total, they used extreme violence as a form of submission. Research like El Yugo Zetaof El Colegio de México, detail massacres and massive executions in municipalities such as Allende and Piedras Negras.
The Allende case perfectly illustrates his cruelty. According to journalistic investigations, mainly from the reporter Ginger Thompson, in Propublic, the Treviño brothers released a traitor hunt in Allende, in 2011, after an former partner delivered their telephone numbers to United States authorities. The Treviño knew of this betrayal after the Americans delivered the data to their peers in the Mexican Federal Police, information that reached the ears of the brothers. It was never known how many people died murdered or disappeared in Allende, but the accounts made to date exceed 300.
For more than a decade, Washington has asked for the extradition of the Treviño brothers, which it seeks to judge for drug trafficking to US territory – mainly cocaine -, money laundering and murder. However, the transfer of the Zetas bosses had stuck in the Mexican courts, largely because the defense has claimed that his client is a homonym that was being associated with the alias of Z-40 by mistake of the authorities. Miguel Treviño continued in prison for two other causes pending resolution related to the crimes of carrying weapons and promotion of drug trafficking. The defense of Omar Treviño Morales, Z-42, followed the same strategy as that of Z-40.
In July last year, the US Department of Justice made public an accusation against the Treviño in which he assured that the brothers have continued to control the cartel from prison, after “installing several family members to direct the operations in their name”. The document added that Z-40 and Z-42, then 51 and 48, are responsible for “innumerable acts of violence, including murders, assaults, kidnappings and torture.” He points out that from 2003 to date the bosses have trafficked in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia and the United States 45 tons of cocaine, and that within one year they obtain profits of 10 million dollars. Only at least 14 tons of cocaine have entered the US, according to the accusation.
Priority extraditions
For his part, El Güerito, considered one of the greatest trusted men of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, Chief of the Chapitos and son of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, was captured in Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa, just two weeks ago in an operation of federal forces by sea and land. His arrest, added to those of other criminal leaders near Archivaldo Guzmán, was scheduled as part of the security strategy of the Sheinbaum administration centered in recent months in Sinaloa, Mexican Pacific state where I know and that during the last six months has been plunged into a wave of violence caused by the intestine war between Los Chapitos and Mayiza, the factions of the Sinaloa cartel.
In 2022, Army documents hacked By Guacamaya, he revealed that there was a priority list of high profile extraditions required by Washington to Mexico as part of the bicentennial understanding, the bilateral security agreement then signed by the governments of Joe Biden and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The list put Caro Quintero to the head; The Treviño Morales brothers, and Abigael González Valencia, aka The cookright and brother -in -law of the founder of the New Generation Jalisco poster (CJNG), .
The revealed papers showed that the US also put the number of extraditions required to the Mexican authorities at that time: “Return the general extraditions to the historical average of 60 per year in 2022”. Another objective in the list was identified only as “Villarreal”, possibly in reference to, head of the Beltrán Leyva poster and that arrived in 2020 at 2020 ranking Of the 10 most sought after fbi fugitives (list also appeared the name of Caro Quintero). The cat was captured in 2023.
