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El Chapo, Mexican Drug Kingpin, Extradited to the U.S. El Chapo, Mexican Drug Kingpin, Is Extradited to U.S.
(35 minutes later)
MEXICO CITY — Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo, who twice slipped out of high-security Mexican prisons and into criminal legend, was being extradited to the United States on Thursday night, officials said, drawing to a close a decades-long effort to successfully prosecute the head of one of the world’s largest narcotics organizations. MEXICO CITY — Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo who twice slipped out of high-security Mexican prisons and into criminal legend, was extradited to the United States on Thursday night, officials said, drawing to a close a decades-long quest to prosecute the head of one of the world’s largest narcotics organizations.
A federal court in Mexico denied an appeal by Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers to block the extradition, clearing the way for his transfer to the American authorities in New York, where he faces numerous charges for his role as the chieftain of the Sinaloa cartel. A federal court in Mexico denied an appeal by Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers to block the extradition, clearing the way for his transfer to the American authorities in New York, where he faces numerous charges for his role as the chieftain of the Sinaloa cartel. Mr. Guzmán was put on a plane on Thursday in Ciudad Juárez, near the border with Texas, and was set to arrive in the United States as President Obama leaves office.
He was then put on a plane in Ciudad Juárez, near the border of Texas. The decision to extradite Mr. Guzmán is an about-face for the Mexican government, which once insisted that he would serve his long sentence in Mexico first. However, following a Houdini-like escape in 2015, when his associates tunneled him out of Mexico’s most secure prison, officials began to reconsider. The decision to extradite Mr. Guzmán was an about-face for the Mexican government, which once claimed that he would serve his long sentence in Mexico first. However, after his Houdini-like escape in 2015, when his associates tunneled him out of Mexico’s most secure prison, officials began to reconsider.
Upon his recapture last year, they publicly said they would allow him to be extradited. When he was recaptured early last year, after one of Mexico’s most exhaustive manhunts, the government publicly said it would allow the extradition of Mr. Guzmán, thus relieving itself of the potential embarrassment of another escape and preventing further souring of its relationship with the United States.
Mr. Guzmán’s extradition came suddenly, after nearly a year of appeals and legal procedures. Even his own lawyer was surprised. In an interview after the announcement by the Mexican government, the lawyer, José Refugio Rodríguez, said he had only just learned about the extradition. Indeed, he was at the prison where Mr. Guzmán was being held, planning to see his client, when it was locked down for two hours.
“I was supposed to visit him today,” he said. “I know nothing of this.”
Mr. Guzmán — whose nickname, El Chapo, means “Shorty” — was a major trophy for law enforcement officials in both countries. Over the years, as the drug trade blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry, he became much more than a mere trafficker. As a farm-boy-turned-billionaire with a flair for the dramatic, he became a symbol of Mexico’s broken rule of law, America’s narcotics obsession and the failure of both nations’ drug wars.
And yet, amid the anguish caused by Mr. Guzmán — the trail of blood left by his henchmen across swaths of Mexico; the addiction crisis fueled by his networks in America — his legend only seemed to grow. In Mexico, he became a folk hero to the masses. In Sinaloa, tales of Mr. Guzmán’s handing out freebies to the poor and covering checks for diners in the restaurants he frequented are commonplace.
But his daring escapes cemented his reputation as an outlaw.
Mr. Guzmán first managed to break out of a prison in 2001 — according to some accounts, by hiding in a laundry cart. In the ensuing years, while on the run, he seemed always just out of the grasp of the authorities, slipping into secret passages beneath bathtubs or absconding seconds before federal raids.
The fascination with Mr. Guzmán stemmed from the fact that one could never really count him out. He perfected the escape hatch, the underground tunnel and the trap door — all tools he used to evade law enforcement during his years on the run, which ended with an arrest in 2014. He sent his engineers to Germany for training, then dispatched them to his homes, where they would outfit closets, bathrooms and refrigerators with secret exits.
A pioneer of the cross-border tunnel, used to shuttle tens of thousands of tons of drugs into America, he ultimately adapted those feats of secret underground engineering for his escape from the Altiplano prison: a maximum-security facility in the State of Mexico where he lived in isolation, under 24-hour surveillance by a camera in his cell.
On the night of July 11, 2015, shortly before 9 p.m., Mr. Guzmán stepped into his shower and passed through a small hole in its floor, positioned in the camera’s one blind spot. From there, he descended into a mile-long tunnel, equipped with a motorcycle on rails, and raced to freedom.
His escape was a stinging embarrassment for the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, which had trumpeted his capture as a crucial victory in its bloody campaign against the narcotics trade.
Again a fugitive, Mr. Guzmán found the time to rendezvous with film stars, including Sean Penn, to discuss a biopic about his life. But his freedom was short-lived. After a manhunt that involved more than 2,500 people, he was seized in the town of Los Mochis in early 2016 after crawling out of a sewer.
Once he was back in prison, many worried that he would escape once more, prompting the authorities to rotate him from cell to cell with regularity and, eventually, to send him up north, to the border with Texas.
The general belief is that, in the United States, El Chapo’s antics will be much harder to pull off. Though his reputation may not diminish, his chances of escape, or acquittal, are drastically lower there, experts say.
Mr. Guzmán faces charges stemming from six separate indictments in the United States. In the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, where he is expected to face prosecution, he is charged with the manufacture and distribution of a range of drugs, the use of firearms, money laundering and running an ongoing criminal enterprise. The indictment, first filed in 2009, has been updated three times since then.
In a statement on Thursday night, the United States Justice Department said it extended “its gratitude to the government of Mexico for their extensive cooperation and assistance in securing the extradition of Guzmán Loera to the United States.”In a statement on Thursday night, the United States Justice Department said it extended “its gratitude to the government of Mexico for their extensive cooperation and assistance in securing the extradition of Guzmán Loera to the United States.”
The statement added that Mr. Guzmán faced six separate indictments in the United States. In ridding itself of Mr. Guzmán, the Mexican government has lifted at least one giant weight from its shoulders: that of keeping and successfully prosecuting the notorious escape artist. He is departing, however, at a time of deep political unrest in the country, as protests over an increase in gasoline prices continue and corruption scandals, as well as rising crime, nag at the nation’s image.
Mr. Guzmán was the embodiment of an identity the country has fought to shed for decades. To some, the uneducated farm-boy-turned-cartel-magnate was a Robin Hood figure for modern times, revered for his fight against the government and generosity to the poor. For others, he was a heartless criminal who flooded America’s streets with narcotics and left Mexico’s streets strewn with bodies. The American president-elect, Donald J. Trump, has made threatening Mexico over trade and immigration a center of his platform. It is unclear whether the decision to extradite Mr. Guzmán the day before Mr. Trump’s inauguration was connected in any way with the hostile tone the president-elect has adopted toward Mexico.
But it was his dramatic escapes that caught the attention of the world. “The fact that we delivered him to Obama is a clear political message that says this is a government we have long collaborated and worked closely with,” said Jorge Chabat, an expert on security at CIDE, a Mexico City research institution. “By not waiting to send him to Trump after his inauguration, it is a subtle statement saying, ‘We could do this for you, too, in the future, if we have a good relationship.’”
El Chapo, which means “Shorty,” was a fugitive for 13 years after escaping from one prison, by many accounts in a laundry cart. During that time, he reigned over a worldwide, multibillion-dollar drug empire that supplied much of the cocaine and marijuana to the United States despite a widespread, yearslong manhunt by American and Mexican forces. “If not, there won’t be any other powerful narco traffickers extradited,” he said.
That period of freedom ended with his relatively uneventful arrest in a condominium tower in Mazatlán, Mexico, in 2014. He was sent to the Altiplano maximum prison in Almoloya de Juárez. That was where Mr. Guzmán pulled off his most spectacular escape. He stepped into a shower in his cell in what was supposed to be the most secure wing of Mexico’s most secure prison.
An opening in the shower led to a mile-long tunnel leading to a construction site in the nearby neighborhood of Santa Juanita in Almoloya de Juárez, west of Mexico City. The tunnel was more than two feet wide and more than five feet high, tall enough for someone to walk standing upright, and was burrowed more than 30 feet underground.
It had been equipped with lighting, ventilation and a motorcycle on rails that was probably used to transport digging material and cart the dirt out. It was the sort of engineering project that Mr.Guzmán’s organization was familiar with: It had built many elaborate tunnels under the border with the United States to smuggle drugs.
That escape was a stinging embarrassment for the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, which had trumpeted his capture as a crucial victory in its bloody campaign against the narcotics trade.
The manhunt that followed led his pursuers into the remote wilds of the Golden Triangle, on the border of Durango and Sinaloa states, an area where Mr. Guzmán was revered. He evaded multiple raids by the Mexican authorities, including a close brush after he sat for an interview with the American actor Sean Penn.
He was finally tracked down last January after a raid on his hide-out and a chase through another tunnel — a sewer.