Kingpin Guzman to appear in US court
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most notorious cartel kingpin who twice made brazen prison escapes and spent years on the run as the country’s most wanted man, was extradited to the United States yesterday and was expected to appear in a New York court today.
A Justice Department spokesman said El Chapo, or Shorty, was set to appear for an arraignment at the federal court in Brooklyn.
Guzman, 59, arrived in a small jet at Long Island's MacArthur Airport yesterday from a prison in the city of Juarez in the northern state of Chihuahua, where his Sinaloa cartel crushed the rival Juarez gang.
The drug lord i s charged in six separate indictments throughout the US and faces life in prison. He is accused of money laundering and drug trafficking, kidnapping and murder in cities including Chicago, Miami and New York.
The convicted boss of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s largest drug trafficking organisations, had been held most recently at a prison near Ciudad Juarez. He was recaptured a year ago after escaping from a second maximum- security prison through a tunnel dug to his cell.
The 2015 escape was highly embarrassing for the Government of President Enrique Pena Nieto, and Mexican officials were seen as eager to hand the headache off to the US afterward. Guzman’s lawyers have fought extradition since his recapture.
“It was illegal. They didn’t even notify us,” said lawyer Andres Granados, who accused the Government of extraditing his client to distract from nationwide gasoline protests. “They handled it politically to obscure the situation of the gas price hike. It’s totally political.”
A federal indictment in the Eastern District of New York accuses him of overseeing a trafficking cartel with thousands of members and billions of dollars in profits laundered back to Mexico. It says Guzman and other members of the Sinaloa cartel employed hit men who carried out murders, kidnappings and acts of torture.
He was first indicted by a US federal grand jury in July 2009. A superseding indictment was issued in May charging him and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada with a variety of drug, gun and money laundering charges as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.
The Mexican Foreign Relations Department’s statement said a court had ruled against Guzman’s appeal and found that his extradition would be constitutional.
Guzman’s first prison break was in 2001. He spent more than a decade at large before being captured in 2014. The following year he broke out through the mile- long tunnel dug directly to the shower in his cell.
It was while on the lam a second time, in fall 2015, that he held a secret meeting with actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo. The encounter was the subject of a lengthy article Penn published in Rolling Stone last January, right after Mexican marines rearrested Guzman in the western state of Sinaloa.
In the interview, Guzman was unapologetic about his criminal activities, saying he had turned to drug trafficking at age 15 simply to survive.
“The only way to have money to buy food, to survive, is to grow poppy, marijuana, and at that age, I began to grow it, to cultivate it and to sell it. That is what I can tell you,” he was quoted as saying in Penn’s article.
Guzman was initially returned to the Altiplano prison outside Mexico City where he escaped through the tunnel. Last May, officials abruptly moved him to the prison in the desert near Juarez.
The White House, which was down to a skeleton staff hours before Trump takes office, said it had no immediate comment.