Mexican drug trafficker sentenced to life term in US

WASHINGTON: Mexican drug trafficker Alfredo Beltran Leyva, a leader of the Beltran Leyva cartel, was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison in the US, the Justice Department said.

“For well over a decade, the defendant commanded a major Mexican drug trafficking organization that imported ton-quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine into the US,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco said in a statement.

Blanco said the Mexican cartel leader had waged “a campaign of violence and fear” that gripped communities across North America.

“Alfredo Beltran Leyva is one of the ‘Goliaths’ of Mexican drug traffickers known for his savage business tactics and responsible for flooding the US with illegal drugs,” said James Hunt, special agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Beltran Leyva, 46, was arrested in Culiacan, in northwest Mexico, in 2008, and extradited to the US in 2014. He had pleaded guilty to conspiring to import cocaine and methamphetamine.

Judge Richard Leon of the federal court of the District of Columbia, the formal name for the US capital Washington, sentenced him to life behind bars and ordered him to pay $529.2 million.

The Beltran Leyva cartel, which split violently from drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel, was one of Mexico’s most powerful drug gangs in the 2000s.