Mexican judge: Extradition of ‘El Chapo’ can proceed
MEXICO CITY — A federal judge has ruled that the extradition of drug lord Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman to the U.S. can move ahead, Mexico’s Judicial Council said Monday, but the Foreign Relations Department must still approve it and the defence can appeal.
The council, which oversees Mexico’s federal judges and tribunals, said the judge, who was not identified, had agreed that the legal requirements laid out in the extradition treaty between the two countries had been met.
The Foreign Relations Department has 20 days to decide whether to approve Guzman’s extradition.
Any extradition attempt can be delayed or stopped by a request to the court by attorneys for Guzman, the convicted leader of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said at an unrelated news conference that she was looking forward to an “imminent” resolution, but did not have a specific timeline.
Guzman was moved Saturday from a prison outside Mexico City to one in Ciudad Juarez near the U.S. border. Questions have arisen on both sides of the border about the decision to relocate the drug lord to a region that is one of his cartel’s strongholds.
A Mexican security official acknowledged Sunday that the sudden transfer was to a lesssecure prison.
The official said that in general the Cefereso No. 9 prison on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, is not as impregnable as the maximumsecurity Altiplano facility near Mexico City where Guzman had been held. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the case publicly and agreed to do so only if not quoted by name.
The official said, however, that Guzman is being held in a maximum-security wing where the same protocols are being enforced as in Altiplano, including 24-hour monitoring via a camera in his cell. Altiplano is the country’s highest-security prison.
“El Chapo” first broke out of another prison in 2001 and spent more than a decade on the run, becoming one of the world’s mostwanted fugitives. He was recaptured in 2014, but slipped out of Altiplano, which many previously had thought was inescapable, in July 2015 by fleeing through a sophisticated, 1.6-kilometre-long tunnel that went up into the shower in his cell.