Drug lord 'El Chapo' Guzman charged in Mexico
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| An interconnected tunnel in the city's drainage system that infamous drug boss Joaquin Guzman Loera, "El Chapo" used to evade authorities, is shown, in Culiacan, Mexico, Sunday Feb. 23, 2014. A day after troops narrowly missed infamous Guzman in Culiacan, one of his top aides was arrested. Officials said he told investigators that he picked up Guzman from a drainage pipe and helped him flee to Mazatlan but a wiretap being monitored by ICE agents in southern Arizona provided the final clue that led to the arrest of one of the world's most wanted men. |
MEXICO CITY
(AP) -- Mexican authorities have set in motion a legal process that
makes it unlikely he will soon face U.S. cases also pending against him.
The
Federal Judicial Council said the hemisphere's most powerful drug lord
had been formally charged under a 2009 Mexican indictment for cocaine
trafficking, an action that could start put him on path for a trial that
would put any extradition request on the back burn.
A
judge has until Tuesday to decide whether a trial is warranted. Guzman,
who is being held in a maximum security prison west of Mexico City,
could then appeal the judge's decision, a process that typically takes
weeks or months.
Also on Monday, Guzman's
lawyers filed a petition asking a court for an injunction to block any
extradition request from the United States. In the past, similar appeals
by other drug suspects have taken months, and sometimes years, to
resolve.
And before considering any
extradition request that might come from the U.S., Mexican officials
also must weigh whether to renew other charges against Guzman. When he
escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 he was serving convictions for
criminal association and bribery, and he was awaiting trial on charges
of murder and drug trafficking.
What to do
with Guzman is a politically sensitive subject for President Enrique
Pena Nieto, who has sought to carve out more control over joint
anti-drug efforts with the United States. Analysts said his
administration is likely torn between the impulse to move Guzman to a
nearly invulnerable U.S. facility and the desire to show that Mexico can
successful retry and incarcerate the man whose time as the fugitive
head of the world's most powerful drug cartel.
Eduardo
Sanchez, the presidential spokesman, did not answer his phone or return
messages Monday asking whether the government was considering
extraditing Guzman to the U.S.
Prominent trial
lawyer Juan Velasquez, who has represented former Mexican presidents,
said that if the administration did decide to extradite Guzman, legal
appeals would only delay the process because Mexico has removed
obstacles to sending its citizens for trial in other countries.
"If
the United States asks for a Mexican to be extradited, that Mexican,
sooner rather than later, will wind up extradited," said Velasquez, who
is not involved in the Guzman case.
U.S.
Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said Monday that extradition
"will be the subject of further discussion between the United States and
Mexico."
And before making an extradition
request, the U.S. government has to sort out where it would want to try
Guzman, who faces charges in at least seven U.S. jurisdictions.
"You
want number one to be the best shot that you have," said David
Weinstein, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of
Florida in Miami who helped prosecute several high-profile suspected
drug traffickers in his 11 years in the office. "What do they say? If
you shoot at the king, you make sure you hit him in the head."
Many
in Mexico see extradition as the best way to punish Guzman and break up
his empire, given the United States' more certain legal system and
better investigation capacities.
"The only
option that would allow for dismantling this criminal network is
extradition, and that's unfortunate," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert
on the cartel and a senior research scholar at Colombia University.
"Because, in the end, extraditions are an escape valve for Mexico,"
which has been slow to improve its own investigative police, prosecution
and court system.
Security expert Jorge
Chabat said, "If he stays in Mexico there are risks he could escape or
continue to control his criminal organization from inside prison."
That
is not a far-fetched possibility. Velasquez, the trial lawyer, said
some Mexican defense attorneys who get involved in such cases often act
as messengers for their clients.
"Because they
are lawyers, they have free access to the prison, so more than being
lawyers they are, let's say, part of the gang, intermediaries for the
gang," he said.
As the extradition question
was debated, new details emerged Monday on how the hemisphere's most
powerful drug lord was snatched by Mexican marines from a condo in front
of his beauty-queen wife and his twin 2 1/2-year-old daughters.
Guzman
spent the next 13 years on the run before he was arrested Saturday
morning in the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan by Mexican marines acting
on U.S. intelligence. Over the preceding week, Guzman had fled through a
network of homes in the city of Culiacan that were connected by
tunnels. At each house, the Mexican military found the same thing:
steel reinforced doors and an escape hatch below a bathtub. Each hatch
led to a series of interconnected tunnels in the city's drainage system.
An
AP reporter who walked through one tunnel in Culiacan had to dismount
into a canal and stoop to enter the drain pipe, which was filled with
water and mud and smelled of sewage. About 700 meters (yards) in, a trap
door was open, revealing a newly constructed tunnel. Large and lined
with wood panels like a cabin, the passage had lighting and air
conditioning. At the end of the tunnel was a blue ladder attached to the
wall that led to one of the houses Mexican authorities say Guzman used
as a hideout.
A day after troops narrowly
missed Guzman in Culiacan, top aide Manuel Lopez Ozorio was arrested.
The officials said he told investigators that he had picked up Guzman, a
woman and the drug lord's communications chief, Carlos Manuel Ramirez,
from a drainage pipe and helped them flee to Mazatlan.
In
an interview with local media Monday, Interior Secretary Miguel Angel
Osorio Chong said no U.S. agents were present at the less-than-luxurious
condo in Mazatlan when marines burst in and grabbed Guzman in front of
his wife, Emma Coronel, and his U.S.-born twin daughters without any
shots being fired. Photos of the condo showed a crib in one of the
rooms.
Osorio Chong said of Guzman, "when he
saw the marines in front of him, he accepted his detention and
immediately let the marines do their job."
"She
was there, his wife, and their two daughters were there, but they had
nothing to do with it. They were released," Osorio Chong said.
