The final chapter in the story of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, Mexico’s most notorious drug kingpin, has finally begun.
With his extradition from Mexico to the United States Thursday, Guzman can now be expected to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison on the other side of the Rio Grande.
In the United States, Guzman will face charges of conspiracy, organized crime, weapons possession, murder and money laundering. He will not face the death penalty thanks to an agreement between U.S. prosecutors and the Mexican federal government.
The timing of the extradition, just hours before U.S. president-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office, has invited speculation. President Enrique Peña Nieto’s popularity ratings are at rock bottom after the recent gasoline price hike. This, combined with Trump’s promises to slap tariffs on Mexican exports and build a border wall, is creating much nervousness in Mexico, and affecting the currency. Analysts on Thursday speculated that Peña Nieto is trying to curry favor with the incoming president before any official meetings between the two nations take place.
Guzman’s celebrity exploded in 2015 after a daring escape through a one-kilometer tunnel at the Altiplano prison in Mexico State.
Fourteen years earlier he had made an equally audacious escape from a Guadalajara penitentiary, allegedly hidden in a laundry basket.
The acknowledged leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Guzman maintained a vice-like grip on drug trafficking routes throughout the north-west of Mexico for more than two decades.
Lawyers for Guzman complained that correct legal procedures had been ignored in the Mexican government’s haste to see Guzman dispatched north of the border before the presidential inauguration.
The U.S. Department of Justice thanked Mexico for its “extensive cooperation and assistance in securing the extradition of Guzman Loera to the United States.”