Thread: Mexican drug lord not extradited because of U.S. error

Posted on Wed, May. 02, 2007email thisprint this
MEXICO
Top Mexican drug lord not extradited because of U.S. error
By Kevin G. Hall and Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Newspapers
MEXICO CITY – The United States missed a chance in January to take custody of the most wanted Mexican drug baron because U.S. officials had not filed a timely extradition request with Mexico, a McClatchy Newspapers investigation has found.

In a surprise move on Jan. 19, Mexico handed over 15 Mexican nationals sought by the U.S. justice system, including the alleged bosses of the Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels and eight other high-level drug suspects.

But Alberto Benjamin Arellano-Felix, reputed leader of the Tijuana cartel, under arrest in Mexico since March 2002, was not among the extradited.

After the slain Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, Arellano-Felix -- known as “Min,” short for Benjamin – is arguably among the most infamous of drug lords anywhere. He is accused by the U.S. government of working closely with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Colombian narco-guerrillas known as the FARC, to convert Mexico into the main drug corridor into the United States.

The U.S. Justice Department confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that an extradition request for him was first filed in February 2007, weeks after Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderon, without advance warning, handed over the alleged top drug traffickers. Prior to that move, Mexico rarely handed over kingpins because of its opposition to the death penalty and life sentences issued in U.S. courts.

The Tijuana cartel is among most Mexico’s most violent and dangerous drug smuggling organizations. Controlled by the extended Arellano-Felix clan, whose members are related by blood and marriage, the cartel since the 1990’s has dominated the flow of cocaine, marijuana and heroin into California, America’s most populous state, and the U.S. West Coast. The cartel is responsible for elaborate tunnels built under the Tijuana-San Diego border to ferry drugs.

Arellano-Felix has been sought by the U.S. government for at least 15 years, and federal grand juries returned sealed indictments on seven occasions. In the latest, a grand jury in San Diego returned a 28-count indictment for drug and money laundering in December 2003 that linked Benjamin to at least 20 murders in the United States and Mexico. He is also alleged to have bribed powerful Mexican politicians, and Mexican authorities suspect his organization was behind the 1993 assassination of a Roman Catholic cardinal at an airport in Guadalajara.

The Drug Enforcement Administration had offered a $2 million reward for the arrest of Benjamin Arellano-Felix and a $5 million reward for brother Francisco Javier Arellano-Felix, who reportedly took over the cartel after Benjamin’s arrest in 2002. Francisco Javier was arrested in international waters aboard a deep-sea fishing boat off the Mexican Pacific Coast in Aug. 14, 2006, and now faces federal trial in California. He’s indicted as a co-defendant under the same 28 counts as Benjamin.

The DEA believes brother Eduardo is now running the organization, and has a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

Both the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorneys Office in San Diego refused to discuss why it took them a full five years after the arrest of Arellano-Felix to request his extradition.

In fact, one of Arellano Felix’s top lieutenants – Ismael Higuera Guerrero – was named in the same federal indictment as his boss and was extradited on Jan. 19 in response to a standing U.S. request. Higuera pleaded guilty March 16 and is expected to testify against Arellano-Felix should Mexico eventually extradite him.

During a Jan. 22 news conference celebrating Mexico’s surprise extraditions, Department of Justice officials sidestepped the question of why Benjamin Arellano-Felix wasn’t among the extradited. DEA officials later suggested that Mexico’s notoriously slow legal system was to blame.

In actual fact, the U.S. legal system proved too slow.

Bryan Sierra, a spokesman for the Justice Department, confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that the U.S. Attorneys Office in San Diego sent documents to Washington in May 2006 seeking Arellano-Felix’s extradition, four years after his arrest.

It took the Justice Department about five months to translate into Spanish 27 boxes full of documents, at a cost exceeding $100,000, Sierra said. The documents were then sent to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico in October 2006. It took an additional four months before the U.S. Embassy presented the complicated extradition request to Mexico. But that was after President Calderon’s government had surrendered some of the drug traffickers most wanted by the U.S. justice system.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, James Dickmeyer, said that once the extradition request was received in Mexico City, embassy officials reviewed it and passed it on to Mexico “within the normal timeframe, taking into account that there was a change of government here on Dec. 1.”

There’s no way of knowing for sure that Mexico would have extradited Arellano-Felix had the United States had filed extradition papers. Mexican drug traffickers have long bribed or killed those in Mexico who would punish them. Although he was arrested in March 2002, it wasn’t until April 26 that Arellano-Felix was even convicted and sentenced for any crime. And, that was the minor offense of arms possession, which carries a five-year term.

But it’s clear that without an extradition request, there was no way for Mexico to hand over Arellano-Felix to the United States.

Sierra, the Justice Department spokesman, said his agency doesn’t believe the U.S. Attorneys Office in San Diego erred in not seeking the extradition of Arellano-Felix earlier. He added that “we are still talking with Mexico about extraditing him here and we’d prefer to discuss the case with the Mexicans, not the media.”

Debra Hartman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorneys Office in San Diego, declined to discuss the five-year delay in seeking Arellano-Felix’s extradition. So did Carol Lam. She’s the former U.S. Attorney in San Diego who was fired late last year by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as part of a controversial mass firing that’s now engulfed the Justice Department in controversy.

Mexican government officials declined public comment for this story. That’s partly because they and their families risk death if seen by drug cartels as supporting extradition of traffickers or interfering with the lucrative illicit drug trade.

The DEA and Justice Department officials must now hope that precedent was set in January and that Arellano-Felix will eventually be extradited, and some experts think that will be the case. Calderon had just taken office on Dec. 1 in a disputed election and was seeking to boost his image at home and abroad by getting tough with the cartels. Cartels responded by killing police and judicial officials across Mexico, and that’s drawn Mexicans to the side of the new president.

“He’s made a very pragmatic decision that he would much rather not have to jail these people in Mexico,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. “He understands there is some collateral benefit from being cooperative with the U.S. on these issues that get him some positive reaction in Washington, but it has been much more him taking care of a practical problem for the Mexican legal system.”

Historically, staunchly Roman Catholic Mexico has refused to extradite top drug barons like Arellano Felix to the United States because they could face the death penalty or life imprisonment. Neither sentence exists in Mexican law.

Together, these two limitations protected drug bosses like Arellano-Felix from facing the U.S. justice system and allowed them to run their empires from jail cells. Several bought their freedom or relaxed rules in recent years. U.S. prosecutors actually softened their indictments against Arellano-Felix in 2003 to avoid the chance of a death sentence or life imprisonment.

However, in 2005 Mexican courts began allowing extradition even when life terms were possible. Since then Mexico has allowed more extraditions, but the entire extradition process remains confusing and shielded in part from public scrutiny on both sides of the border.

“It’s hard to get your hands around the fact of how this really happened,” said Chip Lewis, a Houston attorney serving as co-counsel to Osiel Cardenas, the alleged leader of the violent Gulf cartel who was extradited on Jan. 19 to face trial in Brownsville, Texas.

Lewis, who recently defended the late Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, said he was studying whether rules were broken in what appeared to be snap extraditions by Mexico.

“By all indications, the U.S. government had requested the extradition (of Cardenas) four years before it happened,” he said.

In Mexico, Arellano-Felix is known to have at least eight powerful attorneys trying to prevent his conviction in Mexico and extradition to the United States. Although his brother Francisco Javier has retained counsel in the United States since his arrest and U.S. imprisonment last August, Benjamin does not appear to have hired a U.S. attorney, according to a person with knowledge of his U.S. case.

(Taylor reported from Washington)
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17168223.htm

Too many drug smugglers are getting by and that is because somebody's pockets are being lined.