Infamous Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who twice escaped from maximum-security prisons in his country, was extradited at the request of the United States to face drug trafficking and other charges and arrived in New York late Thursday.
A plane carrying Guzman landed at a suburban airport, where a caravan of SUVs waited to take him away. Guzman, the convicted leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the world’s largest drug trafficking organizations, was expected to spend the night in a New York jail before his first appearance in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn on Friday, officials said.
Mexico’s Department of Foreign Relations announced Guzman was handed over to U.S. authorities for transportation to the U.S. earlier Thursday, the last full day of Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration and a day before Republican Donald Trump’s scheduled inauguration.
Guzman was taken into custody by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Ciudad Juarez, a border town across from El Paso, Texas.
Guzman, who’s in his late 50s, first escaped from prison in 2001 and then spent more than a decade on the run before he was recaptured, only to escape again in 2015 via a mile-long tunnel dug to the shower in his cell.
The 2015 escape was highly embarrassing for the government of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, and Mexican officials were seen as eager to hand the headache off to the United States afterward. A court denied Guzman’s appeal and found his extradition was constitutional, the Mexican Department of Foreign Relations said.
In Mexico, Deputy Attorney General Alberto Elias Beltran told reporters late Thursday that Guzman still faces formal charges in 10 other cases.
“When he completes his sentence in … the United States, he will return to Mexico to continue” the prosecutions, he said.
Guzman’s lawyers had fought extradition since his 2016 recapture and said Thursday the Mexican government sent him to the United States to distract the public from nationwide protests over gasoline prices.
“It was illegal. They didn’t even notify us,” lawyer Andres Granados said. “They handled it politically to obscure the situation of the gas price hike. It’s totally political.”
Besides New York, Guzman faces charges in five other U.S. jurisdictions, including San Diego, Chicago and Miami. He could face the possibility of life in a U.S. prison if convicted.
