It’s a sharp reversal from the official position after his last capture in 2014.
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Michael Braun, a former chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Mexico would be wise to send Guzman to the United States.
His efforts to develop a biopic ends in a scene with high irony: After six months on the run, Guzman is now back in the same maximum security prison from which he escaped, according to a Mexican law enforcement official with knowledge of the case.
“It’s convenient for Pena Nieto to extradite him, even though it’s an admission that he can’t hold him”.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of NY is writing a formal extradition request to the Mexican government, Nellin McIntosh, a spokeswoman for the office said Saturday.
It didn’t take long. “They won’t challenge everything at once… they can drip, drip, milk it that way”.
Guzman, who was captured Friday after a six-month manhunt, faces charges in numerous jurisdictions across the United States.
As of today, he was back in the Altiplano maximum-security prison from which he escaped in July.
Guzman’s prison escape – his second one in 14 years – embarrassed the Mexican government and became a symbol of ineptitude and corruption.
After his capture this week, a relieved President Enrique Peña Nieto applauded security forces. They were fired on from inside the building. They did not mention extradition. They extradited him to Mexico and after his conviction, sent him to the Puente Grande maximum security prison. “It’s nearly a forced move”.
Guzman arrived at the house Thursday, and authorities raided it in the wee hours of Friday.
The marines were met with gunfire as they closed in. Five suspects were killed and six others arrested, according to the statement. One navy personnel was injured. Marines climbed into the drains in pursuit. Two pilots were among the dozens of people arrested.
In 2014, Guzman evaded capture by fleeing through a network of interconnected tunnels in the drainage system under Culiacan, the Sinaloa state capital. Those requests resulted in courts in Mexico’s 3rd and 8th districts issuing arrest warrants with the objective of worldwide extradition. “It shows that the public can have confidence in its institutions”, Pena Nieto said in a public address. “Mexicans can count on a government decided and determined to build a better country”.
It wasn’t exhaustive Mexican detective work, nor sophisticated U.S intelligence, that exposed the whereabouts of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
It also provides relief to US-Mexico relations, strained by suspicion of high-level collusion given the apparent ease with which Guzman gave Mexican authorities the slip after the United States requested his extradition.
Once featured in the Forbes list of billionaires, Guzman led a cartel that has smuggled billions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States and fought vicious turf wars with other Mexican gangs.
The first of the threatening responses was from a Twitter account reputedly belonging to Ivan Archivaldo Guzman, containing profanity and insults, immediately after the news of his father’s recapture.
His second escape past year was even more audacious.
In July, Guzman used an elaborate underground tunnel to break out of a Mexican federal prison. In October, authorities said they were hot on his trail, only to have him slip out of sight, though not before apparently breaking his leg.
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Guzman wanted to make a biopic and this was one of the aspects that helped authorities track him down, Attorney General Arely Gomez said, according to AFP. “He established communication with actors and producers, which formed a new line of investigation”, Gómez said at a press conference Friday.
