As much as US prosecutors want to “get Shorty” — Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman — America needs to stand back and give Mexico some breathing room.
Guzman, widely known as “El Chapo” (Shorty), is the biggest fish ever caught in the Mexican-American drug wars, snared over the weekend in the lovely (but very violent) Pacific resort of Matzatlan in his home state of Sinaloa.
Proud Mexicans compare the bust of this head of the world’s most successful narco-operation, the Sinaloa Cartel, to our Osama bin Laden kill.
But El Chapo is also wanted in five US states. Aides to Attorney General Eric Holder hint he’ll push for extradition, and prosecutors in Brooklyn and Illinois have publicly said they’ll seek it. After all, the yanquis made a considerable contribution (in intelligence, mostly) to the Guzman bust.
And there’s good reason to move Guzman across the border quickly. Prosecution in Mexico will be hazardous: The likes of El Chapo habitually threaten the lives of Mexican court officials and their families.
Their tentacles are so long, in fact, that this weekend even members of the relatively “clean” Marine unit that busted Guzman had to hide their faces while perp-walking him in front of TV cameras. It wasn’t just to protect themselves from retaliation: Marine commanders also wanted to prevent the rankers from sending signals about El Chapo’s whereabouts to his cohorts.
Consider, for example, El Chapo’s wild 2001 prison escape, hidden in a laundry cart with the help of paid-off guards. Other corrupt officials were bribed as he made his way back to his home turf in the hills of Culiacan, the Sinaloa capital where he’s been hiding in plain sight ever since.
To avoid a repeat, Mexico must throw together a costly new maximum-security facility, and pay wardens salaries that can compete with the drug lords’ offers.
So you see why Washington is pushing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto for extradition: Get him to an existing US facility now.
“There are good reasons to extradite, and good reasons not to. My sense: Peña Nieto won’t do it,” says Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister.
Among the reasons not to: At the time of his escape, Guzman had served seven years of a 20-year sentence. So Mexico doesn’t have to rush to a danger-fraught trial; it can lock him up for the remaining 13 years.
And, as Castaneda notes, “It’d look kind of embarrassing if Mexico has spent all these resources in catching him, and now we can’t try him here.”
Finally, many Mexicans are suspicious of US intentions thanks to a bizarre 2012 Chicago case: Soon after Vicente Zambada, the estranged son of a bigwig in El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel, was extradited, he made a stunning allegation in the US court: American authorities, he alleged, were helping Sinaloa, and refrained from busting Guzman, in exchange for information on rival drug gangs.
The young Zambada (whose dad, Ismael, is considered a serious candidate to take over the cartel) is now mum again, raising speculations that the narco-scion is ratting out anyone he’s ever met.
Zambada may be a liar, but such US “divide and conquer” tactics, as he called them, ring true to many Mexicans.
America’s best bet is to wait patiently. Mexico’s president knows that, as one current Mexican official told me, “If anything goes wrong with Guzman — say, another escape — Peña Nieto will pay the political price.”
Therefore, the official predicted, the president may wait a few months, then quietly let America get Shorty after all.
Bottom line: Holder is best off avoiding rash public demands, and giving Peña Nieto the time to work it out.
Bloody skirmishes among El Chapo’s would-be successors are likely to plague Sinaloa streets now. But a legal fight between Mexico City and Washington would overshadow a huge, and rare, success in the dismal, deadly record of the drug war.