It was a fishy, fishy, fishy move.
The transfer of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera to a New York jail Thursday afternoon is one of those events that neither the United States nor the Mexican government will admit that it was the fruit of political maneuvering.
Definitely in Mexico the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) is claiming that the rapid and secret extradition of Mexico’s most famous bandito had “nothing to do” with the swearing-in ceremony of Donald Trump, who is becoming the 45th president of the United States.
But look at the circumstances. The removal of prisoner Joaquín Guzmán Loera – aka El Chapo for “chaparrito” or shortie – from a Ciudad Juárez maximum prison was carried out Thursday afternoon and personally I learned about it watching the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley when he announced he had just received a State Department brief press release that El Chapo was “on the air” in U.S. skies flying to an unknown destination, which turned out to be Brooklyn.
I checked into the Mexican news channels and at Milenio news, which is the favorite spokeperson channel for the Interior Secretariat (Segob), a reporter in Ciudad Juárez broadcasting live said that they were still waiting for the world’s wealthiest drug lord to be extradited to the United States.
It reminds me pretty much of that day when incoming president Ronald Reagan was sworn in on January 1980. Just a day or two before the release of U.S. prisoners kidnapped in the attack to the American Embassy under the Ayatolla Khomeiny were released. It looked then – as it does now – that the incoming and not the outgoing administration scored a grand slam.
In those days the Republican Party made it look as if they, and not the Carter Administration, had brokered the release.
“El Chapo’s” defense lawyer José Refugio Rodríguez told Spanish news agency EFE immediately after he knew of the extradition that, “This is a relay race in which the baton changes to the U.S. lawyers” hinting that a team of lawyers was already waiting for El Chapo, who is to appear in a New York Federal Court precisely on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.
“This is in total violation of due process”, the defense lawyer added.
This past week both the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice recused from admitting the plea bargains submitted by El Chapo’s group of defense lawyers and kicked the plea down to the Fifth Collegiate Tribunal in Criminal Issues in Mexico City where an “amparo” or physical protection under the law was denied to El Chapo, clearing the way for the extradition.
“You can clearly see a game of complicity between the federal and the judicial administrations and that’s a shame. It is evident that this had been agreed upon,” they said.
A few months ago Mexico’s Security Commissioner Renato Sales said that “El Chapo” could be extradited in January of February.
Was “El Chapo’s” release brokered between new Foreign Relations Secretary (SRE) Luis Videgaray and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to give The Donald the candy he grooves on the most, making him look good?
You bet it was. It is pretty much on the GOP style to do this sort of swaps.
Now the question is what did Luis Videgaray gain for Mexico?
We’ll see it soon but the way El Chapo was taken out of Mexico was indeed fishy, fishy, fishy.
