Sealed The Process Against 'El Mini lic' In The US

 "Ivan" for Borderland Beat 

Dámaso López Serrano, son of "El Licenciado", will make agreements behind closed doors with prosecutors.

The trial against Dámaso López Serrano, El Mini lic, was sealed permanently for months, so that any negotiations that occur in the following months between prosecutors of the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) and the defense of the accused, would be carried out behind closed doors and without the possibility of the public knowing what kind of agreements the government of that country made with the drug trafficker. 

“He may never be extradited to Mexico because the reality is that the defendant is cooperating with the United States government and offering them information that may be of value to them,” said Luis Saenz, a former prosecutor for Cameron County, Texas.

The scenario looks dark for justice, since it not only shows how this type of negotiations between authorities and drug traffickers are increasingly common in the administration of justice in that country, but also that in the case of López Serrano, he may never be extradited. to Mexico, where since 2019 he has been accused of being the intellectual murderer of journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas.“That on the one hand, on the other – and without wanting to offend anyone – high-profile drug lords receive preferential treatment in Mexican prisons, and that also influences the fact that prosecutors in my country have no interest in repatriating them” Saenz observed.

For the Mexican prosecutors who keep all the possible evidence against the Minilic, justice will have the last word and they maintain that they have faith that it will prevail, and that when the time comes, the US government will deliver López Serrano to Mexico to face charges for what is accused, and that they maintain that the capo ordered the death of Valdez Cárdenas in a moment of anger in May 2017, just because he did not like what he published about him when his father Dámaso López Núñez el Licenciado was arrested.

“We request extradition in accordance with the extradition treaties that exist between both countries, and the answer is that extradition will be processed once your case is finished in the United States, which is the normal procedure, which occurs in these types of cases,” said Ricardo Sánchez Pérez del Pozo, head of the Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Committed against Freedom of Expression.Sources familiar with the case pointed out that although the process has been inactive since October 22, 2020, it does not mean that it has been sealed, but rather that it may be in a phase where evidence is still being collected, and if that is the case, it is It is possible that prosecutors will eventually present more accusations and this will be taken up again.

"But that's remote, because history has shown us that when you get to these kinds of phases, cases get encapsulated and the public only finds out once the defendant changes his plea from not guilty to guilty, and at the few months he is sentenced to extremely low chains,” said the source, who requested anonymity.

According to file 63436-298, from the United States Department of Prisons, López Serrano is being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) prison in San Diego, a building with more than 20 floors that is located in the center of that city, and according to reports, the defendant is highly protected, after in 2019 the Chicago Four Corner Hustlers gang offered 25 thousand dollars to the inmates of that country's prisons to "split" the drug trafficker's head.That forced the US prosecutor's office to seek methods to protect the Minilic from a possible attack, and at first he was moving him through different prisons across the country, until in 2020 he was permanently confined in the MCC, where he is apparently constantly protected. by security guards.

Until the arrest of Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán, López Serrano was one of the most emblematic narcojuniors of the Sinaloa Cartel, as observed on social networks, since he posed the same next to luxury cars, exotic animals, and among drug traffickers. They respected him for being the son of one of Chapo's associates: El Licenciado.

But all that changed with the extradition of Guzmán Loera, since Los Chapitos demanded the position from the Licenciado, and he decided not to hand it over, unleashing a war between the two factions, which ended with the arrest of López Núñez.

After the arrest, Valdez Cárdenas published a note in Ríodoce on May 7, 2017, referring to the fact that El Mini lic did not have the intelligence or the experience of the father to confront Los Chapitos, which would have provoked his anger, for which he ordered his death.

The order was finalized on May 15, 2017, and shortly after the murder, the Minilic fled to the border and for several weeks was hidden in a safe house in Mexicali, until, on the orders of his father, he turned himself in to DEA agents at the Calexico port of entry.

As it transpired at the time, the lawyer would have negotiated with the US prosecutor a fair deal for his son in exchange for all possible information against capos of the Sinaloa Cartel and in exchange for testifying against Guzmán Loera during the so-called trial of the century.

Two years later, López Núñez effectively accused Chapo Guzmán in a federal court in the Eastern District of New York.

RIODOCE

Article published on April 10, 2022 in the 1002 edition of the weekly Ríodoce.