US Imposed Extradition Quota for Mexican Traffickers, AMLO Has Met It Each Year

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
From a Proceso Article 

President Andrés López Obrador has extradited 341 alleged drug traffickers to the United States, an average of 62 per year, thereby meeting the extradition quota he committed to with Washington in the Bicentennial Agreement, according to a study by the organization Elementa DDHH.

In the report “Extraditing the Truth to Mexico,” the NGO revealed that according to documents obtained from the Guacamaya collective, while the Bicentennial Agreement was being negotiated, the Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA) guaranteed the U.S. authorities that Mexico would extradite 60 alleged drug traffickers to the US each year.

 
And this commitment was followed to the letter by López Obrador, who each year of his six-year term signed the extradition of 61.9 Mexicans on average, thus the exact number to meet the quota of 60.

These extraditions occurred “despite the non-interventionist rhetoric of President López Obrador, who, like his predecessors, contributed to the kingpin strategy,” which focuses on pursuing the leaders of criminal groups and not on fighting crime.

The report, which was coordinated by the Director of Elementa DDH, Adriana Muro, and the Director of the office in Mexico, Renata Demichelis, counted the extraditions to the United States that López Obrador signed from the beginning of his government until June of this year, which yielded an average of 5.1 each month.

López Obrador carried out fewer extraditions than Presidents Felipe Calderón (615) and Enrique Peña Nieto (421), but his vehement speech against interventionism contrasts with his collaboration with the United States not only in drug trafficking, but also in the issue of migration, in which Mexico has played a role in containing the flow of Latin American migrants.

According to Elementa DDHH, the United States' criminal drug policy, the cornerstone of which is extradition, "represents a benefit to the crisis of corruption and impunity that prevails in the justice institutions of our country."

This is because “current bilateral policy allows judicial responsibility to fall under the jurisdiction of the United States,” that is, the criminal process has been extradited to that country, which “makes it easier for Mexico to evade its responsibility to investigate and punish and weakens local institutions.”

The report by the human rights, security and drug policy NGO noted that government agencies in Mexico “are losing institutional memory and practical knowledge to process cases as relevant as those of Edgar Veytia (former Nayarit prosecutor), Genaro García Luna (former Secretary of Security) and (drug trafficker) Joaquín Guzmán Loera.”

It also encourages denunciations and alleged kidnappings of criminals in Mexican territory with the purpose of handing them over to the United States, as occurred last July with the historical leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, who was apparently kidnapped by Joaquín Guzmán López to negotiate an agreement with the Attorney General's Office of the neighboring country.

The NGO said that US prosecutors have encouraged negotiations to get an accused person to testify against a co-defendant or to support the government in pointing the finger at other people involved in criminal activities.

"This allows the spiral of persecution to continue in drug-producing countries without any concrete impact on the operation of the market," the report added.

In practice, what exists is a bureaucratic system in which anti-drug agencies, courts and prosecutors focus on inflating statistics to make it appear that they are fighting drugs and to increase their budgets.

“This is a political use of extraditions,” said the director of Elementa DDHH, Adriana Muro.

U.S. prosecutors and courts also don't care whether it is illegal for people to come to their country to face drug charges.

"In the case of Humberto Álvarez Machaín, related to the murder of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena, the U.S. Supreme Court validated his kidnapping in Mexican territory (which occurred in April 1990) prior to his transfer to the United States, which validates recent cases such as that of 'El Mayo' Zambada," the document stated.

He also argued that the extraterritorial judicial actions promoted by the DEA benefit both the objectives of US criminal policy and the impunity and corruption of the justice institutions in Mexico."

The NGO, with offices in Mexico and Colombia, deplored the fact that trials in the United States for drug crimes focus “on grams and substances, not on the lives of thousands of people affected by the war system of prohibition and the networks of corruption that allow the market to operate.”

Of 150 extradition cases reviewed by Elementa DDHH, only 3 resulted in sentences for crimes associated with victims.

“For the courts that judge drug crimes committed in Mexico, victims exist when they fulfill a role or for the criminal policy of the United States,” he said, adding that it is often forgotten that drug traffickers are also responsible for massive human rights violations.

The NGO called attention to the opacity of the Bicentennial Agreement, signed by the López Obrador government with the United States in 2021.

“The original agreement was not published and there are no freely accessible reports that demonstrate progress in its evaluation indicators,” said Elementa DDHH and warned that this agreement “has continued with the warlike and punitive model of prohibition in its objectives and indicators,” one of which is extraditions.

Source Elementa DDHH, Proceso