Extradited Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo' arrives in US

 The Mexican government has delivered an astonishing snub to Donald Trump by extraditing the notorious drug lord, El Chapo, just hours before the president-elect takes office.

El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquin Guzman, touched down in New York at the Long Island MacArthur Airport about 9:30pm.

A caravan of SUVs was waiting for the prisoner when he arrived, and after getting off the plane he was led into a hangar and raced away in the back of one of the cars. 

After news of the extradition broke, some experts have suggested the extradition was timed purposefully to take place before Trump is sworn in.    

'It could be a coincidence, but I think that's unlikely,' Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope said. 

'They could not send him after Trump was inaugurated because the interpretation would have been that of a tribute.

'But maybe they wanted to do it close enough so that both administrations - the outgoing and the incoming - could really make some political hay out of this.'

A former Drug Enforcement Agency senior official also added weight to the theory.

'The Mexican government decided to move up the time frame because they didn't want Trump to be in the presidency when they sent him over,' Michael Vigil, the former head of international operations for the DEA, said.

'They wanted Obama to take credit. They wanted to send a message to Trump that they won't be bullied.' 

A government source told a similar story to the New York Post, saying: 'Mexico wanted to get this done with a Justice Department it knows and trusts, that understands the gravity and implications of the crimes that "El Chapo" has been apart of.

'That’s not to say that the next Justice Department won’t be just as competent. But with the Trump Administration, everything is a question mark.' 

But Mexico denied any political motivation behind the timing, saying they sent 'El Chapo' to the US as soon as they were able to do so.
Deputy Attorney General Alberto Elias Beltran, who was asked at a Thursday night news conference about the timing of Guzman's extradition, said the federal government cannot interfere in court decisions.

'It was resolved today, and we under terms of the international treaty had to make the handover immediately,' he said.

It is being reported the cartel kingpin will be sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, before appearing in court on Friday. 

The center has been described by CNN as 'Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib' - thanks in large part to the alleged treatment of prisoners there. 

A Justice Department report from 2003 found: 'prison guards slammed detainees into walls, twisted their arms and wrists, lifted restrained prisoners by their arms, and subjected them to humiliating strip searches.' 

He could be tried in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, also in Brooklyn, as it is one of seven with indictments pending against the drug lord, and it is considered to have one of the best chances of getting a conviction.

The New York indictment accuses him of overseeing a trafficking cartel with thousands of members and billions of dollars in profits laundered back to Mexico. 

It alleges Guzman and other members of the Sinaloa cartel employed hit men who carried out murders, kidnappings and acts of torture.

Earlier, El Chapo had left Mexico, where he was being held at a prisoner near the border and El Paso, about 5:30pm local time.

Mexico's Foreign Relations Department announced the extradition in a statement.

'The government... today handed Mr Guzman to the US authorities,' the statement read, referring to a court decision on Thursday rejecting a legal challenge by his lawyers against extradition. 

The convicted Sinaloa cartel boss had been held most recently in an infamously violent prison near the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez. 

He was recaptured a year ago after making a second brazen jailbreak and had fought extradition since then. 

His lawyers had sought to block his extradition to the United States. 

'It's a good thing to finally get him to the US side,' a senior American law enforcement official based in Mexico said, according to Reuters. 

Silvia Delgado said her client was 'uncomfortable' with the way he's being treated and told her: 'There is a security guard that handles me instead of only touching me'.

The slippery drug lord was recaptured in January last year, six months after his brazen escape from the Altiplano maximum-security prison through a one-mile tunnel that opened in his cell's shower.

He had previously escaped from another prison in 2001 and was arrested in 2014.

He was taken back to Altiplano after his January arrest, but was abruptly transferred in May.

source: AFP