El Chapo escape highlights need to extradite

On the evening of July 11, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the kingpin of the Sinaloa cartel, disappeared from his cell at a maximum-security prison in Altiplano, Mexico. It is no surprise that Guzmán, who pioneered the use of sophisticated tunnels to move drugs beneath the border, escaped through a tunnel that was reportedly a mile long and outfitted with a ventilation system, electricity and even a motorcycle on rails. This wasn’t his first flight from a maximum-security facility, either. In 2001, he exited Puente Grande prison in a laundry cart, evidently aided by upwards of 70 prison staff and millions of dollars in bribes.

After that escape, Guzmán spent over a decade on the run before he was arrestedagain in February 2014. His capture was a major victory for the Mexican government, yet his breakout from prison seventeen months later is a colossal embarrassment and a major blow to Mexican citizens’ confidence in their government and institutions.

Guzmán’s disappearing act says less about the physical security of Mexico’s prisons than it does about the ability of powerful drug lords to reach nearly anyone through bribery, corruption and intimidation. After all, Guzmán did not painstakingly cut his way free with power tools; instead, he left Altiplano by way of a custom-built tunnel, aided by a vast criminal network and the criminally derived wealth that landed him on Forbes' The World's Billionaires list in 2009.

His escape demonstrates what many on both sides of the border already knew — as things stand today, Mexico cannot successfully prosecute and incarcerate such a powerful kingpin. Its criminal justice system is too weak, and its top criminals remain above the law. Bringing down a kingpin such as Guzmán requires a functioning criminal justice system and effective forfeiture laws. Mexico has neither, and until it does, the government should pursue extradition in order to “disarm” key traffickers and cut them off from their criminal organizations.

After Guzmán’s capture last year, many believed he would be sent to the United States, where he has been indicted on charges in at least seven federal jurisdictions. The U.S. informally urged Mexico to hand him over soon after his arrest, and latersubmitted a formal request for his extradition. However, Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general at the time, was reluctant to do so, and stated this January that extraditing Guzmán was out of the question for reasons of national sovereignty.

Ironically, voluntarily extraditing Guzmán to the USA would not have threatened Mexico’s sovereignty. Instead, the real threat comes from a handful of vicious and powerful criminal organizations, including Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, which remains the most powerful criminal organization in the world. These cartels corrupt at all levels and effectively control sizable chunks of Mexican territory, including parts of the states of Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and, until recently, Michoacán. While the full extent of their damage is incalculable, rough estimates place the death toll over the past decade at more than 120,000.