US should find way to get drug kingpin ‘El Chapo’

There’s good and bad news stemming from the capture last week of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the Mexican drug lord who escaped from a maximum-security prison in July.

The good news is that the Mexican government, embarrassed by Guzman’s brazen prison break and reeling from charges of widespread corruption within security forces, appears ready to send him to the United States, where he has been indicted criminally in several states.

The bad news, however, is that it could take many, many months before the internationally renowned drug kingpin is handed over to the American criminal justice system.

Each day Guzman is held in the same prison from which he escaped six months ago makes another break all the more certain. It is not a stretch to imagine that the deep-rooted culture of government corruption in Mexico, especially among members of the national police force and military, works to the billionaire’s advantage.

The evidence of Guzman’s infiltration of security forces can be seen in the milelong tunnel that was dug from the shower room used by him to a vacant structure outside the prison. The tunnel was equipped with lights and a ventilation system and contained a motorcycle on tracks. It is a stretch to believe that such a major excavation project could have taken place without the knowledge and consent of prison officials. Indeed, there was an airplane waiting to fly the drug lord to his hideaway in the mountains.

It is noteworthy that a year and a half before the escape, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials alerted Mexican authorities about several plans for Guzman’s freedom. He had been captured in February 2014 after a previous prison breakout.

Shortly after his capture, members of his family and drug-world associates began considering “potential operations to free Guzman,” the Associated Press reported.

That is why we are pessimistic about last week’s capture after an hourlong shootout between gunmen and Mexican marines at a home in Los Mochis, a seaside city in Guzman’s home state of Sinaloa. Five suspects were killed and six others arrested. One marine was injured.

The operation resulted from a six-month investigation by Mexican forces, which located Guzman in a rural part of Durango state in October but decided not to shoot because he was with two women and a child.

FEATHER IN CAP FOR PRESIDENT

To be sure, the capture was a feather in the cap of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government, which brought the head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel to Mexico City’s airport, frog-marched him to a helicopter before news media and then flew him to the prison from which he had escaped.

Guzman’s lawyers wasted no time in reiterating their opposition to any extradition of their client. They already had filed appeals, some overruled and others still pending, after the U.S. had submitted extradition requests June 25, while he was still in prison, and Sept. 8, after he escaped.

“He shouldn’t be extradited to the United States or any other foreign country,” said one of the lawyers. “Mexico has laws grounded in the constitution. Our country must respect national sovereignty, the sovereignty of its institutions to impart justice.”

But some of those institutions have been shown to be open to bribery and corruption by the very rich and powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

It is laughable to hear Guzman’s lawyer talk about law and order when virtually none exists in the regions of Mexico that are controlled by individuals like Guzman.

Thus, our belief, expressed in an editorial last July, is that Guzman should be viewed by the U.S. government as a terrorist, in the same league as Osama bin Laden, because of the death and destruction he and his drug cartel have caused in America. The death toll from drug overdoses is in the thousands and far surpasses the 3,000 deaths from the bin Laden-inspired terrorist attacks on America’s homeland Sept. 11, 2001.

In the editorial, we said the administration of President Barack Obama should treat the drug kingpin’s escape from prison as an opportunity to launch a bin Laden-type search-and-destroy mission inside Mexico or any country that provided him safe haven.

It should not make a difference that he’s back in prison. There are ways to get to Guzman to ensure that he never comes out alive. All it takes is a commitment by the Obama administration to rid the world of this scourge, once and for all.