During his 11-year stint in a Mexican prison on organized crime and drug trafficking charges, a former leader in the Gulf Cartel, Mario Cárdenas Guillén, reportedly threw big parties, oversaw gambling rings for cockfights and horse races and regularly hosted sex workers.
During that time, Cárdenas Guillén also allegedly kept a vast drug trafficking network active and pumping cocaine and marijuana, among other drugs, into the United States. Once he got out in 2007, he continued his role in the Gulf Cartel, Mexican and American authorities say. Mexico sent him back to the clink in 2012.
Now, he’s been extradited to the U.S. to stand trial in the Eastern District of Texas, the Department of Justice said Thursday. His initial court appearance is scheduled for Monday, according to a DOJ press release.
U.S. authorities have charged him with conspiracy with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine. If convicted, he could spend a decade in a federal prison.
“International sources of illegal drugs continue to poison our communities,” U.S. Attorney Brit Featherston said in Thursday’s release. “We will make every effort to combat this scourge, and that includes going to the origin of the drugs in foreign countries and arresting and prosecuting those who seek to make a profit off this blight that adversely affects so many in our society.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Anne Milgram said in the release that Cárdenas Guillén’s extradition “should send a clear message to the leaders of drug trafficking organizations around the world that no one is beyond the reach of the DEA and our law enforcement partners.”
His brother Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who reportedly founded the Los Zetas Cartel, is imprisoned in a federal facility in Colorado, reports Al Dia, the Spanish-language sister paper of The Dallas Morning News. Since 2010, he’s been serving a 25-year sentence for money laundering, drug trafficking and threats against U.S. federal agents more than a decade earlier.
The Gulf Cartel is one of Mexico's oldest and most powerful crime outfits, although it has faced competition and power struggles with competing cartel groups in recent years, according to the InSight Crime watchdog.
Last month, the Mexican and U.S. governments announced what they billed as recent successes against drug cartels and weapons traffickers in a joint address to mark three months of cooperation in what’s called the Bicentennial Security Framework.
That agreement, in part, includes Mexican authorities cracking down on drug production and trafficking within Mexico, and Mexican and U.S. authorities preventing weapons crossing the border both ways.
Mexico’s foreign minister said a fentanyl lab is being dismantled in the country every five days, that seizures of synthetic drugs were up by 350% and that several high-ranking cartel bosses had been apprehended, reported the Mexican daily El Siglo de Torreón at the time.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released preliminary data that predicted a nearly 20% increase in deadly drug overdoses in Texas in 2021 when compared with the prior year. Across the country, the total number of lethal drug overdoses last year nearly topped 107,000, marking a 14.9% spike and breaking previous records.