According to reports, former drug cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who is said to have “created a new era of organized crime” in Mexico, may be released from a U.S. prison and head back across the border to Mexico.
Cardenas Guillen, a former leader of the Gulf Cartel who founded the Zetas gang of ex-Mexican special forces soldiers, was transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday, authorities told Reuters. Guillen was a former Mexican special forces soldier who became Guillen's private army and hit squad.
In 2010, Cardenas Guillen was sentenced to 25 years in prison for assaulting and threatening to kill a federal officer and was ordered to forfeit $50 million in criminal proceeds. It's unclear why he didn't serve out his sentence, but he was taken into ICE custody, according to the Associated Press, suggesting he could be deported to Mexico, and officials said he has two warrants out for his arrest.
Leo Silva, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who once worked to fight the Zetas in Mexico, told Reuters that Cardenas Guillen “created a new era of organized crime” and “unleashed a spirit of terror in the country.”
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Osiel Cárdenas Guillén is escorted by agents of Mexico's Federal Investigation Agency in Mexico City, January 2007. (Reuters/Attorney General's Office)
The news agency reported that Silva directly blamed Cardenas Guillen for the rise in brutal cartel-related violence in Mexico over the past two decades.
The Zetas, which he founded, regularly carried out terrorist acts, massacring dozens of people, beheading them and dumping piles of mutilated bodies in the streets, according to the Associated Press.
Cardenas Guillen's own nickname is “El Mata Amigos” (“The Killer of His Friends”), and the 57-year-old once made millions of dollars moving tonnes of cocaine through the Gulf Cartel, based in the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros.
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A gold-plated gun belonging to Osiel Cárdenas Guillén is displayed at the Narcotics Museum at the Ministry of Defense headquarters in Mexico City in October 2016. The museum is used by the military to give soldiers a glimpse into the lives of Mexican drug lords. (Reuters/Henry Romero)
He was eventually arrested in 2003 and extradited to the United States four years later. By 2010, the Zetas had formed their own cartel and were waging terrorist attacks across Mexico and as far south as Tabasco state, culminating in the deaths or arrests of several of their most senior leaders between 2012 and 2013.
One of Cárdenas Guillén's most daring acts was in 1999 when he surrounded and stopped a vehicle carrying two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and an informant in Matamoros, a border city across from Brownsville, Texas, according to the Associated Press.
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén was photographed before his extradition to the United States in January 2007.
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Cárdenas Guillén's armed men pointed their weapons at the agents and demanded that they hand over the informant, who would almost certainly be tortured and killed. The agents held their own and refused, telling him that it was bad judgment to kill a DEA agent. Cárdenas Guillén eventually called the armed men back, but not before reportedly telling them, “You gringos, this is my turf.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
