Mexico extradites 29 drug traffickers to the United States, including the leaders of Los Zetas

Mexico has extradited 29 drug traffickers who were being held in different prisons across the country to the United States on Thursday, according to the Mexican attorney general’s office. “The people who were deprived of their freedom in different prisons were wanted for their links with criminal organizations, for drug trafficking, among other crimes,” the statement said.

The agency has not provided further details, but various sources have assured EL PAÍS that among the 29 are the former leaders of the Los Zetas cartel, Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, known as Z-40 and Z-42. As well as Rafael Caro Quintero, former head of the Guadalajara Cartel, and José Ángel Canobbio, alias El Güerito, a lieutenant of Los Chapitos, one of the factions of the Sinaloa Cartel.

The extraditions come in the midst of negotiations between Mexico and the United States, due to Washington’s intention to apply a 25% tariff on Mexican exports. Since he took office on January 20, U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened several times to apply the levy on the entry of Mexican products into the country, a threat based on drug trafficking north of the border, mainly in the form of fentanyl, and the migratory flow that reaches the southern U.S. states. On Thursday, Trump reiterated that the tariffs will be applied as of March 4, after a one-month moratorium.

It is difficult to ascertain whether the tax will go into effect on the date Trump has announced. Originally, the tariffs on Mexican products were to begin in early February, but talks between the two governments ended in a month-long suspension. As the deadline approached again, teams from the Mexican Ministry of Economy and the security cabinet have traveled to Washington to try to reach an agreement to stave off the tariffs. Trade between the two countries exceeds $800 billion per year.

The leaders of the bloodthirsty and atomized Zetas cartel, renamed Los Zetas, stand out among the new batch of extradited criminals. Emerging as a group of military deserters, later hired as bodyguards by former Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cardenas, Los Zetas became independent after the latter’s arrest in the early 2000s. By then, the Treviño Morales brothers, both civilians, were barely out of their criminal shell. They had been part of gangs in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. But it was with Los Zetas that they grew to be feared capos, until their capture. Z-40 was arrested in 2013 and his brother, Z-42, the following year.

While they were at large, especially in the first decade of the century, Omar and Miguel Ángel Treviño rose to the top of the Mexican criminal world. Under their command, Los Zetas inaugurated new areas of crime in the country beyond drug trafficking, none as lucrative as extortion. Their rise during the era of President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) forced the government to confront them with blood and fire, as Calderón’s intelligence chief, Guillermo Valdes, has explained several times. During the final years of Calderon’s term, confrontations between the army and criminal groups in Tamaulipas, mainly Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, raised violence to historic peaks.

Los Zetas’ battles with other criminal groups in Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Veracruz raised the tone of horror in Mexico, with massacres, dismembered bodies exposed to the public, and corpses dissolved in acid. In other regions, such as northern Coahuila, where their control was total, they used extreme violence as a form of subjugation. Research such as that carried out by El Colegio de México details massacres and mass executions in municipalities such as Allende and Piedras Negras.

The Allende case illustrates their ruthlessness perfectly. According to investigative reporting, most notably by journalist Ginger Thompson for Propublica, the Treviño brothers launched a manhunt for traitors in Allende in 2011 after a former associate gave up his phone numbers to U.S. authorities. The Treviños learned of this betrayal after Washington handed over the data to their peers in the Mexican Federal Police, information that reached the brothers’ ears. It was never known how many people were killed or disappeared in Allende, but the count to date is over 300.

For over a decade, Washington has been seeking the extradition of the criminal brothers, whom it is seeking to prosecute for trafficking drugs into U.S. territory - primarily cocaine - money laundering, and murder. However, the transfer of the Zetas bosses had stalled in Mexican courts, largely because Miguel Treviño’s defense attorney has argued that his client is a namesake who has been associated with the alias Z-40 mistakenly by authorities. Miguel Treviño remained in prison for two other pending cases related to the crimes of carrying weapons and promoting drug trafficking. The defense of Omar Treviño Morales, Z-42, followed the same strategy as that of his brother.

In July 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice released an indictment against the Treviños in which it claimed that the brothers have continued to control the cartel from prison, after “installing several members of their family to run operations on their behalf.” The document added that Z-40 and Z-42, then aged 51 and 48, are responsible for “innumerable acts of violence, including murders, assaults, kidnappings and torture.” It points out that from 2003 to date, the drug lords have trafficked 45 tons of cocaine in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia and the United States, and that in a period of one year they generate profits of $10 million. At least 14 tons of cocaine have entered the United States alone, according to the indictment.

For his part, El Güerito, considered one of the most trusted lieutenants of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, head of Los Chapitos and a son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was captured in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, just two weeks ago in an operation by federal forces. His arrest, along with those of other criminal leaders close to Archivaldo Guzman, was planned as part of the Sheinbaum administration’s security strategy focused in recent months on Sinaloa, the Mexican Pacific state where huge quantities of fentanyl trafficked to the U.S. are produced and which for the past six months has been engulfed in a wave of violence caused by internecine warfare between Los Chapitos and La Mayiza, factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, the latter loyal to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

In 2022, army documents hacked by the Guacamaya collective revealed that there was a priority list of high-profile extraditions requested by Washington from Mexico as part of the Bicentennial Understanding, the bilateral security agreement signed at the time by the governments of Joe Biden and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The list included Caro Quintero, the Treviño Morales brothers, and Abigael González Valencia, alias “El Cuini,” the right-hand man and brother-in-law of Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) founder Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho.”

The leaked documents showed that the U.S. also put a number on the amount of extraditions it was demanding from Mexican authorities at the time: “Return overall extraditions to the historical average of 60 per year by 2022.” Another target on the list was identified only as “Villarreal,” possibly in reference to José Rodolfo Villarreal Hernández, “El Gato,” the Beltrán Leyva Cartel’s underboss who made the FBI’s top 10 most wanted fugitives list in 2020 (a list that also included Caro Quintero). El Gato was captured in 2023.