Federal prosecutors have extradited an alleged drug trafficker to the United States, the Attorney General´s Office (PGR) confirmed late Monday night. Roberto Bueno Hernández was arrested by federal agents in March of 2005. He will stand trial in the seventh district of Alabama, where he is accused of trafficking large amounts of narcotics.
The PGR said that Bueno Hernández was accompanied by U.S. marshals on a recent flight from the capital to Houston.
This is the nation´s first extradition to the United States since the Supreme Court overturned a 4-year-old ban on suspects facing life in prison in the United States last November - an obstacle that has prevented many of the nation´s most notorious drug lords from facing time in U.S. penitentiaries.
AVOIDING EXTRADITION
For years, suspects were not extradited to the United States if they could face the death penalty, sometimes leading U.S. prosecutors to request the extradition of accused narco-traffickers on lesser charges.
A subsequent Supreme Court ruling in January stated that a U.S.-Mexico treaty supersedes domestic law, thereby removing a point of appeal that could have allowed defendants to draw out the already lengthy extradition process.
The 1978 extradition treaty with the United States allows Mexico to deny extradition if a person faces the death penalty.
Last week, President Vicente Fox pledged that Mexico would "soon" begin extraditing suspected drug traffickers to the United States.
"We are going to start extraditing these drug lords so that they can face U.S. justice and will stop operating in our country," Fox said in a radio interview.
U.S. investigators say that allowing top drug suspects from Colombia to be extradited to the United States reshaped the anti-narcotics battle in that country and that extraditing Mexican suspects could have a similar effect here.
