The United States Department of Justice announced on Monday the repatriation of 14 Mexican prisoners who completed a sentence in federal prisons of the country for crimes related to drug distribution. Shipping, based on a 1977 bilateral treaty, will mean savings for American public coffers of four million dollars, as stated by the head of the criminal division of the agency, Matthew R. Galeotti. That is the estimated value of “the imprisonment costs for the remaining 96 years of their combined sentences,” reads the statement published this morning, which details that the transfer occurred on Friday and that the prisoners had requested the transfer.
The Deputy Attorney General has expressed the will of the country to continue with this type of transfers “to reduce costs and relieve the overpopulation of federal prisons” of the United States, although the origin of the treaty on which this type of, relatively frequent transfer is based, has nothing to do with the saving of budget but rather with facilitating that citizens of each state comply with a sentence in their countries of origin. As you can read on the Page of the Department of Justice, “the program aims to facilitate the rehabilitation of transferred criminals and alleviate some of the administrative and diplomatic problems that arise with the imprisonment of foreigners.”
The last shipment of this nature occurred in mid -April. Then Mexico was repatriated to 13 prisoners who complied with sentence for crimes similar to those now, distribution of drugs that included cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl. The saving announced on that occasion was three million dollars, and it was also specified that the prisoners had requested to be returned to their country.
With the transfer made this Friday, the second of this year, the sum of transfers amounts to 185 since the treaty entered into force, in November 1977. The last of the previous year, which sent nine prisoners back to Mexico, occurred in December. Although it is the transfers who initiates the procedure for the shipment to be carried out – in this case the United States – this must have the express consent of the transferring inmate and with the authorization of the receiving state, as specified by the treaty in question.
The sending of prisoners for minor crimes related to the distribution of drugs by the United States contrasts with the massive transfer of large drug lords made Mexico to its northern neighbor in February of this year. Among the extraordinary booty delivered to the Government of Donald Trump, composed of 29 criminals, were some of the heavy weights of drug trafficking in the country, such as Rafael Caro Quintero, a historic leader of the Guadalajara poster claimed by the United States for decades for the murder of an AGA agent; or old leaders of the Los Zetas poster, such as Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, known as Z-40 and Z-42.
This shipping, carried out outside the framework of the usual extraditions, subject to another series of procedural norms, was part of the negotiations with the Republican executive to avoid the imposition of tariffs to Mexico, with whom the United States shares a border of 3,000 kilometers and a commercial exchange of more than 800,000 million dollars each year.
Security initiatives have become the currency with which the Government of Claudia Sheinbaum is avoiding or postponing the imposition of harder economic measures by its American counterpart, which has found in this issue a reef with which to press its southern neighbor in search of solid results in the fight against fentanyl. This week’s transfer makes it clear that Trump’s interest that the great Mexican drug traffickers meet sentence in the United States federal prisons is not extensible to small drug distributors, whose maintenance is considered an expense to cut.
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