A list of 29 suspects extradited to the United States on Thursday reads like a “Who’s Who” of Mexico’s imprisoned drug lords.
Here are three of the most notorious cartel kingpins who were handed over:
Rafael Caro Quintero
The biggest prize was without doubt Rafael Caro Quintero, who has been wanted by the United States for decades over the kidnap, torture and murder of Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985.
The 72-year-old “Narco of Narcos,” who has always denied he was behind the killing, was on the FBI’s list of 10 most-wanted fugitives until he was captured in Mexico in 2022.
There was a $20 million reward for information leading to his arrest — the most Washington has ever offered for a Mexican drug trafficker.
His handover was an “extremely personal” moment for the entire DEA, the agency’s acting administrator Derek S. Maltz said.
Caro Quintero had already been arrested in 1985, tried in Mexico and sentenced to 40 years in prison for Camarena’s murder.
But in 2013, a Mexican court ordered his release on a legal technicality after he served 28 years, a move that angered US authorities.
By the time Mexico’s Supreme Court overturned the decision, Caro Quintero had already gone into hiding.
Caro Quintero is said to have begun growing marijuana at the age of 14.
He went on to co-found the now-defunct Guadalajara cartel — which did business with the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar — before running an arm of the infamous Sinaloa cartel.
Reputed to have had a weakness for jewelry and fine clothing, he cited his impoverished childhood to justify his actions.
“I was an orphan, my father died, I was 14 years old and I had to feed my brothers, that’s how it all started,” he told Proceso magazine in a 2016 interview.
Miguel Angel Trevino Morales
As head of the Zetas drug cartel, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, alias “Z-40,” led one of Mexico’s most powerful and feared organized crime groups until its collapse.
The group was founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces known for their brutality.
Originally, they acted as the armed enforcers of the Gulf Cartel, but the two groups split in 2010, and the Zetas became a major drug trafficking organization in their own right.
The split sparked brutal turf wars in the north of the country.
At the time of his arrest in 2013, officials described Trevino Morales, now 54, as a brutal killer who liked to “stew” his enemies by plunging them in containers of oil and fuel that he would set on fire.
The US government had offered $5 million for information leading to his capture.
Omar Trevino Morales
Omar Trevino Morales, alias “Z-42,” allegedly took over the Zetas after his older brother Miguel Angel was captured by marines in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas in July 2013.
He was considered “one of the most dangerous and bloodthirsty criminals in Mexico,” Tomas Zeron, the investigations chief at the attorney general’s office, said at the time.
In 2010, Omar Trevino Morales told an informant that he had killed more than 1,000 people while his brother Miguel had killed 2,000, according to an affidavit filed in a US court for a case involving another Trevino brother in Texas.
Like his brother, he had a $5 million US bounty for information leading to his arrest.
Now 51, he was caught in 2015 by Mexican police and soldiers in an upper-class suburb of the northern industrial city of Monterrey.
Washington accuses the two brothers of being “personally responsible” for committing dozens of murders and for directing killings, kidnappings and torture.
