Border Tales

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Ken Ellingwood writes about the “record” number of extraditions of drug suspects and other wanted criminal suspects from Mexico to the US.

Ellingwood writes,

The government of President Felipe Calderon is extraditing drug suspects and other fugitives to the United States at a record pace, reflecting a quiet but seismic shift in Mexican policy that many analysts say could help dismantle trafficking gangs.

Calderon’s administration has handed over more than 150 criminal suspects since coming to power in December 2006.

The extradition rate is double what it was before Calderon took office. And it represents a radical policy change from a decade ago, when Mexico, sensitive about its sovereignty, rarely handed suspects over for prosecution in the United States.

I’d heard something similar about a month ago, and checked in with different sources. I was pointed to a web site for the US Embassy in Mexico City that details the breakdown of extraditions. As of August 2008, about 48 percent of the extraditions involve drugs, while 33 percent are for murder. Overall, more than half the extraditions are for offenses other than drug trafficking, including murder, sexual crimes against children, rape and kidnapping. Most of the fugitives returned are Mexican nationals.

These figures are up from 40 percent of extraditions involved drug trafficking while down from 37 percent involving murder from figures that appear to be about a year old.

See: http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/eataglance_law.html

The overall numbers are certainly up — Mexico extradited only four people in 1995, for instance, compared with 83 people last year and about 70 this year, as Ellingwood reports (the latest figures I have from August are at 57 for the calendar year). A telling number, however, is that 51 extradition cases remain before Mexican judges (at least two involve the Villarreal brothers, as mentioned previously here.)

What I don’t know is if the actual rate of extraditions has increased, as Ellingwood reports. Are the number of extradition requests increasing as well? Or are the requests static and the number of approved extraditions increasing?

Anyway, there has been a trend upward in extraditions going back to 2000. As this State Department press release points out, 2003 saw a record, too. The fact is, we’ve heard about new records before:

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