Mexico has formally started the process of extradition to the US of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
The authorities said Interpol officers served him papers at the Altiplano prison, near Mexico City.
Guzman, 58, escaped from the maximum security jail in July and was recaptured on 8th January.
Mexico is also considering whether to investigate Hollywood actor Sean Penn, who interviewed Guzman soon after his jail break.
Unnamed Mexican officials have said Penn’s secret meeting helped lead them to the fugitive.
WHO IS EL CHAPO?
Born in 1957 to a family of farmers, Guzman’s first exposure to drug trafficking came while working in marijuana and opium poppy fields.
An apprenticeship of sorts followed under Guadalajara cartel boss Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, also known as the Godfather. Guzman was tasked with contacting Colombian traffickers.
His rise was swift, setting up his own cartel, the Sinaloa, in the late 1980s, thought to be responsible for a quarter of all drugs entering the US via Mexico.
After narrowly escaping assassination by a rival gang in 1993, he was arrested by Mexican authorities and sentenced to 20 years in jail.
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El Chapo Speaks
A secret visit with the most wanted man in the world Disclosure: Some names have had
to be changed, locations not named, and an understanding was brokered with the subject that this piece would be submitted for the subject’s approval before publication. The subject did not ask for any changes. “…
They call him El Chapo. Or “Shorty.” Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera. The same El Chapo Guzman who only two months earlier had humiliated the Peña Nieto government and stunned the world with his extraordinary escape from Altiplano maximum-security prison through an impeccably engineered mile-long tunnel.
This would be the second prison escape of the world’s most notorious drug lord, the first being 13 years earlier, from Puente Grande prison, where he was smuggled out under the sheets of a laundry cart. Since he joined the drug trade as a teenager, Chapo swiftly rose through the ranks, building an almost mythic reputation: First, as a cold pragmatist known to deliver a single shot to the head for any mistakes made in a shipment, and later, as he began to establish the Sinaloa cartel, as a Robin Hood-like figure who provided much-needed services in the Sinaloa mountains, funding everything from food and roads to medical relief. By the time of his second escape from federal prison, he had become a figure entrenched in Mexican folklore.
ln February 2014, a detachment of Mexican marines captured El Chapo in a Mazatlán hotel following a 13-year manhunt.
The images of that arrest were flashed across the world’s televisions. While he was incarcerated at Altiplano prison, El Chapo’s attorneys were flooded with overtures from Hollywood studios. With his dramatic capture, and, perhaps, the illusion of safe dealings now that El Chapo was locked up, the gringos were scrambling to tell his story. The seed was planted, and El Chapo, awakened to the prospect, made plans of his own. He was interested in seeing the story of his life told on film, but would entrust its telling only to Kate. The same lawyer again tracked her down, this time through the Mexican equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, and the imprisoned drug lord and the actress began to correspond in handwritten letters and BBM messages.