A judge in Mexico has found a U.S. extradition request for Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman to the Western District of Texas (El Paso) legally sufficient for extradition. El Chapo was one of more than 20 people indicted on charges ranging from drugs (cocaine and marijuana) to money laundering, firearms, murder and Continuing Criminal Enterprise.

It's not alleged that El Chapo committed the murders, but that he ordered his sicarios to kidnap and murder. One murder was of a Sinaloa drug dealer in 2009 who claimed to have lost a load of 670 kilos of marijuana. He was kidnapped in the U.S. and his tortured body was later found in Mexico. Another was a groom who was kidnapped at his own wedding along with some others and later tortured and murdered.

Mexico's announcement is here (in Spanish).

Another court today granted temporary protection to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman-Loera. The case number is 398/2016 and the Court is the Juzgado Segundo de Distrito de Amparo en Materia Penal.

El Chapo also filed at least two other amparo requests. One is against extradition and the other is to return him to Altiplano.

El Chapo's lawyers say their extradition challenges will take between 1 and 3 years to resolve.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome. (The El Chapo news went down the rabbit hole, I just noticed it wasn't there and replaced it.)

The potential extradition of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman-Loera is making headlines again. A few quick points:

1. The Mexican Judiciary announced today a judge in Mexico's Third District federal criminal court (Mexico City) recently ruled that the U.S. request for El Chapo's extradition to the Southern District of California (San Diego) is legally sufficient, meaning it complied with the treaty requirements. The ruling applies to the Fourth Superseding Indictment in the 1995 Otay Mesa tunnel case. The announcement (in Spanish) is here. [More...]

Geraldo Rivera's new interview with Kate del Castillo about El Chapo and Sean Penn is about to begin.

El Chapo was moved today to a prison close to the border. Mexico says it has nothing to do with extradition. It's just a security measure.

Syed Raheel Farook is the older brother of San Bernadino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. Syed Raheel, the elder brother, served in the U.S. Navy from 2003 to 2007, with distinction, earning medals in the "Global War on Terrorism." He is married to Tatiana (Chernykh) Farook. Tatiana has a sister named Mariya Chernykh. The sisters are from Russia and emigrated here. Mariya is married to Enrique Marquez, who was charged with providing guns to Syed Rizwan Farook and marriage fraud. The Government alleges he paid Mariya Chernykh to marry him and the marriage was a sham marriage. They never lived together.

Now the Government has charged Mariya, Syed Raheel and Tatiana with marriage fraud conspiracyincluding making false statements under oath . The conspiracy charge carries a maximum 5 year sentence. There are a total of five counts to the indictment. According to the FBI, Syed and Tatiana took staged photos of Enrique and Mariya's wedding and lied to the FBI.[More...]

Kate Del Castillo chose Diane Sawyer and 20/20 for her first TV interview about her trip to Mexico with Sean Penn to meet El Chapo and the movie he entrusted to her to make about his life. (Background here and here.) As a long time fan of Del Castillo's acting, I found it very compelling.

Shorter version: She's sorry, but not for what you might think. She's still planning on making her movie about the life of El Chapo (it won't be a romantic comedy.) She's a little angry at Sean Penn. [More...]

The world will never move on from OJ Simpson. Here's the newest development with the testing of the knife a cop held onto reportedly found at OJ's Buckingham estate.

Emma Colonel Aispuro, the 26 year old beauty queen wife of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, gave an extensive interview to journalist Anabel Hernandez. It aired on Telemundo last night.

The purpose of the interview: Emma says she fears for El Chapo's life due to the unbearable conditions under which he is now being held.

The close captioning on Xfinity was pretty bad, but here's what I understood her to say [This is from memory, I didn't take notes during it]: [More...]

A grand jury in Houston indicted two people who are part of the group that made headlines last year with videos falsely claiming Planned Parenthood sold organs of aborted fetuses.

The Houston grand jury, which was empaneled to investigate Planned Parenthood after the Center for Medical Progress released its undercover footage last year, indicted the center's founder and another activist on Monday. The indictment was the first time anyone with the anti-abortion group has been charged criminally since the videos began surfacing last year.

Planned Parenthood was cleared of any wrongdoing. [More...]

I'm busy with other things today and tomorrow, so will just make a short post on El Chapo. I'll also fill in the missing source links in this post tonight.

On El Chapo, I wondered as soon as the Sean Penn connection was revealed whether El Chapo was motivated by a crush on Kate del Castillo. Penn intimated as such in his Rolling Stone article.

... maybe he watched her on TV and developed a crush on her. (Penn seems to intimate infatuation may have been the cause.)

The text messages between El Chapo and Kate published by Milennio also suggest he was infatuated with her. But another piece has now been disclosed in Mexican papers: During the search of the room he occupied at the raided house (the one with the secret switch that opened the way to the tunnel), police found 4 videos of various episodes of La Reina del Sur.

[More...]

Update: Penn was not present during the interview. He met with El Chapo in Mexico, and they agreed to do the interview in the future, but circumstances prevented it. So Penn sent the questions by Blackberry Messenger and El Chapo filmed and sent his replies.

Orignal Post

Rolling Stone has just published a two minute video clip from a recent video interview of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman by Sean Penn at a secret location. RS says the interview was submitted to El Chapo and he had no changes.

The producer of the video is none other than Kate del Castillo, the terrific Mexican actress who starred in La Reina Del Sur and more recently, Duenos del Paraiso(See my post here.) She's also in the new film The 33 about the trapped Chilean miners. She's my favorite Mexican actress, by miles. [More...]

I don't know why the media keeps saying Mexico has refused until now to consider extraditing Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman-Loera to the U.S. It issued two arrest warrants for his extradition, one in July and one in September, 2015. One was for his San Diego case involving the 1993 Otay Mesa tunnel, and the other was for his 2012 Indictment in the Western District of Texas.

Mexico's Attorney General confirmed this today in a statement.

The statement also describes the various time periods relevant to an extradition proceeding. The defense has the right to challenge extradition, and the process likely will take several months or longer. His lawyer says he has six writs of Amparo pending or granted, and plans to file another, as he was denied access to El Chapo this weekend at Altiplano. One of the writs was dismissed on legal grounds.[More...]