Los Zetas leader sent to Mexico after serving sentence in the US

The founder of the feared Los Zetas drug cartel has been deported to Mexico after serving a long prison sentence in the United States.

Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, 57, led Los Zetas until 2003, when he was cornered by Mexican soldiers near his hometown of Matamoros.

Under his leadership, the group became one of the most powerful and brutal death squads in Mexico’s drug war.

U.S. immigration officials handed Cardenas over to Mexican police at the Otay border crossing, where he was quickly rearrested and taken to the maximum-security El Altiplano prison in the State of Mexico.

Mexican prosecutors said he had been arrested on murder and racketeering charges dating back to his time as one of Mexico’s most powerful drug traffickers.

Cárdenas Guillén made his criminal career in the Gulf drug cartel in the 1990s, and reportedly did not shy away from killing his allies to get to the top, a practice that earned him the nickname “Kill Friends.” ).

But what he became famous for was recruiting members of Mexico’s elite special forces and using them as hitmen and enforcers for the Gulf cartel.

The law enforcement officers turned hitmen became known as Los Zetas.

The brutal methods they used, such as beheading and dismembering their victims, quickly spread terror in the northeastern part of Mexico, which was their stronghold.

In the early 2000s, Cárdenas Guillén was one of the most wanted men in Mexico.

Mexican security forces managed to arrest him in his home state of Tamaulipas in 2003 after a bloody shootout.

Aware of the power that the gang leader wielded in the area, security forces quickly transferred him to the capital, Mexico City, where he was placed in preventive detention.

In 2007 he was extradited to the United States.

There, he was accused not only of trafficking tons of cocaine to the United States but also of threatening to attack and murder federal agents.

He pleaded guilty in 2010 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Having served much of his sentence, he was released in August 2024 from the federal prison in Terre Haute, Idaho, and turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This paved the way for his deportation to Mexico on Monday.

Mexican prosecutors said there were still seven federal cases open against Cárdenas Guillén and that he could be sentenced to a total of more than 700 years in prison if convicted on all charges.