Extradition is the legal process by which one country returns a fugitive to another country, where that person has been accused or convicted of a crime. It’s often a lengthy and complicated procedure whose specifics are determined through treaties signed by individual governments. Generally, extraditions apply only to activities that are criminal in both countries and to people hiding out in nations other than their own.
Extradition as concept, originated with the Ancient Egyptian and Chinese civilizations. Following an unsuccessful Hittite invasion of Egypt, an extradition agreement formed part of a peace treaty signed between Ramses II and the Hittite King, Hattusili II.Amazingly, this text still exists.
It wasn’t until the Treaty of Falaise in 1174AD that an English monarch officially made provisions for extradition. The treaty between Henry II and William of Scotland set out a mutual extradition agreement between the Scots and the English.
The first U.S. extradition agreement appeared as a clause within the 1794 John Jay Treaty with Britain. It was a shaky piece of legislature, although modest and short lived, it established a number of important principles that have continued to structure the American approach to extradition to this day – it ensured that extradition was dictated by law and not foreign policy and that it was non political (i.e. the only crimes listed were murder and forgery). Fast forward nearly forty years and we find what the UK Home Office claims is the earliest example of a proper and ‘modern’ extradition agreement.
One of the earliest, and most notorious, recorded case of extradition within Britain dates back to 1591 when an Irish nobleman and rebel Brian O’Rourke fled to Scotland. The monarch at the time, Queen Elizabeth, demanded that O’Rourke be transferred from Scotland to England. She used the 1586 Treaty of Berwick to secure O’Rourke’s custody. He was sent to the Tower of London and then executed at Tyburn on the 3rd November 1591. It was an exceptional case and an important precedent.
In the year 1842 a treaty known as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was created between the USA and Great Britain. Created to address the Northeast Boundary Dispute in America, it also specifically dealt with the surrender of alleged offenders in cases of murder, assault with intent to commit murder, piracy, arson, robbery and forgery. Most significantly, the judiciary took on an even greater role. As a result dozens upon dozens of people were extradited to and from Britain in a relatively short space of time and during the 1860s the process of extradition came under considerable strain.
The United States complained that the list of offences enumerated in the Treaty was too narrow. In the twenty-two year period between 1846 and 1868, the total number of extradition requests from England to the United States was 53 and outgoing requests amounted to 36.
Formal extradition didn’t become commonplace in Western countries until the mid–19th century, when increased travel options made it easier for criminals to escape.
Governments almost never surrender their own citizens. Political crimes are rarely extraditable, because countries don’t want to be accused of aiding a coup or opposing a foreign regime. In 1934, an Italian court refused to extradite the assassins of Yugoslavia’s King Alexander, on the grounds that the crime was political.
Today, the U.S. has extradition treaties with many countries. Colombia extradites an average of four suspects to the U.S. each week — the most of any country — usually on charges related to drug trafficking.
Even with a treaty, though, high-profile extraditions can take years to complete. Former Panamanian general Manuel Noriega finished his U.S. prison sentence in 2007, he still remains in jail while the legal system decides whether he should be extradited to France (where he is wanted on money-laundering charges) or repatriated to Panama (where he faces charges of murder and extortion).
According to John Jairo Velásquez Vásquez — Pablo Escobar’s top hitman — extradition to the US is the fate that drug barons like Escobar and Guzmán fear most.
In the jails and prisons of Latin America, kingpins often exercise a great deal of influence. While detained at Puente Grande Federal Prison from 1993 to 2001, for example, Guzmán was allowed to host his family for a vacation inside the prison grounds, held multiple parties for friends, and had female inmates brought to the all-male jail for his enjoyment, Mexican journalist Anabel Hernandez says.
The US legal and prison systems, however, strip drug barons of their power.
Extradition threatens powerful narcos like Escobar and Guzmán because they would be cut off from their cartel business, their family, and corrupt authorities willing to accept bribes.
In the words of Escobar, “better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the United States.”
In the late 1980s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel was the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in the world. As such, Escobar and his associates had attracted the attention of Colombian authorities. Violence in Colombia had increased throughout the decade, and by 1988, Escobar and the Colombian government had entered into “indirect” negotiations, during which the cartel leaders proposed a deal to preserve their wealth and end the government’s efforts to hunt them down.
Escobar “and the traffickers of Medellín … offered to abandon drugs trafficking in return for — no more, no less — an end to extradition, a judicial pardon and a tax amnesty,” wrote Simon Strong in his 1995 book, “Whitewash: Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars.”
At the suggestion of Germán Montoya, the head of then-Colombian President Virigilio Barco’s staff, the drug lords looked for a way to get US officials onboard with the deal, particularly the part about ending extradition. Montoya and others considered US approval essential to any agreement.
“In 1988, the drug lords reportedly attempted to hire the services of the New York firm Kissinger and Associates to mount a public relations campaign on behalf of the proposed trafficker-government accord,” Patrick Clawson and Rensselaer Lee wrote in their 1996 book, “The Andean Cocaine Industry.”
“No agreement was reached with the firm, however,” Clawson and Lee added.
The drug barons were not deterred. They waited until then-US President Ronald Reagan, a dedicated anti-drug warrior, was out of office.
One of the events that may have ended any chance at a successful negotiation was one of the most notorious political killings in Colombian history.
In August 1989, Luis Galán, the leading presidential candidate — who had promised to extradite drug traffickers to the US — was assassinated, a killing orchestrated in part by Escobar and reportedly at the urging of Galán’s political rivals.
After Galán’s death, the situation in Colombia deteriorated. According to Clawson and Lee’s account, the government reacted by issuing an emergency decree against the narcotics industry in the country, to which the traffickers responded with a declaration of “absolute and total war against the government and the industrial and political oligarchy.”
Cesar Gaviria, who had also promised to extradite drug traffickers, was selected as Galán’s Liberal Party successor and went on to win the presidential election in 1990. The Colombian government, with US help, continued its bloody pursuit of Escobar for the next year and a half.
Though Escobar agreed to jail himself in a prison of his own design in mid-1991, by the middle of 1992 he was again on the loose.
In December 1993, with his Medellin cartel withering, Escobar was killed on a rooftop in his home town — though who delivered the fatal shot remains unclear.
To Vallejo, Escobar’s godfather, Galán’s assassination was the beginning of the end for Escobar, even if the Medellín kingpin felt justified in ordering it.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if Galán was killed in retaliation” for police action against the cartel during talks, Vallejo told Strong. “That was an error. Escobar did not have the academic preparation to realize all the effects of what was basically a political act; it finished him.”
Popeye was Escobar’s chief assassin during the final years of the drug lord’s life, and he was responsible for more than 300 assassinations and for organizing another 3,000 homicides.
He spent 23 years in six different Colombian prisons after he turned himself in to authorities in 1992. He was released in August 2014.
In an interview with Univision, Velásquez elaborated on another thing that scared traffickers: “wanted” posters. As one of the few surviving members of Escobar’s Medellín cartel, Vásquez, commonly referred to as “Popeye,” claimed that the “king of cocaine” once told him, “Popeye, we’re dead,” after seeing his face on a “wanted” poster. “The ‘wanted’ poster is very dangerous for us as bandits because you go to a store to buy a drink and there’s your photo. Someone sees it on TV and knows you are worth US$10 million,” Popeye said.
For Guzmán, the years long “wanted poster” portion of his criminal career, which included two brazen prison escapes, appears to have given way to the extradition portion. The extradition of Guzmán to the US was already in the works, according to the Mexican attorney general’s office — Mexico received the extradition request on June 25, but Guzmán slipped out of prison through a mile-long tunnel two weeks later.
Popeye estimates that Guzmán’s 2015 escape could have cost at least US$50 million in bribes to authorities and prison workers since “at [Altiplano] they have sensors and cameras to prevent tunnels,” according to his interview with Univision, though other sources put that number much lower.
But no amount of money is likely to win Guzmán favor in a US prison, something the Sinaloa cartel kingpin most likely knows all too well.
The Law Library of Congresshas recently published a chartcontaining information on the terms that apply to the extradition of citizens in 157 jurisdictions around the globe. Of the countries surveyed, 60 were found to have laws that prevent the extradition of their own citizens, while the laws of 31 other countries generally allow such requests.