Foreign defendants sent to the United States almost never face capital punishment, however serious the accusations that weigh against them are.
But when a famous drug trafficking leader arrived from Mexico to the Federal Court of Brooklyn last month, accused, among other things, of killing an American federal agent, the Prosecutors of the Eastern District of New York said they could be sentenced to death.
Prosecutors would still have to formally request capital punishment for drug trafficker, Rafael Caro Quintero, before a trial for which months or years could be missing. But whatever happens with Caro Quintero, the episode represents a radical change for both countries, and reflects how Mexico is responding to the aggressive foreign policy of President Donald Trump in the continent and beyond.
Before this, historically Mexico had sent criminals to the United States only with the condition that they were not executed, a provision of its extradition agreement with Washington.
However, instead of going through the cumbersome extradition procedure, Mexico simply sent Caro Quintero and another 28 drug trafficking figures, as allows a national security law. The measure gives the Mexican government flexibility to accelerate transfers and means that Caro Quintero and at least four other prisoners sent to the United States last month could also face the death penalty.
For Mexico, the decision is a break with the country’s old policy to protect its citizens from capital punishment. For the United States, it makes possible the punitive vision of Trump’s justice, of which the death penalty is an essential tool.
Mexico has fought fiercely for decades to prevent the US government from executing its citizens. The extradition treaty, whose form is in force since the 1970s, stipulates that the country that requests a defendant cannot impose the death penalty if it does not exist in the country of origin of the accused. Mexico does not apply capital punishment since the 1960s, although it was not officially abolished until 2005.
The different views of both countries have tensioned relations. In 2002, the then president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, canceled a trip to visit President George Bush in protest of the imminent execution of a Mexican citizen. In 2003, Mexico appealed to the highest court of the United Nations for death sentences that the US government had imposed on 51 Mexican citizens.
In 2017, Mexico agreed to extradite drug trafficker Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, with the condition that prosecutors in the East District did not request the death penalty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019.
Emily Edmonds-Poli, a professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego, said that the decision of the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, to transfer to cartels members would normally lead to a political risk. But Sheinbaum, who enjoys high approval indices in the midst of a wave of nationalism, can have the freedom to act with audacity, he said.
“It’s a decisive moment,” said Edmonds-Poli. “Open a door that was firmly closed.”
The predecessor of Sheinbaum, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, tried to end violence through a lower confrontation with the cartels and addressing the deep causes. But her strategy, coined as “hugs, not bullets,” has lost popularity in Mexico.
Instead, Sheinbaum has so far adopted a decidedly more aggressive approach in the fight against cartels. In addition to passing the transfers, he has sent more than 10 my soldiers to the American border and Sinaloa, a fentanyl traffic center where his government claims to have made more than 900 arrests since October.
It is not clear how the Mexican government will respond if US prosecutors request the death penalty against cartels members. Alejandro Gertz Manero, Attorney General of Mexico, told the press in Mexico that the chiefs of the cartels cannot be executed in the United States, according to the newspaper El País.
The negotiations to send to the drug lords of Mexico through this simplified process began during the government of Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the conversations. The White House of Biden resumed those conversations with Sheinbaum when the president assumed the position in October, and the final agreement of the transfer was negotiated by the Trump government after the day of the inauguration.
“It is a short circuit of an important legal procedure,” said Austin Sarat, professor at Amherst College, who has studied the death penalty for decades. “What Trump is doing is restarting the conversation about capital punishment.”
Caro Quintero was a particularly precious capture for US prosecutors. He was sentenced in Mexico for orchestrating the torture and murder in 1985 of Kiki Camarena, undercover agent of the drug control administration, which transformed the agency and relations between the United States and Mexico.
Caro Quintero served in a Mexican prison, but was released in 2013 in the middle of the night thanks to a legal vacuum. He was recaptured by the Mexican authorities in 2022. Michael Vitaliano, a lawyer for Caro Quintero, said in a statement that, in the event that his client faced the death penalty, his legal team was “fully prepared to deal with that procedural and substantively” challenge, “from” the moment of his capture and expulsion from Mexico until the end of the trial. “
They could spend months before prosecutors announce whether they request the death penalty. A spokesman for the district declined to comment.
Prosecutors would first have to overcome obstacles, as an intense review within the Eastern District Office and a Committee of the Department of Justice in Washington that studies cases of capital punishment. During this time, defense lawyers may present appeals to prosecutors and then to the Washington committee.
The detractors of the death penalty have been pointing out the racial disparities in their application, together with the most fundamental moral issue of whether the State has the right to take a life.
Critics have also indicated the high price of the administration of the death penalty, which can be tens of thousands of dollars more expensive than life imprisonment, as well as the fact that the United States executes many more people than the countries of their group. Among the 38 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States and Japan are the only two that apply the death penalty.
Ken Montgomery, a lawyer from Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, another member of the cartel sent from Mexico who could face the death penalty, he said in an interview that the United States should not devote to executing people.
“For a civilized society, I do not think that executing people is never something civilized,” said Montgomery.
Little more than half of the Americans support the death penalty, according to a Gallup October survey, compared to 80 percent of three decades ago. At the national level, in the United States, 25 people were executed in 2024, compared to 85 in 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. President Joe Biden, who in 2020 campaigned for the end of capital punishment, established a moratorium on federal executions and switched the penalties of 37 of the 40 inmates convicted of death before leaving office.
On the contrary, Trump and his allies favor a more punitive approach to the administration of justice, and Trump himself has long hosts an affinity for the death penalty. In 1989, he published ads in the press asking that the state of New York adopt the death penalty after the brutal attack on a broker in Central Park, for which five black and Hispanic adolescents were unjustly condemned. (The ads did not directly ask for the execution of adolescents).
Subscriber content
In 2017, shortly after a terrorist Uzbeko, Sayfullo Saipov, crossed with a truck a crooked crooked in low Manhattan, and killed eight people, President Trump said on Twitter that Saipov “should receive death penalty!” During his first term, Trump restarted federal executions after a 20 -year -old pause. And during his campaign for 2024, Trump said that “drug traffickers and people traffickers” should be sentenced to death.
In January, Trump signed an executive order that requested the death penalty in the cases of “murder of an agent of order” and “a capital crime committed by a foreigner illegally present in this country.”
In a memorandum of February 5, Pam Bondi, Treasury General, raised the moratorium that Biden had imposed on executions.