Mexico to move jailed drug lord to house arrest

MEXICO CITY: Mexico's government said Wednesday it will soon transfer aging drug lord Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo to house arrest after 31 years in prison for the killing of a US undercover agent.
Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said the National Security Commission exhausted all legal options for "this criminal to remain in prison" following a court ruling in his favour with nine years left in his 40-year sentence.
The 86-year-old drug capo, alias "Don Neto", was convicted for the 1985 murder of US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, a crime that strained US-Mexican relations at the time.
Fonseca Carrillo is also known as the "grandfather" of drug trafficking because he is the oldest of the three founders of the now defunct Guadalajara drug cartel, once the most powerful gang in Mexico.
His release will mean that two of the three cartel leaders convicted over the murder are out of prison.
Last year, a federal court approved Fonseca Carrillo's request to finish his sentence under house arrest after his lawyers said he should be released due to his advanced age and illnesses.
"It's an obligation imposed on us by a judge and that we have to comply with," Osorio Chong told reporters, adding that the transfer was "imminent."
A federal government official told AFP on condition of anonymity that Fonseca Carrillo's home will be "guarded by police" at a residence that Fonseca chooses, and that he could be released in the "next few hours".
Fonseca has been held at the Puente Grande prison in the western state of Jalisco.
His lawyer, Ernesto del Castillo, told AFP that Fonseca Carrillo will be taken in an ambulance to the local airport and will then go to a home in Atizapan de Zaragoza, a suburb of Mexico City.
His daughter, Johana Fonseca, told Milenio television that the family was "happy that we will be able to give the necessary care for an 86-year-old person".
"I understand that this sort of news doesn't please public opinion, but my dad is following the law by fulfilling his sentence," she said, defending his "humanitarian" release.
She said her father "possibly has colon cancer" and has lost vision in one eye.
Forefathers of cartels
In 2013, a court freed Guadalajara cartel co-founder Rafael Caro Quintero on a legal technicality with 12 years left in his 40-year prison sentence.
The release angered the US government and prompted Mexican authorities to issue an arrest warrant for his extradition to face US charges over the murder.
The third Guadalajara cartel veteran, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, alias "The Godfather", remains in prison.
Their gang was Mexico's most powerful criminal group in the 1980s and is considered the forebear of the country's modern drug cartels.
Caro Quintero denied killing the DEA agent in an interview that was published by Mexican magazine Proceso on Sunday. He also rejected allegations that he is back in the drug business.
Camarena's murder was considered a vendetta by the Guadalajara cartel for the DEA agent's investigations that led to the seizure of a massive marijuana field in the northern state of Chihuahua.
A US indictment filed in a California federal court alleges that Camarena was taken to Caro Quintero's house in the western city of Guadalajara, where he was interrogated, tortured and killed over three days along with his Mexican pilot, Alfredo Zavala.
Their bodies were found in the western state of Michoacan a month later. — AFP