A federal judge in Mexico City granted the benefit of house arrest to capo Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the Chief of Chiefs, former leader of the Guadalajara cartel, in the process where he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for crimes against health, stockpiling of arms and bribery. The decision was issued last week by the Seventh District Judge of Federal Criminal Proceedings of Mexico City, but this Monday the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has challenged the decision.
The initial decision of the judge took into account the delicate state of health of the drug trafficker and ordered the placement of an electronic bracelet for his immediate location. However, in order to finish his sentence at home, the sentence he faces for the murder of DEA agent Enrique kiki Camarena Salazar, and the Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar, where he faces a sentence of 37 years in prison, for a process that is based in Jalisco.
In March of this year, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal for review that he filed because his case does not have “an exceptional interest in constitutional or human rights matters.”
One-eyed, blind and half-deaf, the founder of the Guadalajara cartel, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, is currently 76 years old and in poor health. For one thing, he can’t walk and for a long time he could only stand upright if he was leaning against a wall. Félix Gallardo also suffers from pneumonia and remains connected to an oxygen tank. The drug trafficker has been operated on up to eight times for different hernias and has already lost the visibility of one eye. Also, according to his defense, he is going deaf and is losing feeling in some parts of his body. Previously, in 2021, he had been denied the possibility of obtaining the benefit of house arrest, despite his poor health and advanced age.
Félix Gallardo was arrested in April 1989 in a luxurious house on Cosmos Street in Guadalajara and sentenced to 40 years in prison during a trial in which he was accused of using an air taxi service to traffic drugs to the United States, as a result of the capture of a plane with traces of cocaine in the workshops of the company Aerolineas Ejecutivas, on May 27, 1985. From the first moment he denied links with organized crime, but he was again sentenced to 37 years for the murder of Camarena.
Subsequently, he was accused of stockpiling weapons, bribery, crimes against health and homicide. Imprisoned for 33 years, the drug trafficker, however, will serve the highest sentence, since the prison sentences of different trials are not cumulative, so he was scheduled to be released in 2029.
In recent months, the capo suffered several legal setbacks. For example, last October, a federal judge denied him an injunction with which he intended to avoid being forced to pay almost 21 million pesos to the families of the DEA agent as compensation for the damage caused by the homicide. In 2017, a Jalisco court sentenced the capo for the murder and ordered him to repair the damage along with the other sentenced from the Guadalajara cartel, Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Don Neto.
Although the judge notified the prison benefit last Friday, until this Monday Félix Gallardo was still imprisoned, although some sources consulted by the newspaper Reform They point out that in order to get out, all they need to do is hire an electronic device or bracelet to leave the Puente Grande Prison. However, after the decision is challenged by the FGR, the case must be turned over to a court that will establish whether or not the judge’s decision was in accordance with the law and whether it is upheld, modified or revoked.
A year ago, from the Puente Grande prison (Jalisco) where he remains, the capo granted an interview to the Telemundo network, where he again requested the permit that he now obtained for health reasons and addressed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. ”I know that the President is a man of good will who is fighting social inequality. He is giving pensions, he is giving a lot of things”, he said on television, and referred to himself as “a corpse that aspires to nothing more than being buried in the root of a tree”. During the interview, Félix Gallardo assured that in his time, in Guadalajara, the cartels never existed, and denied having met Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca.
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