Mexico’s government said it will soon transfer ageing 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 said 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 soon.
Fonseca has been held at the Puente Grande prison in the western state of Jalisco.
His lawyer, Ernesto del Castillo, said 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.
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.