Former drug lord Eduardo Arellano Félix was deported to his home country of Mexico after serving a prison sentence in the USA, where he was arrested again.
The 64-year-old former chief financial officer of the Tijuana drug cartel was handed over to the Mexican authorities on Monday on the border bridge between Brownsville, Texas and the city of Matamoros, Mexico's attorney general announced.
There Arellano Félix alias "El Doctor" was arrested with an arrest warrant for allegations of drug trafficking and membership in a criminal organization, among other things.
Arellano Félix was arrested in Mexico in 2008 and extradited to the neighboring country in 2012. There he was sentenced to 15 years in prison the following year, among other things for conspiracy to launder money. In return for his cooperation with the investigators, the charges were reduced. "El Doctor" was released early after serving much of his sentence in a low-security prison in Pennsylvania. In Mexico he was supposed to be put in a maximum security prison.
The Tijuana Cartel - also known as the Arellano Félix Organization - was founded by several of his family's numerous siblings and was one of the most powerful criminal syndicates in Mexico in the 1990s. The group smuggled large quantities of marijuana and cocaine into the United States via the border towns of Tijuana and Mexicali. According to the security-related portal Insight Crime, the cartel also had extensive relationships with the Mexican government and law enforcement agencies.
Two brothers of Eduardo Arellano Félix are in prison in the USA; two others have been killed. One of them, Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, was shot dead by a killer disguised as a clown at his birthday party in the Los Cabos resort in 2013. He, too, had previously been detained in the United States.