Notorious ex-cartel leader nicknamed ‘Friend Killer’ released from US prison, 21 years after his arrest

Mexican drug lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen, former leader of the notorious Golf Cartel and the criminal gang Los Zetas, were released from a U.S. jail on Friday and turned over to immigration authorities, officials said.

Cardenas Guillen was captured in 2003 and extradited to the United States four years later, where he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. A Federal Bureau of Prisons official told AFP that Cardenas Guillen, 57, was released on Friday and was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

He faces multiple charges in Mexico, but it is not yet known whether the U.S. government will deport him. An anonymous U.S. official told NBC News that the Biden administration was planning to transfer Cardenas Guillen to Mexico.

The Gulf Cartel was once one of Mexico’s most fearsome criminal organizations, but in recent years the cartel has lost influence and split into several factions.

As leader of the cartel, Cardenas Guillen ran a drug trafficking empire responsible for exporting massive quantities of cocaine and marijuana from Mexico to the United States.

Nicknamed “El Mata Amigos” (“Friend Killer”), he recruited former Mexican special forces soldiers to form his personal guard, which eventually operated independently as Los Zetas, one of the country’s most bloodthirsty gangs until it collapsed.

After his arrest in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, he was extradited to the United States in 2007, where he was sentenced in 2010 to 25 years in prison and a $50 million fine.

The Justice Department alleged at the time that Cardenas Guillen threatened to kill a Texas sheriff’s deputy, who was working as an undercover agent with ICE, after he refused to deliver nearly 2,200 pounds of marijuana.

After his arrest, the Zetas began to operate more independently, until they finally broke with the Gulf Cartel in 2010, leading to a war for control of drug trafficking routes in eastern and northeastern Mexico.

Gulf Cartel Faction Behind 2023 Killings of Americans

In January Mexican Marines locked up one of the top leaders of the Gulf Cartel, the gang that kidnapped four Americans and two of them killed in March 2023. The kidnapping and murder of the Americans was linked to the Gulf Cartel faction known as “The Scorpions”.

The four Americans crossed from Texas into the border city of Matamoros in March, so that one of them cosmetic surgeryThey were shot in downtown Matamoros and then loaded into a pickup truck.

Americans Zindell Brown and Shaeed Woodard died in the attack; Eric Williams and Latavia McGee survived. A Mexican woman, Areli Pablo Servando, 33, was also killed, apparently by a stray bullet.

In a Interview April 2023Williams said at one point he was lying on the floor of a pickup truck, hidden beneath the bodies of Woodard and Brown.

In May 2023, the police arrested a top lieutenant of the violent Metros faction of the Gulf drug cartel. The suspect was identified as Hugo Salinas Cortinas, whose nickname is “La Cabra,” meaning “The Goat.”

Just weeks earlier, the brother of Miguel Villarreal, also known as “Gringo Mike”, a former boss of the Gulf Cartel Plaza, convicted in Houston to 180 months in prison for his role in cocaine distribution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.