Best left unsaid

MEXICO CITY, June 24 (Reuters) – Mexico agreed on Tuesday to extradite drug lord Benjamin Arellano Felix to the United States as suspected drug hitmen killed another six people in a border city in the latest round of a killing spree.

Arellano Felix, known as “El Min”, was head of the powerful Tijuana cartel that operates across the U.S. border from San Diego, California until his capture in early 2002.

Mexico’s Attorney General’s office said Arellano Felix will be tried in a Southern California court on charges of smuggling tonnes of cocaine into California between 1990 and 2000.

The decision overturns a decision in May by a Mexican federal judge to block the extradition.

Arellano Felix, whose cartel is now run by sister Enedina and brother Eduardo, is the latest high profile Mexican drug lord to be extradited by the government of President Felipe Calderon, who took office in 2006.

Was this a trade for older brother Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, who was also extradited to the U.S. last year, tried and sentenced, to great publicity, then quietly returned to Mexico on last March 5?  The guy didn’t even do the minimum time.

Back when Francisco Rafael was sent home, Lizbeth Diaz (Reuters) wrote:

President Felipe Calderon’s army-led crackdown has rounded up traffickers and busted police protection rings, and the powerful Sinaloa cartel from western Mexico has muscled its way into the Arellano Felix gang’s home turf.

Experts say some Tijuana smugglers are breaking away and teaming up with the Sinaloa cartel on some drug deals.

“We’re seeing the emergence of a post-Tijuana cartel structure in which you have smaller organizations, splinter groups, some of whom have now allied themselves with the Sinaloa cartel in a kind of confederation-like arrangement because they need protection,” said Bagley.

At the time, I wondered if sending Francisco Rafael home wasn’t an attempt to keep the Arellano Felix-Chapo Guzman feud going, with the hopes that the two gangs would kill each other off.  Hasn’t worked so far (Felipe Calderon keeps telling us “the surge is working” when the death rate goes up in our so-called war), but it might help if when these wise-guys are taken out of circulation — even if it means extraditing them to foreign countries — they stayed gone.

Note to U.S. prosecutors:  You wanted him, you keep him.