Lost in transit?

I tend to bookmark too many items, and once in a while just have to toss them out.  But this is intriguing.  From the 16 June 2010 Houston Chronicle:

Want to know where the Unabomber is doing time? Not a problem.

How about the American Taliban, the Olympic Park bomber, or the only man convicted of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks?

All of that information is in the public record and readily available on the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ website.

But when it comes to the former king of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel drug trafficking syndicate — a man who pointed an AK-47 at the head of two U.S. federal agents and for whom the government once offered a $2 million reward — his whereabouts remain a secret.

There is no record anywhere for convicted drug capo Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

In fact, not the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Justice Department nor anyone else seems willing — or able — to say what’s happened to Cardenas.

Nearly four months ago, he was secretly sentenced behind guarded doors at the federal courthouse in Houston to 25 years in prison.

But according to prison records, Cardenas hasn’t shown up yet.

Inmate number 62604-079 is simply listed as “in transit,” release date unknown.

Not that the complete disappearance of Inmate #62604-079 from the face of the earth, for all time, would be a bad thing, necessarily, or if his head and body were found in different locations (although, happening in the United States, we’d hear all kinds of blathering about drug violence seeping across the border).  Still, between the dubious benefits from the “drug war” here, the embedded U.S. agents in the country, and the sense that the Calderón Administration not so secretly backs a rival gang (the Sinaloa Cartel) it might be reassuring to know exactly what happened to Osiel, so we wouldn’t have to indulge in the favorite Mexican sport of conspiracy-spinning.