Hector Luis Palma Salazar, alias el Güero Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa cartel, must be released since he has already prescribed the crime of homicide against nine people for which he was accused last week, determined the Court of First Instance of the Judicial District from Hidalgo, with residence in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero.
That judicial authority issued a release ticket due to the prescription of the criminal action, which means that the Guerrero Prosecutor’s Office can no longer accuse Güero Palma for events that occurred in 1992.
This document has already been received by the authorities of the maximum security prison of the Altiplano, in the State of Mexico, where Palma Salazar is being held. reiterating that he must be released.
In this regard, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in his morning conference that the release order established a period of three hours for the capo to leave the prison, what was supposed to happen in the early hours of this Thursday.
However, “immediately, because we have to be vigilant, the Prosecutor’s Office was notified, they made an investigation, and found other accusations, other crimes,” said the president.
With this, the new charges must be notified to the drug trafficker in the next few hours, which would keep him in prison until the origin of a new criminal process against him is formally determined.
Palma Salazar was acquitted last week for the crime of organized crime, the latest federal crime against him, for which the First Appeal Court of the state of Jalisco determined his immediate release.
However, on the morning of Wednesday, May 10, when he was expected to leave the Altiplano prison, the prisoner was notified that he was also accused of being the intellectual author of nine homicides that occurred in the state of Guerrero in September 1992.
Given this, Güero Palma obtained a provisional suspension in an Amparo Trial filed in the Sixth District Court in matters of Amparo and Federal Trials in the State of Mexico, an instance that issued an ultimatum to the judge of the state of Guerrero so that, without further delay, define the legal situation of Héctor Luis Palma Salazar.
The latter was carried out on Wednesday night, determining the statute of limitations for the homicides, so the freedom of the capo would only be denied based on the new charges recently found by the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR).
In this vein, it is foreseeable that Güero Palma’s defense will expand his amparo claim by adding his most recent retention in the Altiplano, or that -if applicable- promote another Amparo Trial, since the litigant Jose Gabriel Martin Hernandez Rodriguez considers that your client is illegally detained.
All causes won
Héctor Luis Palma Salazar was accidentally arrested in June 1995, in the vicinity of the states of Jalisco and Nayarit, after the crash of the plane in which he was traveling. In 2007 he was extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for drug trafficking and organized crime.
However, the authorities of the neighboring country released him for good behavior in 2016, and handed him over at the Mexican border to elements of the former Attorney General’s Office, who immediately transferred him to the Altiplano Prison accused of organized crime, in the type of crimes against health.
For this last crime, he was found innocent on April 30, 2021, for which the Second District Court for Federal Criminal Proceedings in Jalisco ordered his immediate release. This acquittal was due to the fact that The FGR could not prove that the drug trafficker continued to commit crimes, as part of the Sinaloa cartel, even after his arrest in 1995.
This process was carried out again due to a challenge won by the Prosecutor’s Office, but the First Collegiate Court of Appeal of the state of Jalisco reached the same conclusion, reiterating the innocence of the accused.
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surya palaces Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal analysis and human rights. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.