Good News: Mexican Drug Kingpin Freed After Arduous Three-Week Stint in U.S. Prison

This one gives new meaning to the term turnstile justice.

On the upside, I guess you could say there's one less Mexican criminal now residing in the United States.

No doubt he's returned to Mexico a reformed man and will now begin leading a productive-law-abiding lifestyle.

Seriously, though, less than a month for a vicious drug kingpin? WTF?

A convicted Mexican drug cartel boss is free and back in Mexico following his release on parole just weeks after he began serving a U.S. prison sentence, U.S. and Mexican officials said on Wednesday.

Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, 58 and the eldest of a clan of brothers who ran Mexico's Tijuana cartel, was deported on Tuesday and crossed to Mexican soil at Ciudad Juarez, entering from El Paso, Texas.

"He does not have any pending charges in Mexico so he was freed," a source in the Mexican Attorney General's office, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

Arellano Felix was the boss of the Tijuana cartel when he was arrested in 1993 in Mexico and sentenced to 11 years for drug possession and using illegal weapons.

He remained in prison for two more years while authorities arranged his extradition to the United States, where he was wanted for selling cocaine to an undercover U.S. agent. He was extradited in September 2006 and pleaded guilty to the cocaine charge in June 2007 in San Diego.

He received a six-year sentence, which he began serving in January, and was paroled on Feb. 1, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons said. A U.S. official said Arellano Felix received credit toward his U.S. sentence for time served while awaiting extradition in Mexico. Because his case dates back to 1980, he was eligible for parole under laws that were on the books at that time, the official said. Since then, parole has been eliminated for criminals convicted of federal crimes in the United States.

U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said Arellano Felix's case "reflects the conclusion of a cooperative effort between the U.S. and Mexico to ensure that he faced justice for crimes he committed on both sides of the border."

Arellano Felix's younger brothers, Francisco Javier and Benjamin, are behind bars in the United States and Mexico, respectively. Another brother, Ramon, was killed in a shootout with police in 2002, and a fifth, Francisco Eduardo, is a fugitive.

The family, notorious for ruthless killings and smuggling millions of dollars of illegal narcotics into the United States, has been weakened by the loss of its top leaders, but authorities say it is still doing business.

Suspected cartel operatives this week fought police in a five-hour shootout in Tijuana, a crime-ridden city across the border from San Diego.

Maybe he can help keep the peace upon his return.

On Tuesday, five youths were tortured, sprayed with bullets and dumped in an empty city lot in Tijuana in what appeared to be the latest grisly drug gang killing.

Curious how his case dates back to 1980, yet his family still controlled the marijuana and cocaine network in the late 1990s.

At its height in the late 1990s, the Arellano Felix network, based in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, controlled the flow of cocaine and marijuana the US, and its operations extended into southern Mexico and Colombia.

The gang is believed to be behind more than 100 drug-related murders in Mexico and the US.