MEXICO CITY, March 5 (Reuters) - 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.
The border city has seen a spate of violence in recent weeks as drug traffickers locked in turf wars with rival gangs react to increased police surveillance under President Felipe Calderon's army-led crackdown on drug gangs across Mexico.
Drug-related violence killed more than 2,500 people last year and about 300 so far this year. Calderon sent thousands of troops and federal police out to drug hot spots a year ago.
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. (Reporting by Anahi Rama and Randall Mikkelsen; Writing by Cyntia Barrera Diaz; Editing by Catherine Bremer and Eric Beech)
The Arellano Felix home across the border, Campo, CA
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