'Güero' Palma Ordered Released; CJF Withholds Information

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

Héctor Palma Salazar was one of Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán's most important associates. 

The Federal Judiciary Council determined that the resolutions of the courts and tribunals that granted the amparo were blocked.

The federal court ordered the release of Héctor El Güero Palma, who spent 28 years in prison in Mexico and the United States, after acquitting him of the crime of organized crime.

Judge María Dolores Olarte Ruvalcaba, of the First Collegiate Court of Appeals of Jalisco, ordered the release after determining that the Attorney General's Office (FGR) did not have sufficient evidence to prove the former drug lord's responsibility.

The collegiate court ordered:

To take the necessary steps to immediately release Jesús Héctor Palma Salazar or Héctor Luis Palma Salazar alias 'El Güero Palma' in reference to the last trial he was facing.

When does El Güero Palma get out of jail?

If there is no other accusation against him, the federal prison authority will release him.

The authorities of the Federal Judicature Council determined that the public versions of the resolutions of the courts and tribunals, which granted the amparo to Héctor Palma, were blocked, and they can only be accessed through a request for information.

With this in mind, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel could be released from the Altiplano prison in the next few hours.

Video: Court Confirms 'El Güero' Palma's Acquittal Sentence

Who is El Güero Palma?

Héctor Palma Salazar, better known as El Güero Palma, was one of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán's most important associates.

El Güero was born in La Noria de Abajo, a town in the Sinaloa municipality of Mocorito, and it was there where he began his criminal activity. From a poor family and after only studying elementary school, he began stealing cars at a very young age, until Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, El Jefe de Jefes, Mexico's top drug trafficker at the time, decided to hire him as a hitman for the Guadalajara Cartel and later made him one of his employees in drug trafficking in the state of Sonora.

In Felix Gallardo's organization, Palma met the man who would later become his great ally, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman Loera, with whom he founded the Sinaloa Cartel.

After accusing him of treason, Gallardo began his revenge against El Güero Palma, infiltrating a young Venezuelan named Rafael Clavel Moreno into Palma's cartel to seduce his wife Guadalupe Lejía, convince her to run away with him, murder her and send evidence of this to Héctor.

Subsequently, Clavel Moreno also killed the drug trafficker's children, allegedly by throwing them off the La Concordia Bridge.

From that moment on, a war between drug traffickers was unleashed, with several bloody chapters in which family members and close associates of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and the Arellano Félix brothers, leaders of the Tijuana Cartel, were victims.

Among the most notorious events in which El Güero Palma was involved were that of the 'Christine' discotheque in 1992 and the assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, for which El Chapo was blamed and caught in 1993.

In 1995, Palma Salazar was captured accidentally, when on June 21 a private jet transporting him from Ciudad Obregón to Guadalajara crashed in Nayarit.

A day later, he was identified by the Army by the handle of a pistol with a palm tree made of emeralds on it.

After his capture, El Güero was imprisoned in the maximum security prison of Puente Grande, Jalisco, and in 2007 he was extradited to the United States.

On US soil, the drug trafficker pleaded guilty and received a 16-year sentence. However, in 2016 he was returned to Mexico, where he was imprisoned again, this time in the Altiplano prison, where he remains to this day.

nmas.com