Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, a major Mexican cartel member known as ‘El Nini’ and one of America’s most wanted criminals for his suspected involvement in the fentanyl trade, has been extradited to the US.
Pérez Salas “was one of the Sinaloa cartel’s lead sicarios, or assassins,” according to the US Department of Justice. In February 2021, he was charged in the US with witness retaliation, machine gun and destructive device possession, and conspiracy to traffic in cocaine and methamphetamine.
As per the State Department, Pérez Salas collaborated closely with Oscar Noé Medina González, who was under Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, a subordinate of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s son, who was given a jail sentence in the United States in 2019. Pérez Salas was also reportedly in charge of the “Ninis” cell, a security team for Los Chapitos, which is a branch of the Sinaloa cartel.
US President Joe Biden praised El Nini’s extradition as “a good day for justice” on Saturday at a speech honoring US-Mexico cooperation on the case.
“El Nini played a prominent role in the notorious Sinaloa cartel, one of the deadliest drug trafficking enterprises in the world. The United States has charged him for his role in illicit fentanyl trafficking and for murdering, torturing, and kidnapping numerous rivals, witnesses, and others,” Biden said, thanking his Mexican counterpart Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
“Our governments will continue to work together to attack the fentanyl and synthetic drug epidemic that is killing so many people in our homelands and globally, and to bring to justice the criminals and organizations producing, smuggling, and selling these lethal poisons in both of our countries,” he added.
“I am grateful to our Mexican government counterparts for their extraordinary efforts in apprehending and extraditing El Nini,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office wrote in a statement. “The Justice Department will continue to go after the cartels responsible for flooding our communities with fentanyl and other drugs.”
