Does the U.S. government have an obligation to extradite a U.S. Border Patrol agent charged with murder on Mexican territory? According to Jose Contreras of México’s La Chronica De Hoy, the answer seems in doubt, after a U.S. Border Guard is alleged to have shot at “point-blank-range,” a Mexican teen on Mexican territory.
For La Chronica De Hoy, Jose Contreras writes in part:
This Friday at dawn, the voices of lawmakers, social activists and other sectors of society will have joined with all other voices demanding that the U.S. Border Patrol agent who murdered a Mexican teenager on our own territory be extradited and judged here. [video of shooting incident below].
But the deafening noise of the hullabaloo at Soccer City Stadium, where opening match of the 2010 FIFA World Cup will take place, won’t allow wither President Felipe Calderon or Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinoza to hear these voices crying out for justice.
The demand that the border guard who killed Sergio Adrian be extradited is not the product of enhanced patriotic fervor over the World Cup or that this is the year of the centenary [the Mexican Revolution took place in 1910]. The demand is born of the need to get the Mexican State to pursue justice after the murder at point-blank-range of a fellow citizen on our territory.
In March of this year, when three U.S. citizens connected to the U.S. Consulate were murdered in Ciudad Juarez, the U.S. government reacted aggressively with statements that spoke of “hunting” the murders and of “returning to the rule of law” to Mexico. They then sent dozens of agents from seven police departments to our territory to investigate the murder of their countrymen.
It would be too much to ask the Mexican government to act in the same way, but we can at least demand that based on our laws and the Mexico-United States Extradition Treaty, the extradition of the agent who killed the young Sergio Adrian, the identity of whom we do not even know.
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