A federal judge has ordered prison authorities to provide immediate medical attention to Héctor Palma Salazar, better known as El Güero Palma, a historical Mexican drug lord. Imprisoned in Federal Social Reintegration Center Number 1 in the State of Mexico, popularly known as Altiplano Prison, El Güero Palma’s defense filed an appeal days ago for being “ignored in the health area” and not receiving the necessary care his health condition requires. In the text, the 66-year-old drug trafficker claims to be “in very serious health.” According to his defense, Palma has a string of illnesses that include several hernias and skin cancer that requires periodic check-ups outside the prison, which he has not been able to receive for two years.
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According to the order, the suspension is granted because “it is noted that his dignity and personal integrity are seriously compromised” for El Güero Palma. Since April 13, “he was maliciously ignored in the health area of the place where he is deprived of his liberty, as he claims to be in very serious health,” and it orders that “the complainant be provided with the medical service, treatments, and medications he needs according to his current health status and clinical history.” The judge’s writ also describes the prisoner’s claimed health condition: “He was diagnosed with three herniated discs in his spine, which affects his sciatic nerve, hence he experiences very severe pain simply from breathing, both in his back and chest, which causes him insomnia at night.”
This is another chapter in the judicial odyssey of this founding father of the Sinaloa Cartel, who during the 1990s and alongside Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, turned this drug trafficking organization into the most powerful in Mexico at that time. Born into a humble home in Mocorito, Sinaloa, in 1960, he started as a car thief and then a hitman for the former Tijuana Cartel, with whom he broke ties after the brutal murder of his wife and two young children.
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His prison journey began in 1995, after being captured in Nayarit following a plane crash. In 2016, Palma was deported to Mexico to be tried for the homicide of two people in the mid-nineties and organized crime, processes that have been dismissed by the Judiciary. After 12 years in a Mexican prison, he was extradited to the United States in 2007, where he was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He only served nine due to an agreement with justice north of the Rio Bravo, and in 2016 he returned to Mexico, handcuffed, where he was locked up in the maximum-security Altiplano prison, in the State of Mexico. His lawyers have since been looking for legal loopholes to get him out of prison, while Mexican justice finds new crimes to charge him with and keep him imprisoned.
