I spoke to two lawyers who have worked on the extradition of cartel figures from Mexico, and they told me that even without a legal fight, it can take six months to actually extradite someone.
Two days later, he met Mr Chávez in Cartagena, and on April 13th, Colombia officially announced that Mr Makled would be sent to Venezuela.To minimise America's ire, Colombia will not actually extradite Mr Makled for another month, giving United States agents more time to debrief him.
Assange remains ensconced in Ecuador's embassy in London, so the likelihood of him actually being extradited and prosecuted remain slim for now.
What is unclear is how many of the 16 named in the indictment can actually be arrested or extradited to the US for trial.
LAST year, when I heard that Rodney Alcala was actually going to be extradited to New York to face a grand jury on Ellen's case, I remembered something a clergyman had said at the first service after 9/11: it was too overwhelming, and unfair to the victims, to think of 3,000 people dead.
-- Moreover, the judge's misguided analysis of the "dual criminality" standard suggests that fugitives cannot be extradited from Thailand unless a Thai court actually had jurisdiction over the alleged crime, not whether the alleged conduct is viewed as criminal conduct under the laws of both countries.
After the 1997 Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, for example, Qaddafi charged that they had actually been murdered by British intelligence agents, and he demanded those agents be extradited to Libya to stand trial.
El Chapo Guzman is creeping toward that recognition, but I think it will diminish once he is extradited to the U.S. The Rodriguez-Orejuela brothers, godfathers of Colombia's Cali Cartel, were actually more powerful than Escobar and helped to take Escobar down, but they were low profile and didn't have the charisma that Escobar had.
He has since prosecuted more whistleblowers under the World War One-era Espionage Act than all other presidents combined, and earlier this week his administration had to actually send Russia a letter promising not to torture or kill NSA leaker Edward Snowden if he is ever extradited to the US to be tried for espionage.
Now he is being extradited to Massachusetts.
