MEXICO CITY — The imprisonment of a cartel member in the U.S. has dashed hopes in Mexico for justice in one of the country’s most notorious slayings — the death of acclaimed journalist Javier Valdez, who was gunned down in broad daylight two blocks from his newspaper office in the cartel-embattled city of Culiacán.
The brazen assassination in 2017 of Valdez — a tireless chronicler of cartel violence and politicians’ links to organized crime — sparked international condemnation. The slaying dramatized the perils faced by journalists in Mexico, where scores have been slain in recent years.
Valdez’s assassination remains the most notorious killing of a Mexican journalist in decades.
While two gunmen are serving prison terms in Mexico, authorities here have long sought the extradition from the United Stares of the alleged mastermind: Dámaso López Serrano, a former Sinaloa cartel capo and the son of a close associate of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the imprisoned co-founder of the Sinaloa syndicate.
Mexican authorities and fellow journalists say López Serrano likely ordered the hit because the journalist had mocked the young narco mercilessly in Ríodoce, the weekly co-founded by Valdez.
On May 8, 2017, Valdez wrote a scathing column dismissing López Serrano as a “junior” party-boy and fake “weekend” pistolero who moved around ostentatiously with 20 bodyguards, “excelled at chit-chat but not business,” and failed to fill the shoes of his father.
One week later, on May 15, assassins forced Valdez, 50, from his car at midday and shot him at least a dozen times in downtown Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. His body was left on the street amid shell casings; his signature Panama hat was streaked with blood.
López Serrano, a godson of El Chapo, fled inter-mob bloodletting a few months later and surrendered to U.S. authorities along the border in Calexico, California. He later pleaded guilty to trafficking tons of cocaine and other narcotics into the United States. He was never charged in U.S. courts with the murder of Valdez.
He is the son of Dámaso López Núñez, the El Chapo confidante known as El Licenciado, or The Lawyer. The son’s mob handle is Mini Lic. His father and El Chapo are both serving life terms in U.S. prisons.
López Serrano served only five years in U.S. custody on the trafficking conviction. According to media accounts and Mexican officials, he agreed to become a cooperating witness for U.S. prosecutors pursuing other traffickers.
López Serrano was released from federal custody after serving his term and allowed to remain in the United States. However, the FBI re-arrested him in 2024 in connection with a scheme to distribute fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia sentenced López Serrano to five years in prison on the fentanyl rap, to be followed by five years of supervised release.
The new sentence dismayed those who hoped López Serrano would soon be brought back to Mexico to stand trial.
“It’s painful and outrageous to know that the person who ordered Javier’s murder will continue avoiding his deserved punishment in Mexico,” Griselda Tirana, the journalist’s widow, wrote on Facebook.
She has long been at the forefront of efforts to pressure Washington to hand over López Serrano.
But there is a serious hurdle: U.S. prosecutors have viewed López Serrano as too valuable a source on the Mexican underworld to ship him back south, according to Mexico’s former Atty. Gen. Alejandro Gertz Manero, who said he pressed the extradition demand with counterparts in Washington.
“They said he was a protected witness of the government of the United States and he was giving them a lot of information,” Gertz Manero told reporters in December 2024, after López Serrano was arrested in the fentanyl scheme. “And, because of that, they couldn’t help us.”
In May, journalists, human rights activists and others gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City on the anniversary of Valdez’s killing, demanding that López Serrano be sent to Mexico to face justice.
That same month, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexican authorities would “insist” on the extradition of López Serrano.
The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on the case.
Advocates say they plan to continue pressing the U.S. government, even though many lack optimism that Washington will ever relent.
“We are going to keep demanding — as we have since the assassination of Javier — that everyone, including the mastermind of this crime, be punished,” said Roxana Vivanco, news editor at Ríodoce, Valdez’s former publication. “We hope that, this time around, once he finishes his sentence in the United States he will be returned to Mexico to be judged for the killing of Javier.”
As casualties mount among Mexican media personnel — and their assailants go free — many in Mexico view the case as a litmus test. The central question: Will there ever come a time when justice will prevail — and impunity will recede — in cases of Mexican journalists targeted by organized crime, corrupt politicians and others?
To date, the Valdez investigation has followed a distressing pattern: Hired trigger-men are sent to prison, their arrests lauded by Mexican authorities, while the “intellectual authors,” or masterminds, remain free.
“If this, the most high-profile case isn’t solved, then we cannot hold our breaths for resolutions in less high-profile cases,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexican representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press advocacy group.
“So this is a really, really important case,” Hootsen added. “We really need for this man to be extradited to Mexico eventually and stand trial.”
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
