Mexico's president-elect to seek negotiated peace in drug war

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Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's transition team unveiled a plan on Friday to shake up the fight against crime, including reduced jail time but stiffer controls on weapons, as the country continues to reel from a militarized drug war.

The concept of "transitional justice" is part of the incoming government's integral security strategy, Olga Sanchez, Lopez Obrador's proposed interior minister, told Reuters in an interview before her team unveiled the plan.

Transitional justice typically involves leniency for those who admit guilt, truth commissions to investigate atrocities and the granting of reparations for some victims.

March 15, 2018: View of illegal poppy flowers during a confiscation operation at Los Pericos village, Mocorito municipality in Sinaloa state, Mexico. /VCG Photo

"Not only will it be amnesty, it will be a law to reduce jail time," Sanchez said.

"We will propose decriminalization, create truth commissions, we will attack the causes of poverty, we will give scholarships to the youth and we will work in the field to get them out of the drug situation," she said.

Meanwhile, Mexico extradited to the US a senior lieutenant of the Sinaloa Cartel drug gang formerly headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman on Friday.

Mexico’s acting attorney general, Alberto Elias Beltran, said Damaso Lopez, the drug kingpin, was seen as an important witness in the case against Guzman.

Guzman was extradited to the US in January 2017 to face drug trafficking and conspiracy charges, his trial is expected to begin later this year.

(Cover: Mexico's president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gestures after voting during general elections, in Mexico City, July 1, 2018. /VCG Photo)

(With input from Reuters)