Diego Cruz, accused of raping a minor, fears being mistreated in Mexico if extradited

Diego Cruz Alonso, who's facing charges of raping a minor in Veracruz in 2015 and was arrested this summer in Spain, is attempting to fight his extradition by alleging that he's a victim of an “elaborate blackmail,” and fears being mistreated in prison and tried unfairly in Mexico.

As part of Cruz's defense, his attorneys' strategy is to provide a series of documents so as to convince the judge in Spain that the he never attempted to flee Mexico, that there's a conspiracy against him and that he should be tried in Madrid as a Spanish citizen, since he inherited that citizenship from his grandfather.

The first document that was presented to the judge is a letter from November 2015 from the Universidad Europea, a private university in Madrid that accepted Cruz to a finances program in 2016 as an exchange student. Luis Miguel Gómez Parra, the attorney of Cruz, one of the four young men known as the “Porkys de Costa de Oro,” claims that the letter shows that the young man had planned to travel to Spain long before he was accused of raping the minor, which proves that he never fled Mexico.

The second document is a report by Mexico's Human Rights Commission regarding the conditions of inmates in Mexico's federal prison system, which lacks proper security and has very high rates of violence.

The third group of documents are news articles detailing the dangerous environment and corruption in Mexico, and the media bias in the case against Cruz.

With these documents, Alfonso Guevara, the judge overseeing Cruz's case in Spain, will have to decide of the rights of Cruz would be jeopardized if he were to be tried in Mexico.

If Cruz were to be tried in Spain, the maximum prison time he could face would be considerably less than in Mexico, where pedophilia charges can end in up to 40 years in prison.

According to jurors interviewed regarding the case, they don't believe there's much Cruz's defense attorneys can do to stop his extradition, since Spain and Mexico have signed an extradition treaty and Cruz's Spanish citizenship is irrelevant.