Fake cocaine in a transparent bag on a board illustrating drug trafficking in Clermont Ferrand France on March 19 2020. (Photo by Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP) (Photo by ROMAIN COSTASECA/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
San Diego, California – A man federal agents have long labeled a key player in a sprawling international cocaine pipeline is now in U.S. custody after Guatemala handed him over eight years after his indictment. Erick Alexander Granados Garcia, suspected of helping run cocaine loads from Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico into the United States, made his first court appearance in San Diego this week.
Granados Garcia was indicted back in June 2017 by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of California on a conspiracy charge tied to trafficking cocaine aboard maritime vessels. Guatemalan authorities arrested him two months later, but extradition stalled for years. The U.S. request was finally approved on October 29, 2025, and Granados Garcia was flown into San Diego on Monday.
At his arraignment, Granados Garcia entered a not-guilty plea before U.S. Magistrate Judge Allison H. Goddard, setting the stage for a case federal prosecutors say reaches deep into the upper ranks of international drug logistics. Authorities say the investigation behind his indictment spans years and touches multiple countries and criminal networks responsible for ferrying bulk cocaine loads up the Pacific corridor. According to prosecutors, the organizations involved have relied on everything from commercial planes and fishing vessels to go-fast boats and maritime containers to push narcotics north and wash the proceeds back south.
Agents say they coordinated the interdiction of at least forty-five cocaine-shipment operations across several jurisdictions, ultimately seizing roughly $4.7 million and a staggering 60,230 kilograms of cocaine — a haul spanning ninety-three separate bulk seizures.
Federal officials credited the Guatemalan government and law enforcement agencies for making the extradition possible, noting additional assistance from the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala. The U.S. Marshals Service transported Granados Garcia back to American soil.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle B. Martin is prosecuting the case, which returns Granados Garcia to a federal system that has waited nearly a decade to bring him before a judge.
His next moves will unfold in a courtroom thousands of miles from the drug corridors investigators say he once helped supply — a stark shift for a man the U.S. alleges spent years moving cocaine by the ton.
