Hector “El Guero” Palma, a Mexican drug lord who co-founded the Sinaloa cartel alongside Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, will be released from prison following a judge’s order.

Palma, 63, has been behind bars in Mexico and the U.S. since 1995. He was nearly released in 2021, but authorities found reason to hold him for two more years. This time, however, Judge María Dolores Olarte Ruvalcaba ruled that prosecutors did not present enough evidence to keep him imprisoned any longer, according to the BBC.

Palma, known as “El Guero” for his light complexion, was one of Mexico’s most ruthless cartel leaders before he was captured and jailed. His vicious work alongside El Chapo running the Sinaloa cartel helped create the chaotic drug wars that have continued for decades.

In 1995, Palma’s private jet crashed near Guadalajara, and he was captured days later. More than two dozen federal police officers on the cartel’s payroll were arrested at the same time, some of whom were acting as Palma’s bodyguards.

In 2007, Palma was extradited from Mexican prison to the U.S. In 2016, after serving nine years of a 16-year sentence for cocaine trafficking, the U.S. sent him back.

Palma spent the next seven years in Altiplano Prison outside Mexico City. Though El Chapo made a dramatic escape from that prison in 2015, it managed to hold Palma.

The highlights of Palma’s criminal career were chronicled in the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico.” Palma’s wife was beheaded and his children thrown off a bridge by a rival syndicate’s hired killer, Rafael Clavel Moreno.

In response, Palma had Moreno’s family murdered and went after many people connected to rival kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who he believed hired Moreno. Palma even had Moreno himself killed while the hitman was imprisoned in Venezuela.