Lawyers for Celso Gamboa Sánchez have asked a federal court in Texas to push back every date in his drug trafficking case by 120 days, telling the judge they have opened an independent investigation in Costa Rica and still have most of the government’s evidence left to review.
The request was filed on September 1 by attorney Rafael de la Garza in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. In the motion, De la Garza told the court that the defense has begun its own inquiry in Costa Rica alongside attorneys based here, and that assembling the information it needs will take time.
De la Garza described the case as complex and said he must work through a considerable volume of discovery, the term used in the US system for the evidence and related material the government turns over to the defense. According to the filing, that material is available for inspection only at the US Attorney’s office in Sherman, Texas, and he has begun reviewing it there.
The attorney also told the court he needs to examine pretrial questions to determine whether additional motions are warranted, and said he had met both with Gamboa and with representatives of the US government before concluding that more time was necessary.
The schedule the request would displace had set a pretrial hearing for September 30 and a jury trial for October 5, with a September 4 deadline for entering a guilty plea. A 120-day extension would move the proceedings into 2027.
De la Garza stated in the filing that the request is not intended to delay the case. He said he notified assistant federal prosecutor Wes Wayne of the petition on September 1, and according to the document, US prosecutors did not oppose it.
Gamboa, a former prosecutor, former Supreme Court magistrate, former security minister and former director of the Directorate of Intelligence and National Security, was extradited to the United States in March alongside Edwin López Vega, known as Pecho de Rata, in the first extradition of Costa Rican nationals in the country’s history. He made his first appearance before a US court on March 24, and De la Garza was appointed as his attorney a week later.
A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Texas charges Gamboa with conspiring to traffic cocaine into the United States. The indictment alleges he offered access to judicial information and institutional contacts to facilitate trafficking operations bound for US territory. According to the case file, the government’s evidence includes recordings of meetings with undercover agents, testimony from collaborators within criminal structures, and financial records that include $16 million in deposits in Mexico.
Gamboa has not entered a plea to the charges and is presumed innocent unless and until a jury finds otherwise. The court had not ruled on the scheduling request as of the time of publication.