During her appearance in the House of Representatives of the United States of America (USA), on Thursday, April 27, Anne Milgram, director of the DEA, said that they seek to obtain the extradition of several drug traffickers, and among them is Rafael Caro Quintero, to to face justice in the USA.
For this, he commented, the Drug Control Administration (DEA) and the US Department of Justice work in coordination, the Infobae media publishes.
As reported by a national media outlet, there are 19 charges, in four different US courts, against Caro Quintero.
He is required for criminal association, drug distribution, possession of a firearm, organized crime, but in a special way, for the kidnapping, torture and murder of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar, murdered DEA agent (together with the Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar).
Some data
According to data on Internet pages, Rafael Caro Quintero, “Don Rafa”, “R1” and “Narco de Narcos”, was born on October 24, 1952 in La Noria, Badiraguato, Sinaloa.
He only studied elementary school, and when he was 13 years old, his father passed away, and Rafael, as the oldest son, took over the family.
At the age of 16 he went to Caborca, Sonora, where he met Pedro Avilés Pérez, a drug trafficker who introduced him to growing marijuana.
Since the 1970s, he began working within organized crime together with Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, with whom he founded the Guadalajara Cartel, considered one of the first drug cartels in Mexico, with ties to Colombian cartels.
In 1984, Mexican authorities with the support of the DEA, attacked the “El Búfalo” ranch, with a thousand hectares, owned by Caro Quintero, located in the state of Chihuahua. There they destroyed, it is said, some 8,000 tons of marijuana, considered at that time the largest destruction of marijuana in the history of Mexico.
With that strong blow, the Guadalajara Cartel learned that it had DEA infiltrators. And then came the kidnapping of Camarena Salazar and Avilés Pérez, in Jalisco. Their bodies were found on March 5, in bags, at a ranch in Michoacán.
After Camarena’s death in 1985, Caro Quintero fled to Costa Rica, but within a few months he was arrested and brought to Mexico. On December 12, 1989, he was sentenced for the crimes of illegal deprivation of liberty in the modality of kidnapping, qualified homicide, planting, cultivation, harvesting, transportation and trafficking of marijuana, cocaine supply, and criminal association.
He was sentenced to 199 years, but was only given 40 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law at the time.
He was released on August 9, 2013.
On January 16, 2015, he was once again found guilty of the murder of Camarena Salazar by a federal court and a new arrest warrant was issued against him.
The US government included him in the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives list, and also offered a reward of 20 million dollars for his capture (this reward is the highest figure in history offered for the arrest of a drug trafficker). .
Since Caro Quintero was released, the DEA said that it would not stop until Caro Quintero faces the US justice system.
In 2016, in an interview with a journalist, Caro Quintero assured that he was no longer a drug trafficker. Although, in mid-2019 it was said that he led the Caborca Cartel (Sonora) for the transfer of drugs and in a bloody dispute with his competitors.
Arrested
On July 15, 2022, Caro Quintero was arrested in the community of San Simón, municipality of Choix, Sinaloa, on the border with Chihuahua and Sonora, as part of an operation by the Navy and the Attorney General’s Office.
The FGR reported that he was admitted to the Social Readaptation Center number 1 “Altiplano” in Almoloya de Juárez, State of Mexico.
There, Caro Quintero fights to avoid his extradition to the US. All drug traffickers know that the US authorities are very harsh, inflexible, with them.
Since the death of Kiki Camarena, 38 years ago, the DEA has been targeting Caro Quintero… it has pending the punishment of who it considers the murderer of its agent, and it does not forget.
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