Rafael Caro Quintero It is an unavoidable figure in the history of drug trafficking in Mexico. It is the only boss, of which you have an official record, which was able to kidnap, torture and finally execute an AGA of the DEA. From that episode, in … 1985, Caro Quintero has been a figure of permanent tension between Mexico and the United States.
Known as “Narco de Narcos”, Caro Quintero was the founder of the Guadalajara cartel in turn would be the first Mexican criminal group to do business with Colombian cartels. Caro Quintero was the Latin American drug trafficking architect of the last section of the twentieth century with a very concrete scheme: drug production in South America, transit in Mexico and marketing in the United States, from California to New York.
The murder of the DEA agent Enrique Camarena It was a fulminating blow to the empire that had raised expensive Quintero and that consisted of dozens of legal business such as construction companies, discos, restaurants, ranches and hotels.
Camarena had arrived in Guadalajara to investigate the cartel within the framework of the anti -drug cooperation policies that the presidents had signed Ronald Reagan and Miguel de la Madrid. He was kidnapped by local police, delivered to the narco on a property on the outskirts of Guadalajara and, after several days of torture, killed.
The crime detonated the relationship between Mexico and the US and the DEA launched the “Legend Operation” to capture those responsible. The anti -drug agency took 40 days to catch him in Costa Rica. The capo was a millionaire, he was 32 years old and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, the maximum that allowed Mexican law at that time.
The first years of his sentence were fulfilled in the Altiplano prison, in the State of Mexico, reserved for the worst criminals. The journalistic chronicle portrayed him as a conventional prisoner and that he sought to go unnoticed.
In 2007 he was transferred to the Maximum Security prison of Puente Grande, where he was until 2010, when he was transferred to the prison of Guadalajara because a federal judge granted him an amparo, since the federal government could not prove that he was a high -danger criminal.
Rafael Caro Quintero, under police custody in 2005
In August 2013, during the government of Enrique Peña Nietoa court granted him freedom to understand that the process of his sentence was vitiated. Caro Quintero left prison and there was strong discomfort from the government of Barack Obama. The DEA, meanwhile, claimed its recapture to judge it in the US
The capo went to clandestinity and organized a criminal group called Cartel de Caborca. He was recaptured in 2022, by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Former members of the former president’s cabinet remember that there was a strong pressure from Donald Trumpin its first government, for Mexico to deliver to Caro Quintero. But López Obrador, like his predecessors, did not yield, perhaps motivated by the information that a capo like Caro Quintero could facilitate to the US authority.
In the history of the Mexican narco there were other more violent, richer or bloodthirsty capos than Caro Quintero, but none of this had been so persecuted by Washington as is the case of the founder of the Sinaloa cartel, which for the DEA was an almost fundamental issue and will now face a trial in New York, where prosecutors are very likely to ask the death penalty.
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