For 35 years it was a reserved document. Until this week the US Justice has decided to bring to light the arrest warrant against Rafael Caro Quintero. Dated on May 13, 1987, the magistrate of the central district of California accuses the capo of five charges, including belonging to organized crime, as well as the kidnapping and murder of a federal agent. It was the undercover DEA officer, Kiki Camarena, who managed to uncover a huge marijuana crop that in turn unleashed Caro Quintero’s revenge. The veteran capo of the historic Guadalajara cartel has already been arrested for the first time for that crime and spent 28 years in a Mexican prison. But he got out early because of a legal argument and returned to the underworld. Two weeks ago he was arrested again and this time the US wants to make sure he serves his sentence in a US jail.
In this context, the declassification of the original arrest warrant against Caro Quintero has taken place, which is not the only one that weighs on the drug trafficker, but which is still sufficient to justify his extradition to the United States according to the opinion of several criminal lawyers collected by this diary. The crimes have not prescribed, nor is it possible to hold on to the lifeline of the prohibition of double prosecution, according to specialists. The US attorney general himself, Merrick B. Garland, said the same day of the capture that they were seeking “immediate extradition” for all his charges, including “the torture and murder of DEA special agent Kiki Camarena.”
The Mexican government has already executed a provisional arrest warrant for extradition purposes requested by the United States. In this process, which takes at least two months, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has the last word, which has to give final approval to the extradition. The judges only enter to make an almost formal review in three parts: guarantee the identity of the accused, confirm that the crime is contemplated in both jurisdictions and support the existence of indications of that same crime. Caro Quintero’s lawyers have responded with a battery of injunctions that, according to experts, will delay the process but will not prevent the capo from ending up in a US prison.
The crime of murder has a statute of limitations between 15 and 20 years in Mexico. “But any action before the Public Ministry stops the prescription,” explains Javier Cruz Angulo, criminal lawyer and professor at CIDE. Caro Quintero was released from prison in August 2013, when an appeals court overturned the 40-year prison sentence for the murder of Camarena and the pilot who accompanied him, Alfredo Zavala. The court ruled that a state court should have heard the case, not a federal one, and ordered his immediate release from a maximum-security prison and never set foot in jail again.
But the case lived on. Months later, the Mexican Supreme Court annulled the order that released him, pointing out that Camarena was an agent of the US government and, therefore, his murder was a federal crime, so he had been properly prosecuted. Then, in 2013, a new arrest warrant was issued against Caro Quintero. That is, the counter was reset to zero for the statute of limitations of the crime.
The same logic is applicable to overcome the pitfall of the prohibition of double jeopardy. In criminal matters, no one can be tried twice for the same crime. “This is not the case because the first trial against Caro Quintero was put on hold. After the ruling of the Supreme Court, everything started from scratch, ”says another lawyer who has preferred not to provide his identity. The CIDE professor, in any case, supports the same thesis: “Theoretically, the case in Mexico is alive. It all starts again.” And the same for the case in the US: “It cannot be considered that he was already tried there.”
The American Justice has also been very active during all this time. Caro Quintero has several open processes against him. In California, the judicial case for the murder of Camarena is open. But on the other coast of the country, in New York, he has been facing charges since 2018 for his role as leader of an organization that has trafficked methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and marijuana into the country since 1980. In April of last year, a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, managed to confiscate five properties that Caro Quintero allegedly bought with illicit money and that he put in the name of his relatives. The buildings were located in Guadalajara and Zapopan, in Jalisco, the region where a large criminal alliance was forged in the late 1970s that, years later, would give rise to the modern Sinaloa, Tijuana and Juárez cartels.
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