In a desperate attempt to placate President Trump in the hope of averting his imposition of a 25 percent tariff on her nation, Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum recently sent a Mexican citizen named Rafael Caro Quintero to Trump. Caro Quintero is alleged to have orchestrated the kidnapping, torture, and execution of a DEA agent named Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
For his part, Trump is claiming that his tariff plan is designed to combat drug cartels in Mexico, which are shipping fentanyl to the United States. Trump believes that by threatening Mexico with economic devastation through tariffs, he can induce the Mexican government to go to war against the cartels and thereby bring a halt to the drug flow into the United States. Trump has even indicated that he might use U.S. military force to combat the drug cartels in Mexico.
DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
Camarena was killed in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1985. At the time, he was a DEA agent living and operating in Mexico. In other words, he and other DEA agents were doing precisely what Trump wants to do today. They were waging war against the Guadalajara Cartel in an effort to stop the flow of massive amounts of marijuana into the United States.
Camarena discovered the existence of a 2,500 acre farm on which the cartel was growing marijuana. Mexican troops raided the farm and destroyed the marijuana crop, which cost the cartel billions of dollars. That’s the principal motivating factor that caused them to kidnap, torture, and execute him.
Except for one thing: Cartel leaders are ordinarily not dumb people. They had to know that retaliating against a single DEA agent would accomplish nothing and, in fact, would likely bring the entire wrath of the U.S. drug-war bureaucracy down on their heads. And that is precisely what happened. U.S. officials did everything they could to ferret out who was responsible for the crimes against Camarena and to ensure they were all brought to justice.
As a result of the U.S. retaliatory crackdown, Mexican officials arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated Caro Quintero. However, U.S. officials were unable to get what they really wanted — Caro Quintero’s extradition to the United States — until just a few days ago when Scheinbaum handed him to U.S. officials on a silver platter. In fact, she actually avoided using Mexico’s extradition process, which now enables U.S. officials to seek the death penalty against Caro Quintero.
When U.S. officials took Caro Quintero into custody, it was clear that the passage of 40 years had done nothing to diminish the thirst for revenge against Caro Quintero for his alleged crimes against Camarena. In fact, to make a point, DEA agents used Camarena’s handcuffs on Caro Quintero. According to an article on CNN.com, “Frank Tarentino, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York division, said the arrest serves as a reminder that, ‘if you hurt one of us, there is no obstacle we cannot overcome.’”
The Kiki Camarena case is described in an excellent Netflix series entitled Narcos: Mexico, which I highly recommend.
So, why would Caro Quintero and the Guadalajara Cartel target a single DEA agent? Simply for revenge for destroying their big marijuana crop? Does that make any sense, given that they knew that the result would be the wrath of the entire U.S. government coming down on them?
Not surprisingly, there is more to the story. I also highly recommend another documentary entitled The Last Narc, which was released by Amazon Prime Video in 2020. According to a description of this documentary on Wikipedia, the Guadalajara Cartel was not the only entity that went after Camarena. So did the CIA. According to Wikipedia: “Camarena earned further enemies by discovering that the CIA was working with the cartels to fund anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua.” The Wikipedia entry states:
Camarena earned further enemies by discovering that the CIA was working with the cartels to fund anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. The docuseries interviews the DEA agent who spearheaded the investigation of Camarena’s death. The agent, Hector Berrellez, states that the CIA agent Félix Ismael Rodríguez helped torture Camerena to learn what Camarena knew about US government connections to Mexican cartels. According to Berrellez, Camarena was killed because he was going to disclose these connections. Also interviewed are employees and enforcers of the cartels who helped capture and torture Camarena, but later became witnesses for the DEA.
Will Caro Quintero threaten to disclose more details about the CIA’s involvement in Camarena’s kidnapping, torture, and death at his trial? If so, that might earn him an early extra-judicial death sentence in jail or even a plea bargain that spares his life in return for his silence.
One thing is for undeniable: Camarena died for nothing. The Guadalajara Cartel disintegrated. So what? In the black market that comes with drug illegality, new drug cartels always replace the old ones. Trump obviously doesn’t realize that in combatting the new drug cartels, he is just repeating a deadly and destructive drug-war history.
As opponents of drug prohibition have been pointing out for decades, there is one — and only one — way to put drug cartels permanently out of business. That way is by ending drug prohibition through the legalization of all drugs. Absent that, everyone — including Trump, DEA agents, federal prosecutors and federal judges, and the American people — should just resign themselves to perpetual violence and death at the hands of drug cartels, along with the never-ending drug raids, arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations that come with the war on drugs.
