It was February 1985, and the phone rang just before dawn. James Kuykendall, the DEA’s supervisor in Guadalajara, picked it up. It was the wife of one of his agents, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Kiki had left for work the previous morning and never come home.
Kiki was supposed to meet his wife for lunch at a Chinese restaurant near the US Consulate. She waited and waited, thinking something had come up. But he never arrived. Now it was the next day, and she hadn’t heard a word.
She was scared. Kuykendall tried to stay calm. If Kiki had stayed out all night, he would have been with his colleagues or told them where he was going. Nobody had seen him.
Within hours, the DEA began calling everyone they knew. Nobody had seen Kiki either. Then a witness came forward. The Consul General’s chauffeur said he had seen what looked like a law enforcement operation near Kiki’s official vehicle the day before, around 2:00 p.
m. He thought he had watched someone being arrested. But no arrest had been reported anywhere in Guadalajara. That same week, the Mexican pilot who had given Kiki information about a massive marijuana plantation had also vanished.
Kuykendall now had a gut-wrenching certainty: Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent, had been kidnapped in broad daylight on foreign soil. It was the first time in US history that had ever happened. And the DEA knew exactly who was behind it. For years, the drug trade flowing through Mexico into the United States had been controlled by one man: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a former state police officer known as El Padrino, the Godfather.
Gallardo had grown up poor on a ranch in Sinaloa but had climbed the ladder of power through corruption and cunning. He had worked as a bodyguard for the governor, built a network of bribes worth over $50 million a year, and used his police training to eliminate rivals with surgical precision. By the early 1980s, he had formed the Guadalajara Cartel with two partners: Rafael Caro Quintero, a cold-blooded young man in charge of marijuana, and Ernesto Fonseca, nicknamed Don Neto, who handled heroin. The cartel pulled in nearly $5 billion a year.
And one of the biggest blows it had ever suffered came from Kiki Camarena’s intelligence. Acting on his tip, 450 Mexican soldiers had destroyed over 5,000 tons of marijuana worth $2. 5 billion. The kingpin was hell-bent on revenge.
Someone would pay. Two months after the bust, Kiki disappeared. Now the DEA began an unprecedented hunt. They placed informants on high alert and wiretapped the homes of known traffickers.
Within days, they intercepted a radio call between members of Félix Gallardo’s circle. Gallardo was heading to the airport to flee. They raced to Guadalajara Airport with the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. When they arrived, they found a private jet guarded by armed men.
A man approached them using a fake name. He was younger than Gallardo, flamboyant, and clearly a cartel boss. It was Rafael Caro Quintero. But the commanding Mexican police officer on scene, Comandante Pavón, talked to the man, made a phone call, and then released him.
Pavón claimed Caro Quintero was a top-secret informant for the DFS, Mexico’s equivalent of the CIA. The DEA knew a bribe had just been paid. But they couldn’t prove it fast enough. Caro Quintero walked free.
For 27 days, the DEA searched for Kiki. Kuykendall never lost hope. Then one morning, as he prepared to go to the embassy, he turned on the television and saw the news. The story had been leaked to the press before the DEA even knew.
Two horribly disfigured bodies had been found dumped along a road outside Guadalajara. One of them was Kiki Camarena. The other was his informant, the pilot. Both showed signs of torture.
Kiki’s skull had a hole that could not have been made by a bullet, only by a blunt instrument. Kuykendall felt a huge emotional letdown. His friend was gone. He was no longer searching for a missing man; he was hunting for murderers.
He redoubled his efforts. Then came news of another kidnapping. A teenager named Sara Cosio had been snatched from a car in Guadalajara while her mother was slapped around. The girl’s family pointed the finger at Rafael Caro Quintero, who had been following her relentlessly.
Now he had decided to take what he wanted. The DEA tapped the Cosio family’s phone. For a month, silence. Then in April, Sara called from Costa Rica, saying she was fine and not to worry.
The DEA traced the call to a large home near the airport outside San José. Agents Sandalio Gonzalez and Donald Clements joined forces with Costa Rican police and set up surveillance. They had only an old, faded photo of Caro Quintero. At dawn, the raid went down.
There was no gunfight. Inside, they found several low-level Mexican traffickers. None of the men matched the photo. When asked their names, they all said Juan, Jose, or Miguel.
The most flamboyant passport read “Mark Anthony. ” The agents put the photo next to his face and doubted it. He looked much younger. Their last hope was Sara Cosio.
One of the agents spoke Spanish to her and asked, “Who is this man? ” She replied with his full name: Rafael Caro Quintero. She wanted to make sure there was no mistake. Caro Quintero was arrested and flown back to Mexico.
The DEA was invited to observe the interrogation. The Mexicans used water torture, forcing water into his breathing passages until he couldn’t breathe. After several minutes, Caro Quintero was ready to talk. He admitted to being a major marijuana cultivator.
He admitted to paying off Mexican comandantes. But he claimed he had nothing to do with Kiki Camarena’s disappearance. Instead, he pointed the finger at Ernesto Fonseca. He refused to blame Félix Gallardo.
The DEA needed both men. But Gallardo was untouchable. He had bribed virtually everyone who mattered in Mexico. The Mexican government at the highest level was not helping.
Officials refused to authorize phone taps on the cartel’s associates. The US government was squabbling over how hard to push Mexico. All the DEA could do was keep close tabs and hope for a mistake. That mistake came in Puerto Vallarta.
In late 1984 and early 1985, a wave of violent assaults on foreign tourists had forced the Mexican government to send a militarized police team to the resort town. One night, a group of men started a violent bar fight. Police chased them to a mansion. When weapons appeared at the windows, the local police called in the SWAT team.
The armed men surrendered. Inside the mansion, police found automatic weapons, remote-control explosives, grenade launchers, and a box of audio cassettes. And among the arrested men was Ernesto Fonseca, one of the cartel leaders wanted for Kiki’s murder. Fonseca was taken to prison.
But he, too, pinned the blame squarely on Caro Quintero. He was charged with drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder and sent to Altiplano prison. One of the men arrested with Fonseca gave the DEA a huge lead: he knew exactly where Kiki Camarena had been tortured and killed. Kuykendall and several agents raced to the address, a middle-class house on Lope de Vega in Guadalajara.
It belonged to Caro Quintero. The house had been cleaned. Walls had been washed, everything scrubbed. But the agents took paint samples, wall samples, vacuumed everything.
They found a window sash cord identical to the ropes used to bind the two men. Then they found hairs on a rug. The samples were rushed to labs in Washington. The hairs matched Enrique Camarena’s DNA.
It was physical proof that Kiki had been held in that house by members of the cartel. With two of the three leaders locked up, the DEA’s focus turned to Gallardo. And Kuykendall had a hunch about those audio cassettes found in Puerto Vallarta. He listened to them with horror.
He heard shouting and beating. Then he heard a voice he recognized too well: his friend Kiki, being interrogated and tortured. On the tapes, Kiki was asked who the informants were. He was subjected to water torture.
More than one interrogator was present. At one point, he begged, “Don’t murder me. My children need me. ” He wasn’t afforded any mercy.
A doctor was on hand to keep him alive long enough to answer questions. The tapes revealed that Caro Quintero, high on cocaine, had struck Kiki. Later, Ernesto Fonseca had arrived and seen Kiki in the throes of death. He slapped Caro Quintero and said in Spanish, “This is your baby.
Now you live with it. ” Then he left. The tapes also revealed something deeper. During the interrogation, Kiki referred to one of his interrogators by his title: “Comandante.
” It was clear a senior Mexican police official had participated. It was proof of government corruption at the highest levels. Félix Gallardo had evaded capture because he paid for protection at the top. For eight months, Kuykendall had overseen the hunt for Gallardo.
But now his time was over. He knew he was no longer effective. In October 1985, he was replaced by Ed Heath as DEA supervisor in Guadalajara. Gallardo continued to survive by moving from house to house, using his ranches, hotels, and real estate as hideouts, protected by corruption.
Then the US raised the stakes. Mexico owed billions in debt. US officials were willing to cancel that debt if Gallardo was captured. In 1989, Mexican officials threw their full support behind the DEA.
They put one of their most feared commanders in charge: Guillermo González Calderoni, a man drug traffickers genuinely feared. With the Mexican government fully on board, the DEA finally got what they had asked for all along: widespread taps on all of Gallardo’s known associates. They identified his code name: Numero Uno. After two and a half months, Gallardo’s calls were traced to a house near Culiacán, his hometown in Sinaloa.
Calderoni and his men rented an apartment and watched the house for days. Then they saw their prey. Gallardo was inside, receiving deliveries of ice chests filled with shrimp and lobster. On Calderoni’s order, 14 men approached the house.
They took Gallardo completely by surprise, still in his pajamas. Calderoni put an AK-47 barrel into his mouth and told him he was under arrest. Gallardo offered $7 million to be released. Calderoni refused.
Gallardo told him: “Then you’re a dead man. ”
The same day, a Mexican army squadron moved against scores of state and municipal police officers in Culiacán. Gallardo was taken into custody, along with the entire police force of the city. The boldest strike the Mexican government had ever launched against drug trafficking and corruption had succeeded.
The manhunt for the Guadalajara Cartel became a turning point in DEA history. It made the agency more renowned, better defined, more respected. And it came at a terrible cost: the courage and sacrifice of Agent Kiki Camarena. Kuykendall remembered his friend.
“He was a good husband, a good father, a great investigator, a fine friend. He didn’t have feet of clay. He was real. Somebody to emulate, somebody to look up to.
He was a true American hero. A good man. I’m glad to have known him. It was an honor.
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