At two in the afternoon, outside the US Consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico, DEA agent Enrique Camarena was taking a break from his top-secret investigation to meet his wife for lunch. He had been working long hours lately and hadn’t seen much of her or their two children. It was the first time in US history that a DEA agent had been abducted on foreign soil. The agency knew there was only one man who could have pulled off such a brazen act, someone they had been tracking for nine years.
At the peak of the cocaine trade in 1984, a hundred tons of cocaine were being smuggled into the US every year. Eight million Americans were hooked. A third of homicides were drug related. The US government threw its resources into battling the Colombian cartels responsible for the flood of cocaine, and the DEA joined Colombian police and military on the front lines.
By the mid-1980s, the Colombian cartels had been hit hard. But stepping into the vacuum of power were new adversaries much closer to home. Just across the border in Mexico, the Mexican cartels had risen. They controlled Jalisco state.
They controlled Sinaloa state. They controlled states all along the border. And almost the entire flow of drugs through Mexico into the United States was controlled by a former police officer. El Padrino.
The Godfather. Thirty-nine-year-old Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. Felix Gallardo grew up on a ranch in Sinaloa, a state in northwest Mexico. Although his family was poor, he always had big ambitions.
He studied business in college and became a state police officer in his early twenties. He quickly learned that corruption was endemic throughout the Sinaloan police force. Smart, ambitious, and ruthless, Gallardo climbed the ladder of power and corruption quickly. He soon became the bodyguard to the governor of the state of Sinaloa, and through that governor he started to meet high-ranking politicians and officials who would later protect him in his drug trafficking activities.
But Felix Gallardo wasn’t satisfied with just being on the payroll. He wanted to make more money, so he moved into the drug trade himself. He used established marijuana and heroin pipelines into the US to transport Colombian cocaine, but he insisted on being paid in both cash and cocaine. He also took fifty percent of each shipment to sell on his own.
By the mid-1970s, he was a mid-size smuggler transporting up to two tons of cocaine across the border every year. But he wanted to be the biggest drug lord in Mexico. That meant setting up legitimate businesses to launder money and cover his tracks. He sat on the board of directors of banks.
He owned hotels and ranches. But he was no respectable businessman. He maintained his growing empire with generous bribes, spending in excess of fifty million dollars a year. And he ruled with tactical brutality, annihilating all rivals.
He knew wholesale violence would be bad for business, so he tried to avoid it, but he was not above taking lives when he had to. He had around a thousand assassins on his books in Mexico and the US, killers who tortured, who chopped up their enemies and left the parts in bags. He based his operation in Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco, a city famous for its fantastic climate, university, and art scene. But now it was also home to Mexico’s most notorious drug baron.
Soon, Felix Gallardo’s drug smuggling operation was making close to five billion dollars a year. But Gallardo wanted more. So in 1980, he joined forces with two other Mexican kingpins to form the Guadalajara drug cartel. The first was thirty-two-year-old Rafael Caro Quintero, who was put in charge of the marijuana plantations.
The other partner was fifty-four-year-old Ernesto Fonseca, nicknamed Don Neto, who was given responsibility for the cultivation and trafficking of heroin. That same year, Enrique, or Kiki Camarena, a young narcotics agent, was assigned to the DEA’s office in Guadalajara. Born in Mexico, Camarena moved to the US as a child and grew up in the border town of Calexico, California. He earned his college degree in criminal justice and joined the Marines.
In 1974, he became a special agent with the DEA. In Guadalajara, Kiki worked with a team of special agents spearheaded by James Kuykendall. Kuykendall was immediately impressed by the young agent’s dedication and intelligence. Kiki was a little more enterprising, tried harder, and was a little more successful.
And Kiki happened to be the guy out front. Four years into his assignment, Camarena got a tip-off from a Mexican informant working with the DEA about the location of a 2,500-acre marijuana plantation in the northern city of Zacatecas. As US agents on foreign soil, the DEA had no authority in Mexico. All they could do was pass intelligence to their Mexican counterparts and hope for the best.
Acting on Camarena’s information, 450 Mexican soldiers backed by helicopters descended on the site. Over 5,000 tons of marijuana were destroyed. Two and a half billion dollars went up in smoke. It was a major triumph for the DEA, but a huge hit for Gallardo’s cartel.
The kingpin was hell-bent on revenge. Someone would be made to pay. Two months later, Agent James Kuykendall was woken up by a phone call. It was Mrs.
Camarena. Kiki had not come home the night before. He was supposed to meet his wife for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. She had waited and waited, thinking something had come up.
But Agent Camarena never made it to lunch, and he never made it home later that evening. She had not seen her husband since he left for work the day before. If Kiki had stayed out all night, he would have been with them, or they would have known. They immediately knew something was wrong.
They started running around calling people to see if anybody had seen Kiki, and pretty soon they decided nobody had. Kuykendall informed the Consul General that they felt they had an agent missing. The next day, a witness came forward. A Mexican employee at the US Consulate, the Consul General’s chauffeur, told them he had perhaps seen a law enforcement operation near Kiki’s official vehicle.
The event took place at approximately two in the afternoon while the driver was on his lunch break. He thought he had seen someone being arrested. Days after his friend vanished, Kuykendall learned that the pilot who had informed Camarena about the marijuana plantation was also missing. Kuykendall was now sure his agent had been kidnapped by Gallardo in retaliation for the pot bust.
There was no reason to think Kiki had any enemies other than the drug traffickers. Since they didn’t know which particular trafficker, they were forced to cast a broader net and look for all of them. They had already identified the top-level ranking members of the cartel, and that is where they started a global manhunt to bring them to justice. All DEA agents were placed on high alert.
Informants were grilled for information. The homes of known drug traffickers were wiretapped. The massive effort soon paid off. The very next day at the DEA’s Guadalajara office, a crucial telephone conversation was intercepted.
It was a communication between members of Felix Gallardo’s group advising that Gallardo was headed to the airport to get in his airplane and leave. They were all going to flee because they knew the full weight of the US government was going to be brought to bear. Working with the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, agents raced to Guadalajara Airport to intercept the drug lord. But when they arrived, there was no sign of Gallardo’s jet.
What they encountered was a person who identified himself with a fake name. His airplane departure was being guarded by a squad of armed men. The agents could see right away the man wasn’t Gallardo, but he was clearly someone just as important. His bodyguards raised their weapons.
The DEA raised theirs as well. Had one shot been fired, it would have ignited a massacre. But it was very clear from what these agents saw that this was a cartel kingpin. There was only one explanation for the flamboyance and the jet.
The kingpin was none other than Caro Quintero, co-founder of the Guadalajara Cartel. He approached Comandante Pavon, the head of the Mexican police. Pavon left the scene and made a phone call. He said he was calling his supervisor in Mexico City.
Then he returned, talked to Rafael Caro, and at that point released him. According to Pavon, Caro Quintero was a top-secret informant with the DFS, the Mexican equivalent of the CIA. But the DEA didn’t buy it. Kuykendall was positive that Pavon had been offered a very significant bribe.
But where was Felix Gallardo? Some today wonder if Felix Gallardo set Rafael Caro Quintero up. Caro was young, stupid, and arrogant. If you’re a smart guy and you know how investigations work because you’ve been a cop, then you sacrifice your young, stupid partner.
But anyway, Rafael Caro Quintero did leave. The cops wouldn’t stop him. Twenty-seven days after Camarena’s abduction, Kuykendall woke up ready to continue the desperate search when he got some devastating news. As he was preparing to go to the embassy, he turned on the television and saw the news story.
Someone had leaked the story to the news stations before the DEA. The bodies had been buried, dug up, and dumped along the road. Earlier that morning, a local farmer had discovered two horribly disfigured corpses. There were signs of torture.
There was a hole in one skull that could not have been made by a bullet. It had to have been made by a blunt instrument because of the way the bone was shattered. The two men had been dead for some time, but the bodies weren’t dumped until after Caro Quintero had flown off in an attempt to get the DEA to back off. The news left the DEA stunned and reeling.
There was a huge letdown among everybody. Emotionally, they were all upset. Kuykendall never lost hope that Kiki was still alive until the bodies were found. Overnight, the search for two missing people became a hunt for their brutal killers.
In March 1985, Agent Camarena’s body arrived back in the USA. Kuykendall was very hurt. Kiki was a very close friend, but that made him redouble his efforts to do what was necessary to bring his killers under the rule of law. As the agents mourned the loss of their fallen colleague, news came through of another kidnapping.
This time, it was a teenager called Sara Cosio. Sara and her mother had been riding in a car that was stopped in one of the streets in Guadalajara. Her mother was slapped around, and Sara was spirited away. The girl’s family pointed the finger at Rafael Caro Quintero.
He had been following her non-stop, and now he had decided to take what he wanted. The DEA wiretapped the Cosio family’s residence with the hope of locating Caro Quintero should Sara call home. A month went by with no word from Sara. Then, in April, a breakthrough.
The family received a phone call from Costa Rica. It was Sara, telling them she was fine and not to worry. The DEA traced the call. It was coming from a large home next to the airport near San Jose.
DEA agents in Costa Rica, Sandalio Gonzalez and his boss Donald Clements, were tasked with finding the teen and hopefully taking down Quintero in the next twenty-four hours. Working with the Costa Rican police, they identified a large house where there were supposed to be some Mexican people. They set up surveillance and planned the raid. They had an old, faded photo of the drug boss.
At dawn, the radio call came in. The operation was a go. When they went into the house, there was no gunfight, not much resistance. They found several low-class Mexican drug traffickers, but none of the men matched the photo of Caro Quintero.
When asked their names, the suspects said Juan, Jose, or Miguel. The one with the most flamboyant name was Marcos Antonio Rios Valenzuela. His passport simply read Mark Anthony. The agent remembered putting the photo right next to his face, and they both looked and said, “I don’t think so.
He was much younger. ” Their last hope of identifying Quintero was his captive, Sara Cosio. She spoke Spanish to them. The agent asked her, “Quien es este hombre?
” And 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.
After having their agent kidnapped and killed, to have the principal suspect captured was a great achievement. With one of the three cartel leaders behind bars, the DEA was closer to catching the killers of Kiki Camarena. All they needed now was for the drug lord to talk. Kirkendall and his colleagues were invited to observe the interrogations.
The Mexicans used a procedure to extract confessions, forcing water into a person’s breathing apparatus to the point that the person couldn’t breathe. After several minutes of water torture, Caro Quintero was ready to talk. The Mexican police now allowed Kuykendall to interrogate the prisoner. He admitted to being a major marijuana cultivator.
He admitted that he had paid off some Mexican comandantes. But he said he didn’t have anything to do with Kiki Camarena’s disappearance. Caro Quintero also refused to place any blame on Gallardo. Instead, he pointed the finger at the third suspect, fellow Mexican drug dealer Ernesto Fonseca.
Kuykendall knew the only way they would ever get the truth was if they could hunt down and capture both Felix Gallardo and Fonseca. But they had a mountain to climb. The cartel kingpin was untouchable. He had bribed virtually everyone who mattered in Mexico.
The fastest way to find the two cartel leaders was to tap all the phones of their associates. But officials refused to execute the order for the phone tapping. Worse still, the American government was reluctant to rock the boat. Kuykendall got a call from a source high up in the DEA who said something was wrong.
The Mexican government at the highest level was not helping look for their agent. There were squabbles going on within the United States government about how hard to push Mexico. Without the full support of the Mexican government, the DEA could only keep close tabs on the two cartel leaders and hope they made a mistake. In Puerto Vallarta, every Easter, tourists came for sun, sea, and sand.
But recently, the crime rate had skyrocketed. In late 1984 and early 1985, there had been several assaults on foreign tourists, especially women. To protect the tourist industry, the Mexican government had sent a militarized police team to try to calm down the violent crime. One night, a group of men started a violent bar fight, and the police chased them.
The police tracked the men to a mansion, but within moments, weapons appeared at the windows. The local police didn’t feel they could handle the situation, so they contacted the SWAT team. Soon outmanned and outgunned, the armed men gave themselves up. Inside, they found an arsenal of automatic weapons, remote-control explosives, and grenade launchers.
They also discovered a box of audio cassettes. When the arrested men were identified, the police were stunned to discover that among them was one of the cartel leaders wanted in the murder of Kiki Camarena. Ernesto Fonseca. Fonseca was taken to prison to be interrogated.
The DEA hoped he would point the finger at Felix Gallardo. But Fonseca pinned the blame squarely on Caro Quintero. Fonseca was sent to Altiplano prison on charges of drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder. But the agents got one huge lead from this mass takedown.
One of the men arrested in Puerto Vallarta with Fonseca said he knew exactly where Agent Camarena had been tortured and killed. Kuykendall and several DEA agents raced to the address. 881 Lope de Vega, in a middle-class neighborhood in Guadalajara. The house belonged to Caro Quintero.
The kitchen was a mess, with food and dishes stacked on every cabinet and counter. But other than that, it was just a pretty common upper-class home for Guadalajara. If this was where Camarena was murdered, Kuykendall’s men found no obvious clues. By the time the DEA got into it, the walls had been washed, everything had been scrubbed.
Most traces of a murder were gone. But not all. They took wall samples and paint samples and vacuumed up everything you could possibly think of. A window sash cord looked identical to the ropes used to bind the two men.
Then hairs were discovered on a rug. They were rushed off to labs in Washington for analysis. The forensic specialists soon got the results. They matched Enrique Camarena’s hair.
It was physical proof that the agent had been held in that house by members of the cartel. With two of the cartel’s leaders already locked up, the DEA’s sole focus was catching the one still at large. Felix Gallardo. And Kuykendall had an ace up his sleeve.
The audio cassettes found at the house in Puerto Vallarta. He had a hunch they might contain a missing piece of the jigsaw that would lead straight to Gallardo. As the tape played, he heard shouting and beating. Then, with horror, he heard a voice he recognized only too well.
That of his friend, Kiki Camarena, being interrogated and worse. The tapes revealed the motive behind the abduction. Camarena was being mistreated, tortured, asked who the informants were. They were using the water torture.
There was more than one interrogator, several voices. At one point he said, “Don’t murder me. My children need me. ” He was begging for mercy, and he wasn’t afforded any.
A doctor was on hand to keep Camarena alive long enough to answer questions. According to witnesses and testimony from defendants, Caro Quintero came to the residence. He was high on coke and struck Camarena. Later, Ernesto Fonseca came there and saw that Kiki Camarena was in the throes of death.
He slapped Caro Quintero and said in Spanish, “This is your baby. Now you live with it. ” And he departed the residence. Harrowing as they were, the audio tapes finally revealed why it had been impossible to take down Gallardo.
During the interrogation, Camarena referred to one of his interrogators by his title. Comandante. It was pretty clear that was a Mexican police official, and a senior one at that. And it was further clear from the tapes that there was government corruption at very high levels in relation to the members of the Guadalajara cartel.
For years, the DEA had suspected that local law enforcement was in the pay of the cartel leaders. Now, at last, they had proof. Felix Gallardo was able to evade capture because he had a lot of very high-ranking, very important politicians and government officials that he paid for protection. To get to Gallardo, the DEA had to find one incorruptible officer and bring Miguel Felix Gallardo to justice at last.
For eight months, Camarena’s old boss and friend, James Kuykendall, had overseen the hunt for Gallardo. But now his time on the case was over. That change needed to be made. He probably wasn’t happy about it, but it was time for him to go.
He was not effective anymore. In October 1985, he was replaced by Ed Heath as Guadalajara’s DEA supervisor, and the hunt for Gallardo continued. So far, the drug kingpin had evaded capture by bribing officials and politicians. His many ranches, hotels, and real estate doubled up as hideouts.
He was able to move from location to location and didn’t spend a lot of time at any given house. He had a massive security blanket, and it was very difficult to penetrate. Tracking Gallardo should have been a simple matter of tapping the phones of his associates, but official corruption had made that impossible. The US had now raised the stakes.
Mexico owed the US billions in debt, and US officials were willing to cancel that debt if they could capture Gallardo. So in 1989, Mexican officials threw their full support behind the DEA effort to take the ruthless criminal down. To help with the operation, the Deputy Attorney General of Mexico called one of the top commanders on the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. Comandante Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni.
When the Mexican government wanted to arrest a major capo or drug trafficking boss, they would go to Gonzalez Calderoni. He was probably the most feared comandante in Mexico. Drug traffickers absolutely feared him. With the Mexican government now fully on board and Calderoni in charge, the DEA got what they had been asking for all along.
A widespread tapping of the phones of all of Gallardo’s known associates. They soon identified Felix Gallardo’s code name. Numero uno. After two and a half months, Gallardo’s calls were traced to a house near Culiacan, a city in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.
Calderoni and his men rented an apartment to spy on the house. After days of surveillance, they spotted their prey at last. They saw him when they delivered some ice chests with shrimp and lobster, and that’s when they knew he was in the residence. On Calderoni’s order, his team of fourteen men approached the house.
They took Gallardo completely by surprise, still in his pajamas. Gonzalez Calderoni put an AK-47 barrel into his mouth and told him he was under arrest. And Felix Gallardo said, “I’ll pay you seven million dollars if you release me. ” Calderoni said, “No.
I can’t do that. ” Then Gallardo said, “Well, then you’re a dead man. ”
That same day, a Mexican army squadron moved in against scores of state and municipal police officers in the northwestern city of Culiacan, Gallardo’s hometown. It was the boldest strike the Mexican government had ever launched against drug trafficking and corruption.
Gallardo was taken into custody along with the entire police force of Culiacan. The manhunt for the Guadalajara Cartel was a turning point in the DEA’s history. It made the DEA more renowned. The number of agents grew.
Its mission was better defined. It gained respect because of the effort that went into finding the abductors of one of its agents. That triumph came thanks to the courage and sacrifice of Agent Kiki Camarena. 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.
He was a good man. It was an honor to have known him.
