After 32 years behind bars, the one who was the first great drug lord in the history of Mexico has decided to speak up. Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (Sinaloa, 76 years old), who is serving a sentence in a maximum security prison in Guadalajara for the brutal murder in 1985 of the infiltrated agent of the United States Anti-Drug Agency (DEA) Enrique
Kiki
Camarena, appears before the cameras from the US network Telemundo as a sick man — in a wheelchair, blind in one eye and deaf — who requires an oxygen tank to cope with a “severe pneumonia” that he claims he suffers. A lackluster image of someone who pulled the strings of drug trafficking in the eighties and who turned the criminal drug empire into a millionaire business that other great bosses would inherit later, such as Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán.
Félix Gallardo denies everything he is accused of - "I am not a man of arms" - and praises the Government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
More information
The DEA does not forget: on the hunt for Caro Quintero 35 years later
SPECIAL |
Boss of bosses
The interview is released a month after it was made public that López Obrador plans a presidential decree to grant an amnesty to prisoners over 75 years old and those who suffer from chronic diseases and are over 65 years old.
The president explained that it will be prisoners sentenced by the common jurisdiction (not the federal one, which condemns drug trafficking crimes) and will not include those who have committed serious crimes.
It does not seem that it is the case of one of the most visible faces of the Mexican drug trafficking.
Félix Gallardo was arrested in April 1989 in a luxurious house in Cosmos (Guadalajara). The persecution and capture of its main founding partners of the almighty Guadalajara cartel, Rafael Caro Quintero - freed in 2013 and the most wanted man in the DEA - and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, alias
Don Neto,
after the DEA's fury for the kidnapping , torture and murder of Kiki Camarena cornered their leader and blew up the old criminal chessboard. "This concluded the unique cartel model with which the drug trafficking industry began in the country," wrote journalist Diego Enrique Osorno in a report in this newspaper.
Despite the fact that Osorno himself stated that he had interviewed Félix Gallardo for his book
El cartel de Sinaloa.
A history of the political use of narco
(2009), in which he explained the relationship between politicians and drug lords of the time - "The narcos were not against the Government, we were part of the Government" -, in the interview with Telemundo, the narco rejects any connection with the drug business.
And his testimony seems to cling to that of an old, tired and sick man, who does not understand why he has spent 32 years in prison.
Capture of the interview "Boss of bosses" of Telemundo.
In video, the teaser of the interview.PHOTO |
VIDEO: TELEMUNDO
Regarding the murder of Camarena, he points out: "It is a very regrettable issue ... I don't know why he is related to me, because I didn't know him" and he adds: "I have no regrets. I did not participate in such an event ”. What happened in 1985 has already made the covers and inspired Netflix books and scripts, but it continues to be the origin of current decisions, such as the reward offered by the DEA last year of $ 20 million for the whereabouts of Caro Quintero, the higher for a criminal.
Camarena was an American agent who, infiltrated the Guadalajara Cartel, dismantled a gigantic marijuana plantation, located in the so-called Búfalo ranch. The official version indicates that, in retaliation, the drug traffickers murdered him and the pilot with whom he inspected the drug fields, Alfredo Zavala. Their bodies were found, a month after being kidnapped, in a ditch 150 kilometers from Guadalajara. Reports revealed that they had been savagely tortured.
Caro Quintero was arrested shortly after in Costa Rica and the eldest of the partners, Don Neto, was arrested that same year. Neither of them is currently in prison. Caro Quintero was released for a formal defect in a sentence and while the judges resolved, he escaped. Don Neto was granted conditional release in 2017. And the only one who remains behind bars is the chief of chiefs: "All the accused have been released, except in my case," says Félix Gallardo in the interview. to Telemundo. He was sentenced in 1989 to 40 years in prison and has eight years to go.
The capo denies even having met Caro Quintero and Fonseca Carrillo “on the street” and notes: “There never were cartels in Guadalajara. We led a family life. I brought my children to school ”. As has happened with previous interviews with drug lords, such as Caro Quintero or El Chapo when they were fugitives, Félix Gallardo insists that before he was imprisoned he dedicated himself to the fields: “He had been farming and ranching since he was a boy. He also had some pharmacies and two old hotels ”.
In some moments of the interview, he pauses to try to understand the journalist, Issa Osorio. "I can't hear," he acknowledges. The capo arrives at the interview in a wheelchair, with his left arm in a sling and blind in one eye. "My health is terrible," he sums up. “I have no prognosis for life. My stomach was sectioned, eight hernias were removed. They deprived me of my life, of my ears and, as you can see, I cannot walk ”, he adds. And although the journalist asks him directly if he is seeking to benefit from López Obrador's amnesty for prisoners over 75 years of age, the capo prefers not to be so obvious: “I'm not looking for that. I know that the president is a man of good will, who is fighting social inequality. He is giving pensions, he is giving many things and I would not take his time.I am a corpse which does not wait more than to be buried in the root of a tree. I'm not asking the Lord for anything. On the contrary, I hope it goes well for him ”, he concludes.
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