Mexican drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero, behind bars, in a file photo. Reuters Photographer (REUTERS)
The game is over.
Eight years, eleven months and six days after leaving prison for the last time, Rafael Caro Quintero returned to sleep in a cell.
With this ends the legend of
The Prince
, one of the characters who defined, for better and for worse, the history of drug trafficking in Mexico.
The son of peasants, Rafael Caro Quintero was born in 1952, when Miguel Alemán Valdés was still president of Mexico.
Like so many other drug traffickers of his generation, he grew up in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, under the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains, a mythical land.
Not even twenty years old, thanks to the patronage of Pedro Avilés Pérez,
El León de la Sierra
, Caro Quintero began to grow marijuana in Sinaloa and Sonora.
Business was good, but his position was secondary for several years.
Avilés Pérez's assassination in 1978 opened new doors for him and allowed him to sit down at the table with Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo
Don Neto
, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno
El Azul
and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
The Boss of Bosses
.
Together they built a quasi-family drug trafficking network that in the early 1980s controlled much of the marijuana and opium traffic in the country.
This network, now mistakenly known as the Guadalajara cartel, also managed to transport cocaine on a large scale from Colombia to the United States for the first time.
Although the organization never achieved a complete vertical integration of its drug production, transport and trade process, nor did it establish a consensual decision-making mechanism, it did manage to maintain certain rules among its members and an extraordinary structure for its time.
Its relevance in the history of drug trafficking in Mexico is indisputable and cannot be minimized.
Outgoing and volatile, Caro Quintero had the ability to manage huge marijuana fields in Sinaloa, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Chihuahua and half a dozen other states.
Hundreds of day laborers came to work on some of his farms under conditions of semi-slavery.
Thanks to the virtuous partnership with Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca, he managed to corrupt civil authorities as well as police and military.
The degree of criminal cooptation of various institutional circuits was profound and reached, as we know today, even the highest spheres of political power.
This did not go unnoticed by US drug enforcement agents who began to track him more and more closely.
It is known: luck and good business do not last forever.
A proverb says that when the gods want to destroy someone, they first blind them and then drive them mad.
Stunned by power and money, Caro Quintero began to take false steps, to go blind.
In January 1985, Caro Quintero dismembered with ice picks, knives and razors two American tourists who had a hard time going to dinner at the same place where he and his cronies drank;
It occurred to Caro Quintero that they could be DEA agents.
The restaurant was called
La Langosta Loca
.
A week later, on February 8, 1985, the drug trafficker ordered the kidnapping of DEA agent Enrique
Kiki
Camarena.
We will never know the true motivations for that act, although it was most likely a revenge for the raids that Camarena and other agents had led months ago in the marijuana fields of Caro Quintero.
It was the mistake of his life.
For 30 hours, Caro Quintero's thugs tortured Camarena until they broke his ribs and fractured his skull.
The tapes of the interrogation, which the DEA found months later in one of
Don Neto
's houses , show boundless sadism.
Once the consequences of that act had been assimilated, Caro Quintero left the country for Costa Rica hand in hand with his girlfriend, Sara Cosío Vidaurri.
For a few months he enjoyed a placid life by the sea until in September 1985 he was arrested in the Central American country on charges of kidnapping, qualified homicide, planting, cultivation, transportation and trafficking of marijuana, cocaine supply and criminal association.
He was 32 years old.
The rest of the story we all know.
For 28 years, Caro Quintero was imprisoned, first in the Altiplano and then in Puente Grande.
In 2013, a collegiate court in Jalisco surprisingly released him by pointing out that Caro Quintero should have been tried for the murder of Camarena in the local order and not in the federal order, as happened.
His release surprised everyone.
When the US Embassy and the federal government found out, it was too late.
Caro Quintero had vanished.
In the United States, the release of Caro Quintero was interpreted first as a mockery and then as an offense.
His recapture became an obsession for which the DEA offered up to twenty million dollars.
The drug lord's name was soon on most wanted criminal lists.
It was a symbol, a trophy, a revenge.
Although some versions indicate that Caro Quintero retraced his course and managed to consolidate himself as an important figure in current drug trafficking, especially in northern Sonora, it is most likely that the last eight years he was more focused on escaping from justice than on continuing. to forge his myth.
Jumping from the bush between Sinaloa and Sonora I imagine him as a ghost trying to understand the speed of a world that was no longer his.
With two arrest warrants and an extradition order to the United States, the future of Caro Quintero seems marked.
The game is over.
Carlos A. Pérez Ricart is a research professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE).
His latest book is:
One Hundred Years of Spies and Drugs: The Story of United States Counternarcotics Agents in Mexico
, Debate, 2022.
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