Cartel boss who murdered DEA agent Kiki Camarena captured in Mexico
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The Mexican drug lord whose role in ordering the kidnapping and murder of a US drugs enforcement agent in 1985 was featured in Netflix drama Narcos: Mexico has been captured by law enforcement.
Rafael Caro Quintero, a notorious co-founder of the brutal Guadalajara Cartel, was behind the torture and murder of 37-year-old DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
He spent 28 years in prison for the killing, which was carried out after Camarena and Mexican authorities raided a ranch in 1984 burning 10,000 tons of marijuana worth $160m, but was released by a judge in 2013 on a legal technicality.
The sentence was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court but by then Caro Quintero had been freed and whisked away by his associates.
The Mexican navy said that the drug trafficker was found on Friday hiding in shrub land in the northwestern state of Sinaloa by a military-trained female bloodhound named Max.
In the Netflix show Caro Quintero was played by Tenoch Huerta Mejia, while the role of Kiki Camarena was taken on by Michael Peña.
Camarena and his pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar were grabbed by the cartel in February 1985 in Guadalajara and their bodies were found wrapped in plastic outside a rural ranch a month later.
The attorney general’s office said in a Friday statement that Caro Quintero was being held for extradition at the maximum security Altiplano prison, which is around 50 miles west of Mexico City.
US officials say that Caro Quintero also ordered the torture and murder of two US civilians, John Clay Walker, 36 and dentistry student Albert Radelat, 33, in January 1985.
The pair were out for dinner when they accidentally came across a party being held by Caro Quintero, who mistook them for DEA agents. He ordered his men to take them into a store room at the restaurant where they were reportedly tortured with ice picks.
Walker died during the attack, while Radelat may still have been alive when the pair were wrapped in tablecloths and buried. Their bodies were found six months later.
The arrest comes just days after Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met with Joe Biden at the White House.
“This is huge,” White House senior Latin America adviser Juan Gonzalez wrote on Twitter.
