16th July, 2022
Mexico’s Navy said it had captured notorious drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, convicted for the murder and torture of a U.S. anti-narcotics agent in 1985.
The arrest on Friday was a major win for Mexican and U.S. law enforcement.
But the arrest may have been at a huge cost as the Navy also announced that 14 of its personnel died after a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in the city of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, on Friday.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, but so far there was no information indicating the incident was related to the capo’s arrest, the Navy said.
Quintero was arrested in San Simon, Choix, which is also in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, one of Mexico’s drug-trafficking heartlands.
He was found in shrub land by a military-trained female bloodhound named Max, the Navy said.
The arrest comes after pressure from the United States, according to a Mexican official, and the same week that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington.
The kingpin rose to prominence as a co-founder of the Guadalajara Cartel, one of Latin America’s most powerful drug trafficking organizations during the 1980s, and had been among the most prized targets for U.S. officials.
The U.S. government hailed the arrest, and said it would waste no time in requesting his extradition.
“This is huge,” White House senior Latin America adviser Juan Gonzalez said on Twitter.
Caro Quintero spent 28 years in prison for the brutal murder of former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, one of the most notorious killings in Mexico’s bloody narco wars. The events, dramatized in the 2018 Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico,” led to a nadir in U.S.-Mexico co-operation in a five-decade “war on drugs.”
He had previously denied involvement in the killing of Camarena. He was released in 2013 on a technicality by a Mexican judge, embarrassing the previous government.
He quickly went underground and returned to trafficking as part of the Sinaloa Cartel, according to U.S. officials, who put him on the FBI’s Top 10 most wanted fugitives list and put a $20 million bounty on his head, a record for a drug trafficker.
Last year, he lost a final appeal against extradition to the United States. He will be extradited as quickly as possible, another Mexican official said.
“It is probably one of the most important captures of the last decade in terms of importance to the DEA,” said Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said he would seek Caro Quintero’s immediate extradition.
“There is no hiding place for anyone who kidnaps, tortures, and murders American law enforcement. We are deeply grateful to Mexican authorities for their capture and arrest of Rafael Caro-Quintero,” Garland said in a statement.
While the 69-year-old Caro Quintero is no longer considered a major player in international drug trafficking, the symbolic impact of his capture is significant.