Word: camarena
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When the battered body of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena turned up on a roadside near Guadalajara in March 1985, one month after he had been kidnaped, the Mexican government quickly pinned the blame on Rafael Caro Quintero, a flamboyant 29-year-old kingpin of the Guadalajara drug cartel. But Camarena's comrades in the DEA did not believe that the reckless, illiterate "Rafa" had acted alone. The agents suspected the brains behind the complex crime were members of Mexico's power elite, who had everything to lose from the relentless probing of Camarena and his partners into...
Ibarra and Aldana were stars of President Miguel de la Madrid's "permanent campaign" against drugs. But DEA agents believe that they, along with other top law-enforcement, intelligence and military officials, orchestrated the Camarena kidnaping because they feared that the DEA was about to expose their involvement in trafficking. Entries in Camarena's work diary show that at the time of his death he was following leads linking Aldana to the cartel...
...investigators say they now have witnesses who can testify that in October 1984 Aldana and Ibarra, his boss, met with Caro Quintero and other Guadalajara drug chieftains and plotted to kidnap Camarena. Aldana, who currently heads Mexico City's bar association, denied the charges last week...
...fact, there was more public fuss over an entirely separate issue: NBC's broadcast two weeks ago of Drug Wars: The Camarena Story, a docudrama about the 1985 murder of American drug-enforcement agent Enrique ("Kiki") Camarena. The mini-series, based on the book Desperados by TIME Washington correspondent Elaine Shannon, suggested that the killing was sanctioned at the highest levels of the Mexican government...
Mexican officials were enraged by the program, and last week the government- owned television network launched a counterattack: an hour-long documentary charging that Camarena himself was a narcotics dealer and was killed after he betrayed the drug lords he worked for. Drug Enforcement Administration Director Jack Lawn, a prominent character in the NBC program, labeled the charges "outrageous" and pointed out that Camarena died penniless...