Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to the Mexican account, the federal judicial police received an anonymous letter saying the two missing men might be found at the ranch of Manuel Bravo Cervantes, a former legislator, in Michoacan state. When some 30 federal judicial policemen approached the Bravo house, the police say, shots from inside killed an officer, setting off a half-hour gunfight. Bravo, his < wife and their two sons died in the battle. The police claimed they later seized two pounds of cocaine and a slew of guns and ammunition...
Three days afterward, DEA agents and Mexican police searched the 30-acre ranch and its surroundings but found no sign of Camarena and Zavala. But that evening, a peasant youth discovered the two plastic bags about ten yards from a highway that runs past the Bravo ranch. The corpses had apparently been dumped there after the agents left the ranch. The soil found on the bags was not common to the immediate area. Investigators concluded that the bodies had been buried, disinterred and brought to the ranch so they could be found there...
...Mexican authorities claim that Bravo was a "known drug trafficker." DEA agents say he was suspected of illegal arms dealing, but they do not believe he was in the narcotics trade. Moreover, the federales, who had recently been making a deliberate effort to cooperate with U.S. investigators, did not tell the DEA of the Bravo raid beforehand. Nor were Michoacan state police notified of the raid in their jurisdiction until after the shooting started; when the local officers arrived at the scene, the federal police even prevented them from entering the ranch grounds...
Skeptical U.S. officials believe the Mexican authorities received an anonymous letter, but think that the overzealous officers might have opened fire on the Bravo house without sufficient provocation. Needing to justify the carnage, the police could have planted the cocaine in the home and later placed the bodies of Camarena and Zavala near- by. If this were the case, the federal police must have known who had kidnaped, killed and buried...
...prime suspects in the Camarena-Zavala case are still two Mexican drug kingpins, Miguel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero. But the U.S. believes that Mexico's gangland "families" have been operating with wide- scale police protection. Officers who were supposedly tracking Caro Quintero in connection with the Camarena case claimed they simply failed to recognize the well-known crook when he boarded a private plane in Guadalajara two days after the agent's abduction. Caro Quintero flew to Caborca, a remote desert town where he may now be in hiding...