After years as one among US authorities’ most wished males, the Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was introduced right into a New York courtroom on Friday to reply fees that embrace orchestrating the 1985 killing of a US federal agent.
Caro Quintero pleaded not responsible to working a unbroken felony enterprise. Individually, so did Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the chief of one other cartel. Carrillo is accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico however not accused of involvement within the demise of the DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 different Mexican prisoners had been despatched on Thursday to eight US cities, a transfer that got here as Mexico sought to stave off Donald Trump administration’s risk of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports subsequent week.
For Camarena’s household, the arraignments marked a long-awaited second.
“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope – hope that this second would come. Hope that we might reside to see accountability. And now, that hope has lastly changed into actuality,” the household stated in an announcement thanking Trump and everybody who has labored on the case through the years.
The White Home, in an announcement Friday forward of the arraignments, referred to as Caro Quintero “some of the evil cartel bosses on the planet”.
In trade for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, unlawful immigration and fentanyl manufacturing.
However members of Mexico’s safety cupboard on Friday framed the switch of the 29 prisoners as a nationwide safety resolution.
“It isn’t a dedication to the USA. It’s a dedication to ourselves,” stated Mexican legal professional normal Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The issue of drug trafficking and arranged crime has been a real tragedy for our nation.”
Mexican safety secretary Omar García Harfuch stated the folks despatched into US custody had been “mills of violence” in Mexico and represented a safety risk to each international locations.
Caro Quintero had lengthy been one among America’s high Mexican targets for extradition.
He was one of many founders of a Guadalajara-based cartel and one of many main suppliers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the US within the late Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.
Caro Quintero had Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1985 as a result of he blamed the agent for a raid on an enormous marijuana plantation the 12 months prior, authorities stated. Camarena’s killing marked a low level in US-Mexico relations and was dramatized within the common Netflix sequence Narcos: Mexico.
Caro Quintero had been 28 years right into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court docket overturned his verdict in 2013.
After his launch, he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles within the northern Mexico border state of Sonora till he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities stated.
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Caro Quintero advised the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “by no means went again to medicine”.
“Whoever’s saying it’s a liar!” he stated, in line with the newspaper. “I’m not working any extra, let’s be clear about that! I used to be a drug trafficker 23 years in the past, and now I’m not, and I received’t ever be once more.”
The US, which had added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wished checklist in 2018 with a $20m reward, sought his extradition instantly after his 2022 arrest. It occurred days after the Mexican and US presidents on the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden respectively, met on the White Home.
However the request remained in limbo as López Obrador severely curtailed his nation’s cooperation with the US to protest undercover American legislation enforcement operations focusing on Mexican political and army officers.
Then, in January, a non-profit group representing the Camarena household despatched a letter to the brand new Trump administration urging it to resume the extradition request.
Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of the drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, often known as “The Lord of The Skies”, who died in a botched cosmetic surgery in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, who was often known as “The Viceroy”, continued his brother’s enterprise of smuggling medicine over the border till his arrest in 2014.
He was sentenced in 2021 to twenty-eight years in jail for organized crime, cash laundering and weapons violations.
Among the many others extradited are main members of Mexican organized crime teams lately designated by the Republican administration as “overseas terrorist organizations”.
They embrace cartel leaders, safety chiefs from each factions of the Sinaloa cartel, cartel finance operatives and a person wished in reference to the killing of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy in 2022.
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