The 1984 Tijuana raid occurred in 1984 during Operation Condor when a team of corrupt Mexican Federal Police officers raided a drug warehouse in Tijuana belonging to Guadalajara Cartel lieutenant Rafael Caro Quintero. The raid, orchestrated by Tijuana drug trafficker Alberto Sicilia Falcon, led to war between Sicilia Falcon and Guadalajara.
Background[]
In 1980, Cuban drug trafficker Alberto Sicilia Falcon - the boss of the Tijuana "plaza" - agreed to let Guadalajara Cartel boss Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo traffick marijuana through the Tijuana corridor in exchange for a promise that Felix would not compete with Falcon's cocaine industry. However, in 1984, Felix discovered heaps of unmovable cocaine during a trip to Nicaragua with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and he conceived the idea of adding cocaine to his organization's exports to the United States. The South Florida Task Force had shut down the Colombian cartels' Caribbean trafficking routes, so - with the help of his associate Sandra Avila Beltran, also a friend of Sicilia Falcon - Miguel Angel decided to approach the Cali Cartel with an offer of partnership. He met with Cali bosses Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, Jose Santacruz Londono, and Helmer Herrera and promised to make them richer than the Medellin Cartel if they would let him handle the trafficking of their cocaine through Mexico with the help of Honduran trafficker Juan Matta-Ballesteros. The Cali Cartel asked about how their existing cocaine trafficker Sicilia Falcon would factor into the situation, but Avila Beltran asked them why they would metaphorically smuggle cocaine through a straw when, with Miguel Angel, they could smuggle it through a pipeline. Cali agreed to form a partnership with Guadalajara, and Miguel Angel began to ship cocaine through Sicilia Falcon's turf.
Raid[]
The destruction of the cocaine shipment
The first shipment, hauled overland by Manuel Salcido Uzeta's truck, arrived at Rafael Caro Quintero's warehouse in Tijuana, where Benjamin Arellano Felix and his brothers had previously been smuggling marijuana cross-border for Miguel Angel. However, Sicilia Falcon caught wind of Miguel Angel's betrayal of his promise and arranged for the Mexican Federal Police to raid the warehouse. The Police crashed the unloading process, holding Salcido Uzeta, Arellano Felix, and Joaquin Guzman Loera at gunpoint before Sicilia Falcon confronted them and told them that Miguel Angel should have expected a response after he began to traffick through Sicilia Falcon's lands. Sicilia Falcon then rode off in a jeep as a policeman with an RPG stepped forwards, and the cartel members fled as the policeman destroyed their shipment with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Aftermath[]
Sicilia Falcon called Caro Quintero shortly afterwards and attempted to recruit him into switching sides, but Caro Quintero yelled at him and destroyed his golden phone in a rage after Sicilia Falcon hung up on him. Shortly after arriving in Cali on a business trip to Colombia, Miguel Angel and Avila Beltran were kidnapped by Medellin Cartel boss Pablo Escobar's henchmen Nelson Hernandez and Roberto Ramos and taken to Medellin, where Escobar convinced Miguel Angel to traffick his cocaine as well.