Ed Heath was an American DEA agent who served in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Heath's brother was killed while serving as a DEA agent, and he himself took part in five gun battles and was wounded in one of them. Heath was appointed as the DEA's director of operations in Mexico in 1976, and he was despised by field agents such as Jaime Kuykendall and Kiki Camarena for his bureaucratic methods; in 1983, he refused to take action after Kuykendall discovered that Operation Condor had been compromised by corrupt policemen, saying that both the Mexican government and the State Department agreed that Operation Condor's "eradication program" was a model program, and that the DEA in Mexico were guests who should not get too nosy. He also refused to acknowledge the existence of the Guadalajara Cartel's massive marijuana farms, believed the corrupt DFS' lies, and did not immediately react to Camarena's kidnapping and murder. However, after Administrator John C. Lawn initiated "Operation Leyenda" in 1986 to avenge Camarena's murder and crack down on Guadalajara, Heath admitted that his previous policies were unsuccessful, and he gave his full support to Agent Walt Breslin and his team, even managing to keep them posted in Mexico even after State Department official Ted Kaye declared that the operation was being shut down. He later served as DEA agent-in-charge in Panama, meeting with Manuel Noriega several times. By 2000, he argued that Colombia, and not Mexico, was the world headquarters for the drug trade.
