James "Jaime" Kuykendall (1936-) was the head of the DEA's Guadalajara office during the 1980s.
Biography[]
James Kuykendall was born in south Texas in 1936, and he joined the Border Patrol at age 21 and later became a US Customs investigator along the United States-Mexico border and a DEA agent. He was posted to Ecuador, Houston, and Guadalajara, where he headed the local DEA office during the 1980s. Kuykendall married a Mexican woman from Chiapas and was given the Spanish name "Jaime" as a nickname, and he supervised Kiki Camarena on his arrival in Guadalajara in 1981. Kuykendall told Camarena that his stay in Guadalajara would be more of a data collection mission, as the DEA did not have the power to make arrests in Mexico, and he also warned him that the Mexican Federal Police was corrupt. He later took part in the search for Camarena after his 1985 kidnapping and murder, and he was reassigned to Laredo by his boss Ed Heath, who called him "burnt out" and "too emotionally attached" with regard to seeking vengeance for Camarena. He ended his career as agent-in-charge at the Laredo DEA office before becoming a private investigator.