Rafael Caro Quintero (born 3 October 1952) was a Mexican drug lord and one of the co-founders of the Guadalajara Cartel during the 1980s. He was the right-hand man of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and he was imprisoned from 1985 to 2013 after he was accused of DEA agent Kiki Camarena's kidnapping, torture, and murder. He was released in 2013 after his original sentence had been cancelled due to a mistrial, only to evade a rearrest order and become one of Interpol's 15 most-wanted fugitives.
Biography[]
Caro Quintero in 1980
Rafael Caro Quintero was born in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico on 3 October 1952, the oldest of twelve children; he was the nephew of Emilio Quintero Payan. At the age of 16, he became a livestock farmer in Caborca, and he became a truck driver two years later and later a bean and corn planter. As a teenager, he began to grow marijuana on a small scale, and, in less than five years, he managed to buy several nearby ranches. He worked with the drug traffickers Pedro Aviles Perez and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo during the 1970s, and he became the right-hand man of his close friend Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and accompanied him on his 1980 business trip to Guadalajara, where he, Miguel Angel, Ernesto, and Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno cofounded the Guadalajara Cartel. He purchased an opulent mansion for himself in Guadalajara, and he seduced the socialite Sara Cosio into running off with him after staging a fake kidnapping which led to her father, Jalisco Education Secretary Octavio César Cosío Vidaurri, threatening to expose the Guadalajara Cartel. However, Miguel Angel did a favor for DFS Director-General Salvador Osuna Nava by delivering an arms shipment to the Nicaraguan Contras (and being tortured in the process) in exchange for the DFS calling off the manhunt; Caro Quintero was then forced to return Cosio to her family to put an end to the crisis.
Declining power[]
Albert Radelat and John Clay Walker
At around the same time, Caro Quintero grew to be psychopathic due to his frequent cocaine usage, and he opposed Miguel Angel's shift towards cocaine trafficking for the Colombians, as Caro Quintero's own sinsemilla marijuana was not being moved or sold, and was thus being left to rot in its fields. Caro Quintero also became rivals with Amado Carrillo Fuentes after Carrillo Fuentes seduced Cosio at a nightclub, and Caro Quintero responded by shooting at the nightclub's ceiling and threatening to shoot Carrillo Fuentes before his friend Joaquin Guzman Loera calmed him down. In 1985, Caro Quintero had the writer John Clay Walker and the dentistry student Albert Radelat kidnapped, tortured, and murdered at his friend Cochiloco's restaurant after mistaking them for undercover American agents, and their bodies were found six months later in Zapopan.
Murder of Kiki Camarena[]
Following the Rancho Bufalo raid of November 1984, which destroyed Caro Quintero's 2,500-acre marijuana plantation in Chihuahua and destroyed $8 billion worth of marijuana (5,000 tons), Caro Quintero and his DFS contact Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno decided to retaliate against the men responsible. The DFS discovered that DEA agent Kiki Camarena had planned the raid, and - against Fonseca Carrillo's advice - Caro Quintero and Esparragoza Moreno decided to punish Camarena. Camarena was kidnapped from his house at 881 Lope de Vega in Guadalajara on 7 February 1985 in broad daylight, with the DFS taking him to Ruben Zuno Arce's estate to be tortured. After two days of torture, Camarena was executed.
Capture and release[]
Caro Quintero's capture
Camarena's death led to the DEA and Mexican government initiating a large-scale crackdown on the Guadalajara Cartel, codenamed "Operation Leyenda". On 4 April 1985, Caro Quintero was tracked down and arrested at his mansion in Alajuela, Costa Rica after Guillermo Calderoni forced Sara to identify her lover, and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for Camarena's murder. He was released on 9 August 2013 after a judge decided that his case should have been tried at the state level rather than the federal level, but, on 14 August, the Mexican government bowed to American pressure and issued a new arrest warrant for Caro Quintero. He became one of Interpol's 15 most-wanted fugitives, and he was reported to be on good terms with Sinaloa Cartel boss Ismael Zambada Garcia by 2020, although he refused to join the cartel due to its concurrent infighting.
Gallery[]
