The case continues to trouble U.S.–Mexican relations, most recently when Rafael Caro Quintero, one of the three convicted traffickers, was released from a Mexican prison in 2013.
Caro Quintero was again captured by Mexican forces in July 2022, reigniting discussions surrounding Camarena’s murder and its impact on enforcing drug policies domestically and abroad.
[7] His oldest brother, PFC Eduardo Camarena-Salazar, died of malaria while serving with the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam in September 1965.
[11] In 1977, Camarena transferred to the agency's field office in Fresno, where he worked undercover on smuggling activities in the San Joaquin Valley.
Author Elaine Shannon describes Camarena as "a natural in the theater of the street", able to "slip effortlessly into a Puerto Rican accent or toss off Mexican gutter slang—whatever the role demanded.
[12] Foreign assignments were important for job advancement in the DEA and the Guadalajara office was seeing a surge in work, foreshadowing the explosion in drug trafficking of the 1980s.
Despite joint anti-drug initiatives such as eradication programs and intelligence-sharing, the drug trade continued due to mutual mistrust, institutional corruption, and the demand for narcotics within the U.S.
[18] At this time in the early 1970s, Mexico was not yet a major transshipment point for cocaine, primarily produced in the Andean countries of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.
[19] In response to strong American pressure and domestic law enforcement concerns, Mexico began eradication programs of opium and marijuana plantations, with large infusions of U.S.
In 1975, Mexican president Luis Echeverría approved Operation Trizo, which used aerial surveillance and spraying of herbicides and defoliants from a fleet of dozens of planes and helicopters.
[19] They have no law enforcement powers; instead, they perform intelligence, liaison, and advisory functions, collect and pass along information on drug trafficking, and advise on local anti-narcotics programs.
[19] In Mexico, although there had been an informal agreement with the Mexican federal government that agents could carry personal weapons, it was illegal for foreigners to do so, and local officials were free to arrest them for this.
In addition, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, cocaine trafficking, driven mostly by Colombian smugglers, grew rapidly in the United States and became a primary target of the DEA, leaving Mexican enforcement a secondary concern.
Desert production required well drilling for irrigation, and Mexico had strict laws governing well digging, a problem that was eventually solved by massive bribery.
With an end to solo American overflights as part of the eradication program, however, money and intimidation allowed farms to grow dramatically without coming to official notice.
[39] In 1984, acting on information from the DEA, 450 Mexican soldiers backed by helicopters destroyed a 1,000-hectare (2,500-acre) marijuana plantation in Allende, Chihuahua,[40][41] known as Rancho Búfalo, with an estimated annual production of $8 billion.
[42][43] Camarena, who was suspected of being the source of the information, was abducted in broad daylight on February 7, 1985, by corrupt Mexican officials working for the major drug traffickers in Mexico.
[44] Later that same day, a Mexican pilot named Alfredo Zavala Avelar (who flew missions with Camarena and was a DEA asset) was also abducted.
[15] Camarena was taken to a residence at 881 Lope de Vega in the Colonia of Jardines del Bosque, in the western section of the city of Guadalajara, owned by Rafael Caro Quintero,[45] where he was tortured over a 30-hour period and then murdered.
[46] Camarena's and Avelar's bodies were found wrapped in plastic in a rural area outside the small town of La Angostura in the state of Michoacán on March 5, 1985.
[49] Investigators soon identified Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and his two close associates, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero, as the primary suspects in the kidnapping and under pressure from the U.S. government, Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid quickly apprehended Carrillo and Quintero, but Félix Gallardo still enjoyed political protection and wasn't arrested until four years later in 1989.
Due to the difficulty of extraditing Mexican citizens, the DEA went as far as to use bounty hunters to capture Humberto Álvarez Machaín, the physician who allegedly prolonged Camarena's life so the torture could continue, and Javier Vásquez Velasco, and bring them to the United States.
They wrote that Camarena, like Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía, discovered that the CIA helped organize drug trafficking from Mexico into the United States in order to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua as a part of the Cold War.
Buendía had found out about the CIA-contra-drugs-DFS connection, which seriously questioned Mexican sovereignty, while Camarena learned that the CIA had infiltrated the DEA and sabotaged its work so as to interfere with the clandestine contra-DFS-traffickers network.
Later official investigations attempted to limit criminal responsibility to the dirty connections between drug traffickers, secret agents and corrupt police, leaving out the (geo)political ramifications.In 2019, the United States Department of Justice began reinvestigating Camarena's murder,[5] and in 2020, Amazon Studios released a documentary, The Last Narc, supporting the allegations, and implicating Félix Rodríguez.
[6] In a blog post, Camarena biographer Elaine Shannon described the allegations as a "Deep State conspiracy theory," and interviewed former DEA agent Jack Lawn, who agreed with her.
[2] In Fresno, the California Narcotic Officers' Association (CNOA) hosts a yearly memorial golf tournament named after him and presents an annual scholarship to graduating high school seniors.
"Heroes Under Fire: Righteous Vendetta (2005)"[71] is a documentary that explores the related events and includes interviews with family members, DEA agents, and others linked to the investigation.
On December 21, 2020, retired DEA agent James Kuykendall filed a lawsuit over the show's claims that he was involved in Camarena's murder.