MEXICO CITY, July 15 (Reuters) – The Mexican navy on Friday captured drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero, convicted of the murder of a US anti-narcotics agent in 1985, in a coup that had a great cost when a helicopter used in the mission. it crashed and killed 14 soldiers.
The Marines drove out Caro Quintero with a blood dog in a far-flung corner of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, one of Mexico’s drug trafficking cores, before the Black Hawk helicopter crashed as it was about to land further into the city. south.
Caro Quintero gained prominence as a co-founder of the Cartel of Guadalajara, one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Latin America during the 1980s, and had been one of the most prized targets for American officials.
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The U.S. government praised the arrest and said it would not waste time asking for his extradition.
“That’s huge,” White House senior adviser for Latin America Juan Gonzalez said on Twitter.
Caro Quintero was captured in San Simon, in the municipality of Choix, in Sinaloa, after a military-trained bitch named Max found him in bushy land, the navy said.
The arrest comes after pressure from the United States, according to a Mexican official, and the same week that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met with US President Joe Biden in Washington.
Lopez Obrador said on Twitter that the Navy will investigate what caused the helicopter crash in the city of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, which killed 14 people and left one seriously injured. He said he was carrying military personnel supporting the team that detained the chief.
Caro Quintero spent 28 years in prison for the brutal murder and torture of former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, one of the most notorious murders of the bloody wars of drug trafficking in Mexico. The events, dramatized in the 2018 Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico,” sparked a nadir in U.S.-Mexico cooperation in a five-decade “war on drugs”.
Caro Quintero has previously denied involvement in Camarena’s murder. He was released in 2013 by a technicality of a Mexican judge, embarrassing the previous government.
He quickly went underground and returned to traffic as part of the Sinaloa cartel, according to U.S. officials, who put him on the FBI’s list of the 10 most wanted fugitives and gave him a reward of 20 millions of dollars in the head, a record for a drug dealer.
Last year, he lost one last appeal against extradition to the United States. He will be extradited as soon as possible, another Mexican official said.
“It’s probably one of the most important catches of the last decade in terms of importance to the DEA,” said Mike Vigil, former head of international operations at the DEA.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said he would call for the immediate extradition of Caro Quintero.
“There is no hiding place for anyone who kidnaps, tortures and kills U.S. law enforcement. We are deeply grateful to the Mexican authorities for their capture and arrest of Rafael Caro-Quintero,” Garland said in a statement. .
Prior to the extradition, Caro Quintero will be detained in the Altiplano prison in the state of Mexico, Mexican prosecutors said. The prison is known as the one from which his former partner of the Sinaloa Cartel Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán fled in 2015.
Although Caro Quintero, 69, is no longer considered a major player in international drug trafficking, the symbolic impact of his capture is significant.
The arrest points to significant cooperation between the United States and Mexico despite recent security clashes, Mexican security expert Alejandro Hope said. “This type of capture is unthinkable without the involvement of the DEA,” he said.
Mexico’s unwillingness to extradite Caro Quintero to the United States before he was released from prison had been a source of tension between the two countries. An American official said Washington was very impatient for him to be extradited.
“We are hoping that this will start fixing the deteriorating relationship between the United States and Mexico in terms of the fight against drug trafficking,” the former DEA Vigil official said.
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Featured by Lizbeth Diaz, Drazen Jorgic, Dave Graham and Jackie Botts; Additional report by Diego Ore; Written by Drazen Jorgic and Brendan O’Boyle; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer, Rosalba O’Brien and William Mallard
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