What Did Enrique Kiki Camarena Tell His Family About His Job
Inside The Brave Life And Horrifying Death Of Undercover DEA Amanuensis Kiki Camarena
Published February 3, 2020
Later on Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was institute out by the Guadalajara cartel in 1985, he was kidnapped and tortured to decease over the course of iii days.
In an audio recording of the torture and interrogation of undercover DEA agent Kiki Camarena that was released to the public iii years after his 1985 expiry, i can hear the desperate human being pleading with his captors.
"Couldn't I ask yous to have my ribs bandaged, please?"
The recording is the only record authorities have of Camarena's last agonizing moments on world before his execution. Whether this execution was at the hands of cartel members, decadent Mexican officials, or the CIA, remains a mystery.
In 1981, the DEA sent Camarena to Guadalajara, Mexico, after stints in Calexico and Fresno, California. He quickly helped develop an informant network in the Guadalajara Cartel's drug trafficking activities and his legendary piece of work at that place is the basis of Netflix'due south Narcos: Mexico.
justthinktwice.gov DEA Special Agent Kiki Camarena with his wife, Geneva "Mika" Camarena, and two of their sons.
Camarena knew the dangers of being a DEA amanuensis and he as well knew how unsafe information technology could be to poke effectually cartel business. But more than annihilation, he wanted to make a deviation in the War on Drugs.
"Even if I'thousand only one person," Camarena once told his mother earlier becoming an agent, "I can brand a divergence."
Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena: A Man With A Moral Mission
Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was born into a large Mexican family on July 26, 1947, in Mexicali, Mexico. He was 1 of viii children and he was around nine years former when he moved to Calexico, California.
Netflix introduces actor Michael Peña as Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena in flavour one of Narcos: Mexico..
He and his wife, Geneva "Mika" Camarena, were high school sweethearts. After serving in the U.S. Marines Camarena started work equally a fireman in Calexico. Then in 1972, he graduated from Royal Valley College with an Associate of Science degree in criminal justice and started working as a local police officer.
His background in narcotics police force work opened the door for him to join the Drug Enforcement Assistants (DEA) in 1974, a year after President Nixon created the agency. But his sis, Myrna Camarena, was actually the one who joined the agency first.
"He was the one who talked me into joining DEA," said Myrna, in a 1990 interview with AP News. She was working as a secretarial assistant for the DEA in Istanbul, Turkey, when her blood brother went missing.
To the Camarena siblings, being a special amanuensis in the War on Drugs seemed like a dangerous game for a father of 3. Their blood brother, Eduardo, was killed before in the Vietnam War and their mother, Dora, couldn't acquit the thought of losing another child.
But Dora believed in her son and Kiki Camarena believed in his mission — even if it meant putting his life at risk.
justthinktwice.gov Kiki Camarena in U.South. Marines.
Meanwhile, President Nixon Wages A State of war On Drugs…
The verbal nature of the DEA's business in United mexican states is even so up for debate, just President Nixon presented that business to the American people as simply: A War on Drugs.
Only this wasn't exactly the truth, according to what a former Nixon aide named John Ehrlichman told writer Dan Baum in 2019. The drug war, Ehrlichman insisted, was really most targeting black people and hippies.
"The Nixon entrada in 1968 and the Nixon White House afterwards that had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," said Ehrlichman.
"You lot empathise what I'm saying? We knew nosotros couldn't arrive illegal to be either against the war or blackness, simply by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and and then criminalizing both heavily, nosotros could disrupt those communities. We could abort their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night subsequently nighttime on the evening news."
justthinktwice.gov DEA amanuensis Kiki Camarena poses with United mexican states's constabulary enforcement.
Nixon'southward War on Drugs might have been presented to the public nether a fantasy, but the havoc it wreaked on the people forth the Mexico-United states border was very existent. The need for drugs suddenly spiked and dealing in and transporting them quickly became a billion-dollar industry.
Cartels got so rich and powerful that non even the DEA could stop them. At least, not until Kiki Camarena came along.
The Hunt For 'The Godfather' Of Cocaine, Felix Gallardo
Some telephone call Guadalajara Cartel boss Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo the Mexican Pablo Escobar, simply others affirm that "El Padrino," or The Godfather, was more of a man of affairs.
The big departure between the 2 was that Escobar congenital his drug empire on production whereas Gallardo's empire dealt mostly with distribution.
Gallardo was the leader of the Guadalajara Cartel along with Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Although there is less bloodshed tied to Gallardo's proper name, he nonetheless earned himself the nickname of El Padrino with his ruthless appetite for profit.
Flickr El Padrino, The Godfather of Mexican cocaine, Félix Gallardo.
Breaking Gallardo'due south distribution network was thus Kiki Camarena'due south number one priority as an undercover DEA agent in Guadalajara.
But the dangers of inbound the cartel world were axiomatic to Camarena early on and he did his best to keep his family out of the fray and in the dark every bit to how dangerous his work really was. Deep down, his wife Mika said, she still knew.
In an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2010, she shared, "I think the knowledge of the danger was always in that location. The work he performed had never been done at that level. He told me very piffling considering he didn't want me to worry. But I knew."
Over four years, Camarena closely followed the Guadalajara Dare's movements in Mexico. Then he caught a break. Using a surveillance aeroplane, he located the massive, near eight-billion-dollar Rancho Búfalo marijuana farm and led 400 Mexican authorities to destroy it.
The raid fabricated him a hero at the DEA, but Camarena's victory was brusk-lived. Now he had a target on his dorsum, just whether that threat was from the Guadalajara Dare or his own country is what makes this story even more than tragic.
Who Really Killed DEA Agent Kiki Camarena?
Flickr Kiki Camarena posed behind a lush marijuana plant.
On February. 7, 1985, a group of armed men abducted DEA amanuensis Kiki Camarena in wide daylight as he left the U.Southward. Consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico, to encounter his wife for tiffin. Outnumbered and outgunned, Camarena didn't fight every bit the men escorted him into a van.
It was the last day anyone would encounter him live again.
An early on investigation into Kiki Camarena'south death assumed that this was payback for his shutting downwardly the Rancho Búfalo. Every bit a result, cartel leaders Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero received most of the arraign for Kiki Camarena'due south expiry.
Quintero received a xl-year prison house sentence, only he only served 28 years when he got out on a legal technicality. Still wanted by U.S. authorities today, Quintero has since disappeared.
Meanwhile, Gallardo now 74 years old, is still serving fourth dimension. In his early prison diaries, he wrote about existence innocent of Kiki Camarena'south death.
Whoever would kill a DEA amanuensis had to be a madman, the police force told Gallardo during questioning. Indeed, but Gallardo insisted that he was "not mad."
"I was taken to the DEA," he wrote. "I greeted them and they wanted to talk. I only answered that I had no interest in the Camarena case and I said, 'You said a madman would do it and I am non mad. I am deeply sorry for the loss of your agent.'"
The Gruesome Details of Kiki Camarena's Death
Cindy Karp/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images The bodies of Enrique Camarena Salazar and pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar.
A calendar month after his abduction, the torso of special agent Kiki Camarena was found by the DEA 70 miles outside of Guadalajara, Mexico. With him, the DEA also plant the torso of Captain Alfredo Zavala Avelar, a Mexican airplane pilot who helped Camarena to take aerial photographs of Rancho Búfalo.
Both men's bodies were bound, desperately browbeaten, and riddled with bullets. Camarena's skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones, and windpipe were crushed. His ribs were broken and a hole had been bored into his skull with a power drill.
Amphetamines and other drugs establish in his toxicology report suggested that Camarena was forced to remain conscious while he was being tortured.
The DEA'due south response to Kiki Camarena'south death was the launch of Operation Leyenda which is to this day the largest DEA drug and homicide manhunt e'er undertaken. The operation forever changed the structure of cartels in Mexico as the U.S.'s fists of fury were brought down on the drug business organization.
Legendary journalist Charles Bowden spent 16 years researching Camarena's capture, torture, interrogation, and mutilation and compiled it together with the ensuing investigation into a gripping albeit complicated web of claret and cant.
Even so, according to Bowden, Camarena's murder had already been solved by a DEA amanuensis assigned to the case when he was notwithstanding missing.
The Men Inside The Torture And Interrogation Room
DEA amanuensis Héctor Berrelle and Kiki Camarena never met in person, but they knew each other and shared instance information.
Kypros/Getty Images The flag-covered casket of Enrique Camarena is escorted out of Guadalajara, Mexico en route to California for his funeral.
According to Bowden, Berrellez plant the CIA responsible for Camarena's death by tardily 1989 — merely his findings were met with a dead end.
"On January 3, 1989, Special Agent Hector Berrellez was assigned to the example," Bowden wrote. "Past September 1989, he learned from witnesses of CIA involvement. By April 1994, Berrellez was removed from the example. Two years later on he retired with his career in ruins."
Still, Berrellez went public with what he knew.
In a 2013 TV interview with FOX News, Berrellez, another erstwhile DEA agent named Phil Jordan, and a CIA contractor named Tosh Plumlee all shared the belief that the CIA was to blame for Camarena's death.
"I know and from what I have been told by a former caput of the Mexican federal police, Comandante (Guillermo Gónzales) Calderoni, the CIA was involved in the movement of drugs from Southward America to Mexico and to the United states," Hashemite kingdom of jordan said in the interview.
"In (Camarena's) interrogation room, I was told by Mexican authorities, that CIA operatives were in at that place – actually conducting the interrogation; actually taping Kiki."
Kiki Camarena'due south Legacy In Nixon'due south Drug State of war
Kiki Camarena's sacrifice in the War on Drugs did not go unnoticed. In 1988, just as an investigation into his murder was boot off, TIME mag put him on their cover. He received many awards while working in the DEA and he posthumously received the Ambassador'southward Award of Laurels, the highest award given past the organization.
In this CBS Evening News segment, Camarena'south son Enrique Jr. explains how his father inspired him to become a estimate.
In Fresno today, the DEA hosts a yearly golf tournament named after him. A school, a library, and a street in his dwelling town of Calexico, California, are as well named subsequently him. The nationwide annual Crimson Ribbon Week, which teaches school children and youths to avoid drug utilise, was also established in his honor.
The DEA edifice in San Diego, a road in Carmel Valley, and the El Paso Intelligence Middle in Texas all bear Camarena's proper name. His name was besides added to the police force enforcement memorial in Washington, D.C.
After her husband's murder, Geneva "Mika" Camarena moved her 3 boys dorsum to the Us. She now runs the Enrique S. Camarena Educational Foundation which provides scholarships to loftier school students and advocates for drug prevention.
Though little is known publicly about 2 of Camarena'southward iii sons, one has been following in his male parent's "legacy of duty." Enrique S. Camarena Jr. took an oath of office in 2014 to become a San Diego Superior Court estimate. Previously, he served xv years as a deputy district attorney in San Diego County.
He was 11 years old when his begetter went missing.
"You lot know, I think about him every day," Camarena Jr. said during his swearing-in ceremony. "And so for me, it'southward however a little bit virtually the legacy of duty. And that's what I've been doing up until yesterday. And I'm going to be serving my county, serving this customs in a different way."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJYcmHBTjc[/embed
When asked if she felt the DEA did enough to bring Camarena's murderers to justice, Mika Camarena said she thought they got the key people who were responsible.
"But I try not to concentrate on that considering information technology will go on me from doing my job and the things I need to do," she said. "If that happens, and so I'1000 letting them (the drug cartels) win."
For Camarena's mother, Dora, any documentary or TV serial on his work is an opportunity to keep her son's legacy live. "He gave his full strength and everything he could to gainsay the drug trafficking in a foreign land. He left an case…I have a lot of faith, and that keeps me going."
Indeed, Kiki Camarena did brand a difference. His years of undercover work helped launch the largest DEA crackdown on Mexican drug cartels in the bureau's history. And though Camarena did not live to run into information technology, generations after him will do good from it.
Afterwards this look at the horrifying and complicated story of brave agent Kiki Camarena's demise, see what the CIA, a poisoned milkshake, the American Mafia, and Fidel Castro all take in common. Then, explore the origin story writ in claret for Escobar's Medellin dare.
Source: https://allthatsinteresting.com/kiki-camarena
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