After serving 28 years of a 40-year sentence behind bars, Rafael Caro Quintero will walk out of Mexico's notorious Puente Grande prison, not far from a city he used as the base of operations for the Guadalajara drug cartel he founded in the 1980s. A Mexican court has ruled that Caro Quintero, considered one of the most important figures of the drug trade, was tried improperly for the 1985 kidnapping and murder of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena Salazar. The court found the drug kingpin should have had his case handled in a state court instead of the federal court in which he was tried.
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According to Reforma, the decision was based on the legal requisite that the victim be a consular or diplomatic agent in order for the case to be held in a federal court. Camarena and the other murder victim -- Camarena's pilot Alfredo Zavala -- were neither of those things. The Associated Press spoke to a court official who commented off the record on Friday that Caro Quintero would be released from Puente Grande because he had already served his time on other non-violent charges.
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Caro Quintero, 61, rose to power as the head of the Guadalajara cartel, which grew rich off the cocaine it bought from Colombian cartels and the marijuana it cultivated on northern Mexican farms and shipped northward into the United States. More than 6,000 tons of marijuana were confiscated in 1984 in a raid on his ranch El Búfalo, in the state of Chihuahua, where a packaging plant built for that purpose was found on the premises. A native of Sinaloa state (known as a birthplace of the modern-day drug trade in Mexico), he once forced more than 4,000 people to work against their will in his drug farms.
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Reforma reports that there exist a few recourses for authorities who want to see Caro Quintero back behind bars -- charges against the kingpin may have been logged by the state and forgotten when he was tried in federal court, or he may be extradited to the United States, where he was also wanted for the murder of Camarena. On the federal level, there are no new or outstanding charges against Caro Quintero.
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