“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat
Attempts by Rafael Caro Quintero, one of Mexico’s biggest drug traffickers on record, to avoid being sent to the United States have been constant. He has even sought to take his legal situation to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) to stop a possible extradition.
Judicial records indicate that the founder of the Guadalajara Cartel and accused of the alleged kidnapping and murder of a federal DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, in 1985, has filed a total of 19 amparo lawsuits before the federal justice system.
Most of them have been to avoid being sent and tried for various crimes in the U.S., but others seek to revoke the arrest warrant issued against him for organized crime and drug trafficking and some others to guarantee him better health services in the maximum security prison of Altiplano, in Almoloya de Juarez, State of Mexico.
Just last June 3, a federal court denied him an injunction against an alleged arrest warrant for extradition to the United States.
The magistrates of the Second Collegiate Court in Criminal Matters of the State of Mexico unanimously confirmed the decision of Judge Tania Rosalinda Méndez, in Federal Amparo Proceedings in the State of Mexico, who refused to grant the drug trafficker amparo protection.
A month earlier, the Supreme Court refused to review an injunction filed by Caro Quintero’s lawyers against his extradition to the United States.
Of the 19 amparos filed by the drug trafficker’s lawyers, only 5 have been resolved against him, the rest are ongoing in courts and tribunals in the State of Mexico, Jalisco and Mexico City.
How was Caro Quintero’s capture and recapture?
Caro Quintero was the founder of the Guadalajara cartel along with Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, with whom he began working in the 1970s. During the 1980s, he acquired so much power that he was nicknamed: “Narco de Narcos” (Narco of Narcos).
He was arrested in San José, Costa Rica, on September 18, 1985 and later extradited to Mexico.
On December 12, 1989, Caro Quintero was sentenced for the crimes of kidnapping, aggravated homicide, planting, growing, harvesting, transporting and trafficking marijuana, supplying cocaine and criminal association. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
He was in the Federal Center for Social Readaptation of Altiplano, in the State of Mexico. In 2007 he was transferred to the maximum security prison of Puente Grande, where he was held until 2010, when he was transferred to the Guadalajara Preventive Prison.
Caro Quintero spent 28 years in prison and was released by a judge.
On August 9, 2013, Rafael Caro Quintero was released after serving 28 years in prison. A court in Guadalajara ordered his immediate release because it considered that the murder of the U.S. agent in February 1985 should have been tried in the common courts and not in the federal courts.
On July 15, 2022, one of the most wanted drug lords in Mexico and the United States was recaptured while hiding in the bushes of the town of San Simon, in Choix, Sinaloa.
Following his recapture, U.S. authorities indicated that they will request Caro Quintero’s extradition for the DEA agent’s crime, which is a federal crime in the United States.
Caro Quintero is also charged with cocaine trafficking, running a “criminal enterprise”, i.e. a cartel, criminal association and violent crimes, as well as kidnapping and murder.