Kiki Camarena's Drug War Legacy

This is March 5, 1985,

when the body of legendary American DEA

hero Kiki Camarena was

found, in actual footage.

Beside him lay another man, who had been buried alive,

Mexican pilot Alfredo

Zavala. Camarena was born in

Mexico and immigrated to the United States with his family at age nine.

He grew up in a community plagued by drugs,

He grew up in a community plagued by drugs,

witnessing firsthand how drugs destroyed his

younger brother and friends. These experiences

deeply shook the young Camarena

and inspired him to become a law enforcement officer.

In 1973, after leaving the U.S. Marine

Corps, Camarena joined the newly

established DEA, becoming one of its first

agents.

In the 1980s, Mexico's Guadalajara

Cartel became a major source of drugs in the United States.

This drug cartel was controlled by three major kingpins:

This drug cartel was controlled by three major kingpins:

Quintero, Carrillo, and Gallardo,

and was, at the time,

the world's most powerful and brutal drug-trafficking organization.

By bribing officials,

forming private armed forces, and infiltrating the drug

trade into the police and judicial systems,

they built a vast criminal empire

that operated almost without restraint in Mexico.

To gather evidence against this drug

cartel, Camarena

volunteered in 1981 to be transferred to Mexico

for an undercover assignment, intending to uncover the

operations network of this vast criminal empire.

With his Mexican heritage and fluent Spanish,

he infiltrated the heart of the Guadalajara drug

cartel, continuously building a network of

informants and becoming one of the DEA's finest

narcotics agents.

In 1984, Camarena's undercover

work achieved a major breakthrough.

He discovered a massive 2,500-acre marijuana plantation,

something quite rare in the entire history of drug enforcement.

毒史上都是相当罕见的。

The plantation was run by the Guadalajara drug

cartel and had an annual output

worth as much as $2.5 billion.

To further verify the intelligence,

he and Zavala went deep into the Chihuahua

Desert, risking their lives to photograph the entire plantation

and deliver the intelligence to the U.S.

DEA and the Mexican government.

With the intelligence provided by Camarena,

the Mexican military deployed hundreds of soldiers

and successfully raided and destroyed this massive

drug-production base,

destroying large quantities of drugs and processing equipment,

while using bulldozers and gasoline to uproot or burn entire fields of

marijuana.

and completely destroyed the plantation's complex

irrigation system.

This operation dealt the Guadalajara drug

cartel a fatal blow,

almost completely cutting off the source of funds

they depended on for survival.

But it also made Camarena

a thorn in their side,

someone they desperately wanted to eliminate.

After the incident, Quintero offered a

reward to find the informant.

Through their inside source in the Mexican government,

they quickly identified Camarena.

In February 1985,

on the seventh, Camarena was

kidnapped by corrupt Mexican federal narcotics agents

and taken to a drug traffickers' hideout at 881

López de Vega Street.

There, Camarena was subjected to brutal,

inhuman torture.

According to testimony from three corrupt agents,

the skin and flesh below Camarena's knees were stripped,

his nose was cut off,

both his eyeballs were crushed,

and eight of his fingers were severed.

To make Camarena endure the maximum

possible pain, the traffickers even arranged for

Dr. Humberto to inject him with large amounts of

amphetamines, central nervous system stimulants,

to keep him conscious throughout

the entire torture.

After being tortured for a full 36 hours,

he still did not reveal the DEA's intelligence network in

Mexico.

Drug lord Quintero then ordered him killed.

A gunman smashed his skull with a steel bar

and drilled a hole in his

head, driving in a steel nail.

Pilot Zavala was later kidnapped as well

and buried alive after suffering extreme torture.

On March fifth, 1985,

their bodies were found outside

San Lucas, Mexico.

The autopsy report

showed that Camarena's jaw was broken,

his teeth had fallen out, his skull was fractured,

and nearly every bone in his body was shattered.

His death was exceptionally gruesome.

The incident shocked Washington.

The DEA quickly launched a large-scale investigation

codenamed Operation Legend.

It was the agency's largest

murder investigation since its founding,

and suspects were quickly identified.

But because extraditing Mexican citizens was difficult,

to avenge Camarena,

the DEA even bypassed the courts

and hired bounty hunters for $250,000

to kidnap Dr. Humberto and others

and bring them back to the United States for trial.

The Mexican government ultimately could not withstand the pressure

and arrested drug trafficker Quintero and others.

Today, 40 years have passed since this tragedy,

but the truth about the Camarena case

has yet to be fully disclosed.

Because this case not only involves

high-ranking Mexican government officials,

there is even evidence that the CIA

was also involved in the kidnapping.

When Camarena was brutally tortured

and cried out in agony,

CIA agent Rodriguez

was also at the scene.

According to journalist Charles Bowden,

the CIA was colluding with Mexican

drug cartels at the time,

using drug trafficking networks to raise funds

while using the cartels' ranches

as bases to train Nicaragua's anti-communist

guerrillas, providing them with funds and weapons.

Camarena's anti-drug operation inadvertently

disrupted this secret funding pipeline

and could expose the CIA's

secrets at any moment.

Therefore, he was likely betrayed by the CIA

to eliminate an obstacle.

But unfortunately, Charles

Bowden died before he could finish

his report.