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“That is enormous,” White Home senior Latin America adviser Juan Gonzalez mentioned on Twitter.(File)
Mexico Metropolis:
Mexico’s navy on Friday captured drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, convicted of murdering a US anti-narcotics agent in 1985, in a legislation enforcement coup that got here at a heavy price when a helicopter used within the mission crashed, killing 14 navy personnel.
Marines flushed out Caro Quintero with a bloodhound in a far-flung nook of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, one among Mexico’s drug-trafficking heartlands, earlier than the Black Hawk chopper got here down because it was about to land additional south.
Caro Quintero rose to prominence as a co-founder of the Guadalajara Cartel, one among Latin America’s strongest drug trafficking organizations in the course of the Eighties, and had been among the many most prized targets for U.S. officers.
The U.S. authorities hailed the arrest, and mentioned it could waste no time in requesting his extradition.
“That is enormous,” White Home senior Latin America adviser Juan Gonzalez mentioned on Twitter.
Caro Quintero was captured in San Simon within the Sinaloa municipality of Choix after the military-trained feminine bloodhound named Max discovered him in shrub land, the navy mentioned.
The arrest comes after strain from america, in response to a Mexican official, and the identical week that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington.
Lopez Obrador mentioned on Twitter the navy would examine what induced the crash of the helicopter within the metropolis of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, that killed 14 and left one critically injured. He mentioned it had been carrying navy personnel who had been backing up the crew that arrested the kingpin.
Caro Quintero spent 28 years in jail for the brutal homicide and torture of former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, probably the most infamous killings in Mexico’s bloody narco wars. The occasions, dramatized within the 2018 Netflix collection “Narcos: Mexico,” led to a nadir in U.S.-Mexico co-operation in a five-decade “warfare on medicine.”
Caro Quintero has beforehand denied involvement within the killing of Camarena. He was launched in 2013 on a technicality by a Mexican choose, embarrassing the earlier authorities.
He shortly went underground and returned to trafficking as a part of the Sinaloa Cartel, in response to U.S. officers, who put him on the FBI’s Prime 10 most wished fugitives checklist and put a $20 million bounty on his head, a file for a drug trafficker.
Final yr, he misplaced a closing enchantment in opposition to extradition to america. He shall be extradited as shortly as attainable, one other Mexican official mentioned.
“It’s most likely probably the most necessary captures of the final decade when it comes to significance to the DEA,” mentioned Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of worldwide operations.
U.S. Legal professional Common Merrick Garland mentioned he would search Caro Quintero’s fast extradition.
“There is no such thing as a hiding place for anybody who kidnaps, tortures, and murders American legislation enforcement. We’re deeply grateful to Mexican authorities for his or her seize and arrest of Rafael Caro-Quintero,” Garland mentioned in a press release.
Earlier than extradition, Caro Quintero shall be held in Altiplano jail within the state of Mexico, Mexican prosecutors mentioned. The penitentiary is infamous because the one from which his previous Sinaloa Cartel affiliate Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped in 2015.
Whereas the 69-year-old Caro Quintero is not thought-about a significant participant in worldwide drug trafficking, the symbolic influence of his seize is critical.
The arrest factors to vital cooperation between america and Mexico regardless of latest clashes over safety, mentioned Mexican safety skilled Alejandro Hope. “Any such seize is unthinkable with out the participation of the DEA,” he mentioned.
Mexico’s unwillingness to extradite Caro Quintero to america earlier than his launch from jail had been a supply of rigidity between the 2 international locations. A U.S. official mentioned Washington was very desperate to have him extradited.
“This may hopefully begin to mend the frayed relationship between america and Mexico when it comes to combating drug trafficking,” mentioned former DEA official Vigil.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)
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