“Why are you smiling so much?” Has life treated you well?
“Yes, he has treated me well because I am alive.
This is how Rafael Caro Quintero responded to a journalist on the day in 1985 that he entered a prison for the first time. He had just been caught with his girlfriend in Costa Rica, he was 33 years old and was the biggest marijuana dealer in the world. On Friday they arrested him again in Sinaloa, 150 kilometers from the town where he was born and from where he led a small army that sows terror in northern Sonora. In a world of drug lords, having reached the age of 33 alive was already a luxury, but following him at 69 is a privilege rewarded with retirement in freedom. However, Caro Quintero responded to that same freedom as the fable of the scorpion and the turtle: drug dealing.
Born in 1952 in the municipality of Badiraguato, Sinaloa, the homeland of drug traffickers like Joaquín El Chapo Guzman and Ernesto Fonseca, Don Neto, his life adds business skills, love and violence in equal parts that led him to the top of drug trafficking in record time. If there were a robot portrait of the great drug lords of the 1980s in Mexico, Caro Quintero would be a good example.
Son of a peasant couple who had 10 children, nephew of Lamberto Quintero and cousin of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, The lord of the skies, known for his ability to bring small planes into the United States, Caro Quintero barely knew how to read and write when he started in the business, but his business acumen made him rich with marijuana in a few years. Before turning 30, he built a 600-hectare drug production center, the largest ever seen, and he had paid police, military, politicians and judges from all over the country. Caro Quintero revolutionized the world of marijuana when he managed to massively reproduce female plants, without seeds, which also took up less space. 4,000 peasants worked on his farm in El Búfalo and trucks loaded with marijuana left every day thanks to the sophisticated irrigation system and the construction of the first greenhouses in all of Mexico. Caro Quintero’s marijuana was not only the favorite of consumers, but also brought in more trucks and planes than anyone else in the United States.
At that time, El Chapo Guzmán was just a hitman for the cartel that Caro Quintero led together with Don Neto and Félix Gallardo. One produced weed at close range, another introduced Colombian cocaine and another coordinated the strategies to move trucks and planes to the United States. Together they were the Guadalajara cartel, which later became the Sinaloa cartel, the most powerful in the country until a few years ago, with the emergence of Jalisco Nueva Generación.
One day in November 1984, hundreds of soldiers showed up at the scene, arrested all the workers and burned the 8,000 tons of marijuana they found, in what remains to this day the largest drug seizure in a single place. The definitive proof to locate the camp was an area photo of the huge camp, which forced Mexico to act in the face of pressure from the United States.
After the coup, Caro Quintero swore revenge and three months later killed Kiki Camarena Salazar, a DEA agent who had managed to infiltrate the farm, and the pilot of the plane. But he didn’t do it anyway: he tortured them for weeks while a doctor kept them alive at all costs so that his boss could torture them longer. The DEA has since sworn revenge.
Those were the times when drug traffickers went to bars, bragged about their money in nightclubs, closed brothels or took pictures with ministers and governors, where they appeared as successful businessmen from the countryside.
In one of the bars, Caro Quintero, a handsome and seductive guy with peasant manners, who had just finished elementary school, met Sara Cosío Vidaurri, a 17-year-old girl from high and conservative Guadalajaran society, niece of the former Governor of Jalisco, Guillermo Cosio Vidaurri. With her DEA hot on his heels, he fled with her to Costa Rica. The family denounced that she had been kidnapped and the soap opera of her escape was followed both in gossip magazines and in the newspapers. The day the young woman called her parents to say that she was fine, her call was intercepted. When the police entered the house of the Bonnie and Clyde of Sinaloa, she told them: “I’m not kidnapped, I’m in love,” the chronicles of the time say.
After spending 28 years in five different prisons, Caro Quintero achieved freedom in 2013 with a legal trick. A judge decided that he should not have been tried in a federal court, but in one from his town, and released him long enough for him to escape. Thus, at the age of 59, the old capo returned to freedom and underground.
In the broadcast images of that day there was nothing left of the provocative and sarcastic young man who liked television interviews. In them, he appears as an old man who had decided to abandon the criminal life. The reality, however, is that he reassembled a small army and went back to his old ways in places like Caborca or San Luis Río Colorado, where he tried to make his way with a clean shot in the world of organized crime.
When he was captured Friday afternoon, the navy said he was hiding in some bushes and that a dog from the prosecution found him while she was chasing him. In the images, however, a properly dressed man appears, with his feet untouched by mud, wearing a jacket and a well-pressed shirt. 40 years after the murder of Kiki Camarena, the DEA kept him as its number one target on the list of most wanted criminals and offered 20 million dollars for his capture.
Criticized by the United States for his paralysis in the face of violence, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, settles accounts with the past with the arrest of Caro Quintero and can boast of his first weight capture. However, his critics reproach him for anyone succumbing to a visit to the White House three days after meeting with Biden. The United States, for its part, celebrates it as a paid account.
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