By Bret Stephens / The New York Times
I was a boy living in Mexico City in 1985 when I read that an American agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar, had been abducted by the Guadalajara police acting at the behest of local drug lords. He was then tortured for 30 hours and murdered alongside Alfredo Zavala Avelar, his Mexican pilot.
The case was a sensation not only because it highlighted the sadism of the narcos — Camarena’s skull was found shattered — but also because it underscored their sense of impunity, even when it came to killing an American agent. The Reagan administration made a priority of hunting down the perpetrators, several of whom were convicted in a U.S. federal court in 1990.
Yet the principal culprit, Rafael Caro Quintero — “el narco de narcos,” as he was known — served most of his sentence from the comparative comfort of a Mexican jail, where he continued to run his criminal enterprises behind bars until he was released by a judge on a legal technicality in 2013. He promptly disappeared until his recapture by Mexican authorities nine years later in a remote corner of Sinaloa state.
But it was only Thursday that Caro Quintero, along with 28 other drug lords and cartel operatives, met the legal fate they almost surely most feared: extradition to the United States. What happened? The probable answer is that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, fearful of the Trump administration’s tariffs and other threats, pulled out all the legal stops to prove her anti-cartel bona fides with Washington. That follows her decision earlier this month to deploy thousands of additional Mexican troops to stop the flow of migrants into the United States.
For Mexico, Sheinbaum’s move against the narcos represents a welcome shift from the feckless “hugs not gunshots” (abrazos, no balazos) approach to the cartels of her political patron and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It also suggests she’s prepared to be more independent from López Obrador than many of her doubters expected.
For the Trump administration, this is an unequivocal victory. You may think, as I do, that Donald Trump is a disgrace as a president, that tariffs are a terrible idea and that the practice of repeatedly threatening allies will exact a long-term price in terms of trust and reciprocal goodwill. But in this case, the bullying paid off.
Most importantly, the extradition represents a long-delayed victory for Camarena’s family, which wrote the Trump administration in January beseeching Caro Quintero’s extradition. For them — as for all the DEA agents who risk their lives against the narcos — Thursday was a good day. Even if it came 40 years late.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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