Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero was arrested Friday in the state of Sinaloa, located in northwestern Mexico. Elite Mexican Navy troops found him with the help of a sniffer dog in the bushes near a village in the municipality of San Simón, according to a declaration. Quintero was wanted by both Mexican and US authorities.
Caro Quintero, 69, co-founded the Guadalajara cartel, which trafficked large consignments of cocaine and marijuana in the early 1980s. In 1985 he was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of Enrique Camarena, an employee of the American anti-drugs authority DEA. The drug lord was sentenced to 40 years in prison, but was released in 2013 because a formal error was allegedly made in his trial.
A few days after his release, the Mexican Supreme Court, under pressure from the US government, reversed the release of Caro Quintero, but he had already fled. In recent years, authorities have searched in vain for the drug lord, who, according to the DEA, would have led a branch of the Sinaloa cartel. In 2018, the FBI offered a $20 million reward for information that would lead the service to Caro Quintero.
Extradition warrant
The US has issued an extradition order for the drug lord, which Mexico says it will comply with. According to the US Attorney General Merrick Garland “There is no hiding place for anyone who kidnaps, tortures and murders an American agent.”
Around the time of the arrest of Caro Quintero, 14 soldiers of the Mexican Navy were killed in the same region on Friday when their helicopter crashed. Reuters news agency reports that the helicopter was used during the mission and was about to land. According to the Mexican Navy, the cause of the accident is unknown and the incident is unrelated to the arrest of Caro Quintero.