Enrique “Kiki” Camarena

Born: July 26, 1947, Mexicali, Mexico
Died: February 9, 1985, Guadalajara, Mexico
Nicknames: Kiki
Associations (law enforcement): U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Calexico (California) Police Department, Imperial County (California) Sheriff’s Department

Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar, a special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, investigated drug trafficking cartels in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the 1980s. But he was more well known in death than in life. Mexican drug traffickers captured him in 1985 and tortured him to death. Worse, they did this with the complicity of high-level Mexican government officials and law enforcement.

Camarena, born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1947, moved with his impoverished family to Calexico, California, and later obtained U.S. citizenship. He first served as a firefighter in Calexico and, with a strong desire for police work, later joined the Calexico Police Department. From there, he moved to the Imperial County Sheriff’s Department, which eventually assigned him to its narcotics task force. The experience led to his career in the DEA beginning in 1975.

Camarena was first assigned as an agent in Fresno. After four years, the DEA assigned him to its office in the “narco paradise” of Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1980. Camarena won early success as an undercover officer with his looks and ability to speak Spanish, including barrio “street” language to fit in with the drug underworld. His target was the powerful Guadalajara drug cartel — which later evolved into the Sinaloa cartel — that pushed tons of marijuana and cocaine into the United States.

In the early 1980s, in what he called Operation Padrino, Camarena arranged for U.S. agents to seize international bank accounts held by wealthy cartel drug lords. He assembled evidence of major marijuana plantations in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, based on a lengthy list of informants and flyovers by a DEA pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar. In November 1984, based on his investigation, Mexican federal police and the DEA raided an enormous pot-growing operation on the 1,300-acre El Búfalo ranch in Zacatecas that employed thousands of field hands. The team confiscated 20 tons of marijuana, burned the remaining crops and made 177 arrests.

The bust cost cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero at least $50 million. Caro Quintero believed his massive pot industry had the protection of the Mexican army and the CIA, which allegedly used his farm for training U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebel forces, the “Contras.” He vowed revenge against Camarena.

Meanwhile, a DEA task force organized by Camarena seized a large cache of cocaine shipped by cartel boss Miguel Félix Gallardo’s operation to New Mexico and Texas. Gallardo, too, believed he had CIA and Mexican army protection.

In Guadalajara, Camarena noticed that agents of Mexico’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), followed as he drove his car, which he thought was for his security. He did not realize that the DFS acted as double agents, maintaining close ties to drug cartels and the CIA, which trained its agents.

During the fall of 1984, Caro Quintero held meetings with top cartel traffickers Gallardo, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo and Rúben Zuno Arce. Also present, thanks to rampant corruption bought by the Guadalajara cartel, were Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior and DFS chief Manuel Bartlett Díaz, plus three other officials: Mexico’s defense minister, the head of Mexico’s Interpol office and the governor of the state of Jalisco.

The agenda was to kidnap Camarena and force him to reveal his informants and any other information they wanted. Zuno ordered the kidnapping. Fonseca issued additional orders for the captors only to put a scare into Camarena and then release him. Nevertheless, Caro Quintero intended to kill the DEA agent as payback for the raid on the El Búfalo ranch.

On February 7, 1985, Caro Quintero and Gallardo directed their henchmen to kidnap Camarena from a street in Guadalajara. As the agent walked from the U.S. consulate to meet his wife for lunch, an employee of the U.S. consulate helped the cartel men spot him. Five men forced Camarena at gunpoint into a car and drove him to a residence used for cartel rendezvous. They bound and blindfolded him, turned on a tape recorder and questioned him, during which he was severely tortured.

The lead interrogator was the dirty head of the secret police in Guadalajara, Sergio Espino Verdin. The questioning centered on what Camarena knew about the cartel men and their dealings with Mexican officials. The gangsters also brought in Zavala, Camarena’s pilot, and tortured him, too. Both men died about two days later, angering Fonseca, who told Caro Quintero not to kill Camarena.

The agent’s wife reported him missing, and Washington launched what would be the largest manhunt in DEA history. The cartel had the bodies of Camarena and Zavala buried, then dug up and relocated to the grounds of a farm in another state — apparently to confuse investigators and shift the blame to others — where Mexican police found them in early March. Both bodies revealed signs of torture.

During his funeral a week later, Camarena’s family interred his ashes in Calexico. Dead at age 37, he left behind his wife, Mika, and their three children.

His murder triggered an international incident. U.S. officials ordered all cars from Mexico at the border searched, effectively closing it to the cartels. A federal court in Los Angeles charged 22 defendants in the murders of Camarena and Zavala. Feeling the pressure, Mexican authorities arrested 13 men. A court in Mexico City convicted Fonseca, who got 40 years in prison. Caro Quintero and Espino also received 40-year sentences.

Caro Quintero won early release from a Mexican judge on a technicality in 2013 and reportedly fled to Costa Rica, but U.S. officials regarded him as a fugitive and sought to arrest him on federal charges. He was finally recaptured in 2022 by Mexican law enforcement while hiding in San Simón, Sinaloa.

Mexican police arrested Gallardo in 1989, and he got 40 years. A court in Los Angeles found Zuno guilty in the murders in 1990 and sentenced him to two life terms in prison, where he died in 2012. Bartlett ducked a U.S. grand jury and remained a free man as a member of the Mexican Senate.

In Camarena’s honor, in 1985, the National Family Partnership started the National Red Ribbon Campaign, a volunteer education drive that urges youths to recite a pledge to refrain from using drugs. The campaign celebrates “Red Ribbon Week” each October.

In 2018, Camarena was featured as a character in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, played by actor Michael Peña. The first season of the show follows the agent’s experiences with the cartels leading up to his death.