The New Life Of Caro Quintero: A Legend Of The Narco Clinging To His Land

"Guerrero" for Borderland Beat

Mexico City - Those who have to know where it is, know it. When the old school drug lords arrive alive at the age of Rafael Caro Quintero, 68 years old, the most important thing is that they remember them. May they venerate them some day when they are gone. May its legend survive. Despite being the Mexican drug trafficker most hated by the United States Anti-Narcotics Agency (DEA), which charges the highest reward for a criminal, 20 million dollars, no one in his land doubts his refuge. The towns where he grew up, the dusty mountains of Sinaloa and the desert where he lived with his family from a young age, northern Sonora. Small places, difficult to access, surrounded by its people. A few weeks ago the FBI sent a file that warned that the kingpin who went into hiding in 2013 due to an error in a sentence,after 28 years in prison, he was still a threat to drug trafficking. That Caro Quintero, the last living and free legend of the Mexican narco of the eighties, was in no way retired.

Returning to the land has been the strategy of Mexican drug traffickers for decades, even if they were on their heels. It happened to Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, who was detained for the last time in a house in Los Mochis (Sinaloa, in 2016) and it is assumed that the same happens with the only old-school narco never detained from the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael El Mayo Zambada. When Caro Quintero managed to get a judge to release him in 2013, before serving the remaining 12 years of jail, the first thing he did was return to his hometown. Reorganize your people, negotiate a piece of the pie and without the eccentricities of your time, go about business quietly. The FBI locates him in Badiraguato (Sinaloa), the town from which almost all the drug lords of Mexico are, and announces: from there he operates his own cartel.

Unlike other drug trafficking leaders who have yet to be arrested, Caro Quintero's days will always be tied to the powerful DEA's thirst for revenge. Few dared to go as far as the founders of the Guadalajara cartel, the father of all the cartels that were born later: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the ringleader and only one still in prison; Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Don Neto; and the others. When they were the undisputed leaders of drug trafficking to the United States, they assassinated an infiltrated DEA agent in 1985, Kiki Camarena. And the agency does not forgive that Caro Quintero managed to avoid what was left of grief.

The outstanding debt that he maintains for the crime that landed him in jail in 1985 haunts him night and day. The sentence against him considered it proven that on February 7 of that year, when Camarena was leaving the US consulate in Guadalajara, he was kidnapped by police and handed over to the Guadalajara cartel. On a farm owned by the organization, the American policeman was tortured over and over again while a doctor kept him alive. When his body was recovered, it was discovered that he had been neutered and buried alive.

In 2013 an error in a sentence released him and before justice had time to repair that ruling, the capo had already gone into hiding. From his lair he offered an interview to Proceso magazine where he stated: “I am no longer a danger to society. I don't want to know anything about drug trafficking. If I did something wrong, I already paid for it, "he said after denying his participation in Camarena's death. But according to the residents of the towns of Sinaloa and Sonora, Caro Quintero has returned to the only thing for which members of the drug trade — and especially that generation — were born: trafficking.

Local reporters who have been covering the riskiest source for a journalist in this country for more than a decade say they are convinced that Caro Quintero is there, among the towns in the mountains where he grew up, as announced by the FBI. Especially in the Babunica community, in Badiraguato, Sinaloa.

“We recently sent some reporters to this area, for an issue that had nothing to do with it. And people from Caro Quintero surrounded them and returned them. Everyone knows that the Lord is there. It is their refuge, their burrow ”, explains the director of Espejo magazine, Alejandro Sicairos. “It is an effigy, an emblem of the narco. He is seen as the respectful old man who asks for permission, who warns the owners of the square, that he does not want conflict. He is a traditional capo from the eighties, he retains the face of a benefactor of the region, who treats people and his henchmen well. On the contrary with what happens with other very bloody groups, such as the sons of El Chapo, the Chapitos ”, adds Sicairos.

Another of the Culiacán journalists, Martín Durán, explains how it is possible that despite the fact that his location is an open secret, he has not yet been captured. “If you feel that you are on your heels, you are able to sleep under the trees, that was one of El Chapo's mistakes, he wanted to be in a house. Caro Quintero is epic because of his not ostentatious way of running things, that is why we believe that he has been successful unless he was arrested ”. Old school bosses like him have adapted well to working without making use of traceable technology. According to experts in the area, they do not give orders by mobile phone, almost everything is solved in person through representatives. And if a strong operation against him is announced, he crashes in the mountains: “They are complicated regions, there is no way to get there without sending helicopters.And since they leave the Sinaloa air bases they are already being informed. The radios go crazy, it is almost impossible to launch an operation like this without being alerted, especially during the day, ”adds the journalist.

Besides Badiraguato, there is another place where neighbors have located Caro Quintero before the DEA or the FBI. In the municipality of Caborca ​​(Sonora) besieged for more than a year by violence between local cartels, his name began to sound. It was not strange, since those who remember the time of the eighties have in their imagination the arrival of Caro Quintero's family to this town in the Sonoran desert. When even the streets were not asphalted, a reporter with more than two decades of work in the area, has recorded an image that she still has not forgotten: a pink limousine. “Caro brought a lot of money to the town, people have a high regard for him and his family. Many stayed to live here and it is something known that they come and go from Sinaloa to these directions, "he says from the other end of the phone and prefers not to give his name for security reasons.

In Caborca, 100 desert kilometers from the US border and with little control from the authorities, he maintains another of his shelters. Some narcomantas from a few months ago indicated the presence of his gunmen in this area. And some local media pointed to a fight for the square of some who claimed their name. Mexican intelligence leaked to the local press that Caro Quintero was working in coordination with the Juárez cartel and its armed wing, La Línea, to recover areas of Sonora that while he was in prison had been taken over by another cartel, Gente Nueva, a cell of those from Sinaloa. Especially the envoys of one of the factions of the powerful cartel, the sons of El Chapo, known as Los Chapitos.

A war between Los Chapitos - heirs of his father's criminal empire who have disputed total control of the organization with another of the founders, El Mayo Zambada - and local gangs that revive the name of Caro Quintero keep northern Sonora under siege. But while they have unleashed terror in the region by their new ways of intimidating their rivals, much bloodier, reluctant to pacts or even the slightest code of honor, the old capo continues to represent the golden age of drug trafficking. “Both he and others, like El Mayo, are dedicated to taking care of people, so that they do not forget them, that their history is not erased. They work so that if one day they are gone, they continue to evoke them, ”explains Sicairos.

(With information from Elena Reina / El País)