DOJ probing claims that CIA operative, DEA official betrayal led to murder of agent
By Greg Norman
Fox News
February 28, 2020
The U.S. Justice Department is investigating explosive new allegations that a Central Intelligence Agency operative and Drug Enforcement Administration official played a role in the 1985 abduction, torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, a report claims.
The renewed focus into the grisly killing of Camarena – who is featured in the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico” – is based on recent statements witnesses provided to U.S. agents and prosecutors, according to USA Today. The Justice Department reportedly started re-examining the case in 2019, two years after a federal court tossed convictions against two suspects.
“I want the truth to be out,” Mika Camarena, Enrique’s widow, told the outlet. “At this point, nothing would surprise me.”
The DEA and Camarena had been utilizing a series of wiretaps to make sizeable drug busts inside Mexico. One of them cost Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro-Quintero $2.5 billion.
In February 1985, as Camarena left to meet his wife for lunch outside the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, he was surrounded by officers from the DFS, a Mexican intelligence agency that no longer exists.
"Back in the middle 1980s, the DFS, their main role was to protect the drug lords," former DEA agent Hector Berrellez, who led the investigation into Camarena's murder, told Fox News in 2013.
The DFS agents then took Camarena, blindfolded and held at gunpoint, to one of Caro-Quintero's haciendas five miles away.
For more than 30 hours, Caro-Quintero and others interrogated Camarena and crushed his skull, jaw, nose and cheekbones with a tire iron. They broke his ribs, drilled a hole in his head and tortured him with a cattle prod. As Camarena lay dying, Caro-Quintero ordered a cartel doctor to keep the U.S. agent alive.
The 37-year-old’s body was found dumped on a nearby ranch about a month later. Caro-Quintero was convicted in the kidnapping and murder but was mistakenly released from a Mexican prison in 2013. He is now on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive’s list – with a reward of up to $20 million for information leading to his capture.
Three former Mexican police officers who claimed to have once worked as security guards for cartel kingpins told USA Today they informed U.S. investigators that a DEA official and CIA operative were present at meetings where Camarena’s abduction was being discussed. They also claimed the DEA official accepted cartel money.
One of the officers, George Godoy, said he spoke to DEA officials about the killing in April 2019 and that the U.S. government has given him and the other cops immunity in exchange for their accounts.
“There is too many ghosts behind me,” Godoy told USA Today. “We need to make justice.”
Mika Camarena, in an interview with USA Today, also said U.S. prosecutors and agents told her that they are investigating accounts allegedly tying the DEA official and CIA operative to her husband’s death, but did not elaborate.
The Justice Department, when asked by Fox News to respond to the allegations, declined to comment.
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Was the CIA Behind ‘Kiki’ Camarena’s Murder? Investigative Journalists and Congress Must Follow Up
By Luis A. Marentes
HuffPost
December 15, 2013
Last week both Fox News in the United States and Proceso in Mexico published a remarkable story with very significant repercussions. According to both sources, US intelligence agencies were involved in the 1985 brutal torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in Mexico. The case is almost 30 years old, and many have forgotten it or weren’t even alive at the time, but the implications of these allegations, if true, are extremely relevant today. Mexican media has jumped on the story, with many major and minor news outlets distributing it. It has even made the pages of the Spanish newspaper El País. Yet, beyond the original Fox story and coverage by Univisión and Daily Kos, very little else has been written about it in the United States.
Back in 1985 Camarena’s torture and murder created major tensions between Mexico and the United States. The U.S. insisted that Mexican authorities colluded with the murderers, leading the Reagan administration to close the Mexico-U.S. border in order to pressure Mexico into action. Shortly thereafter, Mexican authorities arrested Rafael Caro Quintero, head of the then most powerful Guadalajara drug cartel. He was sentenced in Mexico to 40 years in prison. Due to legal technicalities he was released this August after having served only 28 years of his sentence, leading to the outrage of many.
Over the last few months there has been much speculation about bribes and other illicit forces behind Quintero’s release. However, new allegations emerging from interviews with three people who claim to have personal knowledge of the case — Phil Jordan, former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, Héctor Berrellez, former DEA agent, and Tosh Plumlee, former pilot for the CIA — add a totally new and very disturbing dimension to the case. In their interviews with Fox and Proceso, these men link the Camarena case to the Reagan administration’s drug-running operations to finance the Nicaraguan Contras who, with U.S. support, were fighting to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista regime. Fox quotes Jordan as stating that at the time, working with Quintero, “the CIA was involved in the movement of drugs from South America to Mexico and to the U.S.” Plumlee insists that drug and gun running “operations were sanctioned by the federal government, controlled out of the Pentagon. The CIA acted in some cases as our logistical support team.” Berellez, for his part, claims that “the pilot that flew Caro Quintero to Costa Rica [to help him escape after the murder] was a [CIA] contract employee.”
These allegations are disturbing, but not necessarily surprising to anyone familiar with Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan administration. This was a time when the administration made alliances with dubious characters in its determined effort to outmaneuver the Soviet Union around the world. It was the same period when the U.S. government began supporting radical factions in Afghanistan which, as Steve Coll eloquently narrates in his Ghost Wars, would morph into today’s Taliban and al-Qaeda.
But they also make much more disturbing accusations. As quoted in El País, Camarena became aware of this drug running scheme and “The CIA ordered Kiki Camarena’s capture and torture, and when he was killed they made us believe that it was Caro Quintero in order to cover up their illegal activities in Mexico.” Berrellez also claims that CIA agents were present during Camarena’s torture, which lasted over 30 hours.
As far as I’m concerned at this point these are allegations and not facts. But they are allegations that definitely deserve much more attention than that they have received in the U.S. media. I am very surprised that Fox, which broke the story, hasn’t followed up. For almost a year it has been beating the drums of the Benghazi disaster, accusing the Obama administration of incompetence, indifference and a coverup. These accusations are much worse. They imply a coverup, but also the torture and assassination of a federal agent by his colleagues, far more sinister than incompetence or indifference. At another level, as the country begins to consider its support for new insurgent groups in the Middle East, these accusations remind us of the corrupting effects that many of these undercover operations have had in the past.
In these days the media is obsessed with the budget negotiations, but we do need good investigative journalists to follow this story’s thread.
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