In 1985, an annual anti-drug awareness event, Red Ribbon Week, was created in his honor, and later championed by First Lady Nancy Reagan. Nearly thirty days later, his body was found dumped by a roadside in the state of Michoacán.Ĭamarena became a national symbol. news agency sending someone to Guadalajara. The manhunt for Camarena’s captors was covered widely, with every major U.S. The Reagan administration took unprecedented steps, including almost entirely shutting down the U.S.–Mexico border. He was the first DEA agent murdered abroad, and the organization launched its biggest-ever homicide investigation, which it portentously named Operation Leyenda. What changed? In part, it was the creation of a martyr: Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in 1985 by the Guadalajara Cartel. As Hurowitz details, when other American agencies such as the DEA began to sniff around, the CIA would protect DFS members from scrutiny. In the 1980s, the DFS and CIA likely colluded with Mexico’s first united drug organization, the Guadalajara Cartel, to transport weapons to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. In Mexico, the CIA worked with the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS, a secret police force, to keep track of leftists and ferry arms to right-wing groups in Nicaragua. (By 2019 it had grown to $3.1 billion.) If anything, the United States was doing more at that time to aid than combat the drug trade-above all, by supporting traffickers who were fighting left-wing groups. The War on Drugs began in earnest in 1971, when Nixon declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one.” Yet when he formed the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, its budget was just $75 million, or about $460 million adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the corruption and impunity that created him is still firmly ingrained on both sides of the border. El Chapo may be in jail, but he remains the face of a curiosity we cannot escape. For its part, the media likes to tell an exciting narrative, with clear heroes and villains, occluding the more complex, systemic issues that prolong bloodshed. Politicians, law enforcement officials, and narcos alike use the drug wars as a pretext to manipulate politics-and entrench their own positions. Drugs flow north cash, arms, and violence flow south. We can think of the War on Drugs as an exchange of goods between the United States and countries such as Mexico and Colombia. The answer lies in the so-called War on Drugs and the narrative we build around it. But it also raises a deeper question: Why are we so obsessed with El Chapo in the first place? The latest, Noah Hurowitz’s El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord, dutifully recounts the kingpin’s rise and fall. He is also the subject of dozens of books, many stemming from his widely followed Brooklyn trial. He has been the subject of derided Sean Penn profiles in Rolling Stone, was once an entry in Forbes wealthiest people lists, the namesake for podcasts from the scumbag left, and a character in a popular Netflix serial. That the Americans can be trusted to hold El Chapo is precisely why the Mexican government agreed to extradite him in 2017, after years of grandstanding.Įven in his tiny cell, El Chapo looms large in the North American imagination, like Pablo Escobar once did. There will be no mile-long tunnel dug under his room, like in 2015 at the Altiplano prison just west of Mexico City no laundry cart getaway, as in the 2001 jailbreak from Puente Grande prison in Jalisco. federal government and tried from November 2018 until February 2019.Įl Chapo will not escape from the ADX, which has housed illustrious jailmates such as Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski. The case was brought against him by the U.S. He was whisked off to this icy stronghold in 2019, when the Eastern District court of New York sentenced him to life plus thirty years on murder and drug charges. Scoring one last favor, he might have gotten a room with a view out of the so-called “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” Colorado’s ADX supermax prison. He spends twenty-three hours a day there, with nothing to look at but a black-and-white television and a four-inch window. Simon & Schuster, 448 pages.Īt this moment, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is likely sitting in a soundproof, eighty-four-square-foot cell. The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord by Noah Hurowitz.
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