Was the CIA Behind ‘Kiki’ Camarena’s Murder? Investigative Journalists and Congress Must Follow Up

huffpo_latino_voicesBy Luis A. Marentes, Huffington Post Latino Vocies

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.”

Read more HERE.

This article was originally published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.

Luis A. Marentes is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT and Tehran University’s Faculty of World Studies. His academic work has focused on Mexican and Latin@ culture in the first half of the 20th century. What began as research on the state-sponsored nationalist culture of the Mexican Revolution – focusing on the life and work of the first post revolutionary Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos – has turned into a greater interest into other forces that interacted in the development of the cultures of modern Mexico: processes of globalization, migration, and the growth of mass communications. He is currently exploring ways in which to communicate and learn through the new social media. His first blog is http://blogs.umass.edu/marentes/and he tweets @marentesluis.

[Photo by Duffman]

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