Hermelinda Quintero, mother of the historic drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, founder of the original Guadalajara Cartel and implicated in the torture and murder of United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Kiki Camarena, died this Thursday in Guadalajara, Jalisco, according to the local press. The cause of her death has not been revealed, but the newspapers in Sinaloa, the woman’s home state, point to natural causes due to her advanced age, supposedly 94 years old. The man popularly known as El Narco de Narcos has experienced the death of his mother from the Altiplano maximum security prison, in the State of Mexico, where he awaits possible extradition to the United States following his second arrest, in 2022.
The Río Doce portal, a reference medium for information on drug trafficking in Sinaloa, indicates that the elderly woman’s body will be transferred from Guadalajara to Culiacán, closer to her hometown, Badiraguato. Known for being the cradle of other historical Sinaloa drug lords, Badiraguato saw the birth of the most powerful drug trafficker in the world, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias El Chapo, founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, today sentenced to life imprisonment by a US court .
Hermelinda Quintero was a woman of extremely humble origins who lived most of her years thanks to working the land. She married Emilio Caro Payán and with him she had at least eight children: Rafael Caro Quintero (1952) was, sadly, the most famous of all, a figure who, for better or worse, shaped the history of Mexican drug trafficking.
That young farmer, who barely knew how to read or write when he took his first steps in the business, would apply the knowledge of the Sinaloa farmers to revolutionize the cultivation of marijuana. He massively developed seedless female plants, which took up less space when transported and allowed larger quantities to cross the border, skyrocketing profits.
At the end of the seventies, Caro Quintero began doing business with three names that would end up being key to the modern history of Mexico: Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo alias Don Neto, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno alias El Azul and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, El Boss of Bosses. That would be the seed that would give rise to the Guadalajara Cartel, a pioneering organization in massive drug trafficking to the United States that would also establish commercial ties with Colombian drug traffickers to transport cocaine, more profitable than marijuana, north of the border.
The most widespread historical account defends that the Guadalajara Cartel was the pioneer organization that would later give rise to the Sinaloa Cartel and other criminal groups that split following the arrest of the original bosses. However, some academic research in recent years defends that “on the contrary, it was a quasi-family organization that never achieved complete vertical integration of its drug production, transportation and marketing process, which failed to implement well-defined rules between its members, nor to establish a hierarchical mechanism for consensual decision-making,” reads a work by Noria Research titled The Guadalajara cartel never existed, a theory disputed among experts.
Academicisms aside, Caro Quintero, Félix Gallardo, Fonseca Carrillo and Esparragoza Moreno changed the rules of the game. They created an extensive network in which they involved top-level politicians, businessmen, police and military personnel who shielded them from justice. For a time they were untouchable. The DEA began to look askance at that group of Sinaloans who flooded their streets with drugs. The United States put pressure on the Mexican Government and the drug traffickers suffered the first casualties. One day in November 1984, the Army burned 8,000 tons of that seedless marijuana that Caro Quintero had perfected, one of the largest seizures in history.
The young man wanted revenge. He started to lose his mind. Increasingly more violent, increasingly unleashed, the drug traffickers took false steps that dynamited the foundations of the organization they had built. In January 1985, Caro Quintero stabbed two American tourists who were dining at his restaurant, whom he mistook for DEA agents. A week later, he sharpened his aim and ordered the kidnapping of Enrique Kiki Camarena, himself an investigator for the anti-drug agency who was closely following Caro Quintero’s steps.
Kiki Camarena was kidnapped along with Alfredo Zavala, a pilot he used to work with. Both were brutally tortured for more than 30 hours by Caro Quintero’s hired hitmen, advised by a doctor who kept them alive so that they would continue to suffer, until they finally left them to die and abandoned their bodies. Independent investigations published years later by the magazine Proceso or the documentary The last narc (The last narco, 2020), point to the involvement of members of the CIA and the Mexican police in the murders. According to that story, the US agency was an active part of drug trafficking through third parties, whose profits were then used to finance the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, who sought to destabilize the Sandinista Government.
Be that as it may, Caro Quintero signed his sentence with participation in the murder of Camarena. The DEA swore revenge and did not stop until the kingpin was arrested in April 1985 in Costa Rica. He spent 28 years in prison and was released in 2013 due to a procedural failure. When the authorities wanted to repair the mistake, Caro Quintero had already gotten lost in the Sinaloan mountains. He hid between his home state and Sonora for more than eight years. During that time, he was the most wanted man by the DEA, which offered 20 million dollars for him. The drug trafficker returned to the old business, although a changed reality was found. He was finally arrested once more in July 2022, in an operation in which 14 soldiers died and helicopters were shot down. From a Mexican prison he has learned of the death of his mother, while the United States fights for his extradition.
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