Caro Quintero, the Narco of Narcos, the coveted trophy that the US has been pursuing for 40 years

The Buffalo was both his greatest success and his inevitable curse. That ranch in Chihuahua, a giant plantation the size of 1,000 football fields, revolutionized the world of marijuana and catapulted him, a man who was barely able to read or write, to the top of the drug trade in record time. At 33 years old, Rafael Caro Quintero was already a millionaire. He ran the powerful Guadalajara Cartel with his partners and had police officers, members of the military, politicians and judges on his payroll throughout Mexico. Until one day in November 1984, when hundreds of soldiers showed up, arrested all the workers and burned down some 8,000 tons of marijuana.

The definitive proof was an aerial photo of the ranch, taken thanks to Kiki Camarena, an undercover agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Caro Quintero swore revenge and months later ended up savagely killing Camarena and the pilot of the plane. The DEA never forgot the affront and since then he has been its top target. He was imprisoned, released and arrested again in Mexico. But in all these decades they had not achieved the longed-for extradition to the U.S. Fate had been hot on Caro Quintero’s heels for 40 years. And on Thursday, the United States finally got its man under pressure and threats from Donald Trump.

The 72-year-old drug lord landed in New York late in the afternoon. Wearing a beige prison uniform and handcuffed, he got off a Mexican army plane. More than a dozen DEA agents were waiting for him on U.S. soil, some of whom even took a photo with their cell phones. The anti-narcotics agency’s vendetta has been fulfilled. “There is no hiding place for someone who kidnaps, tortures and kills an agent.” This is how the U.S. government announced his second arrest, in which the DEA itself collaborated, three years ago in the mountains of Sinaloa.

The U.S. justice system also said then that his extradition was imminent. That earlier arrest of the drug lord came at a delicate moment in the bilateral relationship, in the midst of a migration crisis and just a few months after it was made public that the then-president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had dissolved a DEA intelligence unit that had been operating in Mexico since the 1990s. Quintero’s capture was seen as a settlement of outstanding debts with the White House, which not only demanded extradition at the bilateral negotiating table, but also set a date for it: “Processing before July 1, 2022,” according to documents from the Mexican army.

The charges against Caro Quintero in U.S. federal courts include, in addition to the murder of Camarena, three other open cases for drug trafficking in Texas, Arizona, and New York. After his capture, an extradition trial was initiated against him. But the process was bogged down by a tangle of injunctions and other legal appeals by his lawyers. In the background, a political decision weighed heavily. The ball was always in the court of the Foreign Ministry, which has to give the go-ahead for extraditions. In recent history there have been cases of express shipments, such as that of Dámaso Núñez, alis “El Licenciado,” El Chapo Guzmán’s right-hand man, captured in 2017 and extradited a year later.

The exit door to the United States for Caro Quintero has now opened in a context of maximum pressure on Mexico. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House at the beginning of the year, the Republican tycoon has deployed an aggressive negotiation strategy. Under the threat of imposing a 25% tariff on Mexican exports, Trump is tightening the screws on his neighbor, demanding results in immigration, trade and, above all, in the fight against drug trafficking. The fentanyl epidemic, which claims thousands of American lives year after year, is a priority for the new administration, which blames Mexican cartels for flooding its streets with the powerful opioid.

Trump has even gone so far as to equate the fight against drug trafficking with anti-terrorist policies, designating Mexican cartels as such. Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has been announcing almost daily a series of arrests and drug seizures. The latest message came on Thursday, the same day that the U.S. president confirmed that he would not grant any more extensions and that tariffs would begin to apply as of next Tuesday. Mexico has responded by announcing a massive deportation operation, unprecedented in recent history.

In addition to Caro Quintero, the most coveted prize, 28 other drug traffickers who were in different prisons in the country have been sent to the other side of the Rio Grande. Among others, the former leaders of the Los Zetas cartel, Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, known as Z-40 and Z-42, and José Ángel Canobbio, alias “El Güerito,” one of the main architects of the distribution of fentanyl in the Sinaloa Cartel and lieutenant of Los Chapitos, the faction of the sons of El Chapo Guzmán. The historic Sinaloa capo, who is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in New York, was extradited just a few weeks after Donald Trump took power for the first time in January 2017.

The story of the two fallen drug lords is intertwined. Both were born in Badiraguato, a small village of peasants in the mountains of Sinaloa. El Chapo, just five years younger than Quintero, began his criminal career as a hitman for the cartel that Don Rafa, one of his many nicknames, led together with Don Neto and Félix Gallardo. The arrest of the founders of the Guadalajara Cartel, cornered after the murder of Camarena, precipitated a reordering of the criminal map in Mexico. Thus was born the Sinaloa Cartel and the rise of El Chapo.

Of the three godfathers of modern drug trafficking, Caro Quintero was the first to fall. With the DEA hot on his heels, he fled to Costa Rica with the niece of a former governor of Jalisco. A call from the 17-year-old to her parents was intercepted by the police. After spending 28 years in five different prisons, he was released in 2013 through a legal ruse. A judge decided that he should not have been tried by a federal court, but by one in his town and released him with 12 more years to go before he served his sentence. At 59, the old drug lord was free and back in hiding.

Although he no longer had the power he once wielded, the FBI’s file warned that he was still a threat from his fiefdoms in northern Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California. When he returned to the ring, he demanded seniority, sought an alliance with another veteran, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was arrested last year, assembled a small army of loyalists and went to war with Los Chapitos. He was unable to regain the power that earned him the nickname “the Narco of Narcos,” and his plans to return to the top ended up betraying him. The DEA had recruited infiltrators in his inner circle.

The Prince, another of his nicknames, is once again trapped by his past. The ruling in the Camarena case found that on February 7, 1985, when the anti-narcotics agent was leaving the United States Consulate in Guadalajara, he was kidnapped by police and handed over to the Guadalajara Cartel. On a farm belonging to the organization, he was tortured over and over again while a doctor kept him alive. When his body was recovered, it was discovered that he had been castrated and buried alive.

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