When the family of an American federal agent killed continued the Sinaloa cartel and three infamous drug traffickers this month, it was considered the first anti-terrorism trial ever filed in the San Diego region, as well as the first trial of this type in the country targeting a Mexican drug trafficking organization.
A lawyer for the family of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, the American agent of the administration of the drug application, killed in 1985 in Mexico, said that the unprecedented trial was in preparation for more than a year, but the process was accelerated by two recent events – the designation of the Sinaloa cartel as a foreign terrorist organization and the arrival of the former drug drugs Rafael Caro Quintero. Death.
“We expected Kiki to come back from Guadalajara and settle in San Diego and continue with his family and pupils his children – Caro Quintero withdrew that,” said his sister Myrna Camarena. “He removed Kiki from us and his three children.”
While Caro Quintero is currently faced with federal criminal charges in Brooklyn linked to drug trafficking and the death of Camarena, the anti -terrorist civil prosecution of his family in the Federal Tribunal of San Diego will highlight a unique field of the law in which American citizens are looking for justice through civilian penalties against terrorist groups. In most cases, the designated terrorist groups do not defend themselves, which often leads to default judgments for complainants who may be worth tens of millions of dollars – if applicants can receive the damages granted to them.
Myrna Camarena, who worked for the DEA in an administrative role at the request of her brother, said that money was not the motivation for her family after waking 40 years for Caro Quintero to be brought to the United States
“It has nothing to do with that,” she said. “It is justice that is brought because Kiki paid his life.”
The agent and the drug lords
Camarena, born in Mexico but raised in Calexico, was 37 years old on February 7, 1985, when five armed men removed her from the street in Guadalajara near the American consulate. Another group of Hammands kidnapped its driver, Alfredo Zavala-Alvear, in a different place. The two men were taken to the same house and tortured for about 30 hours and then killed.
US officials said the managers of the Guadalajara cartel, including Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo and Caro Quintero, blamed the agent DEA for a raid by Mexican police in a marijuana plantation, and that they ordered his death as a background.
The DEA launched “Operation Leyenda” to investigate the death of Camarena. Caro Quintero initially fled to Costa Rica, but finally he was captured and extradited to Mexico, where he, Félix Gallardo and Fonseca Carrillo were all condemned for their roles in the murder of Camarena.
Each of the drug lords was sentenced to 40 years in Mexican prison, although a judge ordered that Caro Quintero was released in 2013 for technicality. He immediately went underground but was resumed in 2022.
Last month, the Mexican government expelled 29 cartel figures imprisoned in the United States, bypassing the normal extradition process. Caro Quintero was part of the group.
“I was very skeptical (I would never see this day),” said Notre-Dame law professor Jimmy Gurulé, who, as an assistant American prosecutor in Los Angeles in the mid-80s, helped lead the investigation into the murder of Camarena and, in 1987, charged Care Quintero and several co-definers on the federal charges in Los Angeles.
Gurulé said that the expulsion by Mexico of Caro Quintero and other last months was “politically motivated” by the threat of prices of President Donald Trump. Mike Elsner, legal advisor to the Camarena family in their anti-terrorism trial, also credited Caro Quintero’s expulsion on Trump’s economic pressure on Mexico. Elsner said that this move “opened the door” to his business, Motley Rice, to continue Caro Quintero in the United States, although a decision a week earlier that had the greatest impact.
From TCO to FTO
The first day of Trump at the White House for his second term, he signed a decree ordering the State Department to designate drug trafficking cartels operating in the Western hemisphere as foreign terrorist organizations. The order did not appoint specific cartels, but on February 20, the State Department appointed six Mexican drug trafficking groups, including the Sinaloa cartel, which he described as “one of the most powerful drug cartels in the world … (that) used violence to murder, kidnap and intimidate civilians, government officials and journalists.”
Gurulé became an expert in terrorism financing after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, while serving as a subsecretary to the application of the US Treasury Department. He said that the terrorist designation of drug cartels made sense.
“It was certainly unprecedented because you are thinking of foreign terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and Isis,” he said. “So it was unique, but I think that has a certain merit. Because you look at the power that drug cartels exercised in Mexico … These acts of violence are intended to intimidate a civilian population. They are intended to influence government policy, such as Camarena Kidnapping, torture and murder was intended to send a message to the American government and to DEA -” If you do, that’s what will happen. “”.
Tricia Bacon, Director of the American University Anti-Terrorism Hub of Washington, DC, said that if drug trafficking cartels probably respond to the legal definition of terrorist organizations, designating them as transnational criminal organizations generally achieve the same objectives.
“A TCO is to earn money, and an FTO concerns an ideological and political objective,” said Bacon, who has spent more than a decade working on initiatives to fight terrorism for the State Department. “We must not deal with organizations with financial motivation as terrorist organizations.”
Bacon said that drug traffickers at the street level, drug consumers who buy them or that undocumented immigrants led through the border by a person linked to a cartel designated terrorist could now be charged under the large -scale federal law that criminalizes material support for terrorism.
“The treatment of narcotics and criminal activities such as terrorism, in my mind, encourages the worst pulses to politicize the term” terrorism, “said Bacon. “Terrorism becomes this term devoid of meaning used to describe essentially anyone you don’t like.”
For the Camarena family and their lawyers, the designation opened a new avenue to try to ask for justice for Kiki.
The anti-terrorism law
For more than three decades since the Congress adopted the anti -terrorist law in 1992, American citizens injured by acts of terrorism have had the opportunity to continue responsible terrorist groups. The best known cases involve the survivors and families of the 2,977 people killed during the September 11 attacks. They continued not only Al-Qaeda but also the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, alleging that the Saudis provided funding and other support for the pirates of the air.
While Saudi Arabia has hired lawyers to defend it against allegations, most of the designated terrorist organizations do not respond to the summons or in no way participate in the civil dispute. Even the simple fact of serving an assignment to such a group can be difficult for applicants if the defendants are based in a country where American mail cannot be delivered, although the judges can approve bypass, such as the deposit in the media based on defendants.
Elsner, the lawyer for the Camarena family, said that the Caro Quintero trial service will be much simpler because it is in police custody, and there are proven ways to signify an opinion to those of Mexico such as Félix Gallardo and Fonseca Carrillo, who are also called defendants.
But the lawyer acknowledged that most terrorist groups have a “very little” motivation to participate in a civil lawsuit. This is generally reflected in a judge entering a default judgment for damages in favor of the complainants.
These prices can be heavy but can also be largely symbolic without a good way to collect, said Gurulé.
Gurulé and Elsner said that the complainants could approach assets controlled by a designated terrorist group, but Bacon said it could be difficult with regard to the Sinaloa cartel, because it has long been designated with a transnational criminal organization, and American companies and banking establishments have been prevented from doing business with the cartel.
However, there may be other ways to charge the terrorists. In a previous case linked to terrorism in San Diego, a judge ordered a Defense entrepreneur from San Diego who had previously done business with Iran to pay $ 9.4 million to victims of terrorist attacks linked to Iran.
In the case of the Camarena family, there is also the question of appointing the Sinaloa cartel as one of the defendants when it did not yet exist in 1985. But Elsner argued that the Sinaloa cartel can be properly appointed as a defendant because it was formed by leaders of the Guadalajara cartel.
“If the members of a group then form another organization, they can be held responsible for the bad previous acts” of the first group, said Elsner. He compared it to a new company that buys an older business and takes its assets and liabilities.
“This is the same general theory with the Sinaloa cartel – here you have a lot of people who were really involved in the foundation and the training of cartels in Mexico … And they later formed these other cartels, which are now FTOs,” said Elsner. “Thus, they can be held responsible for the acts of the previous group.”
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
