Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero pleads not guilty in 1985 killing of U.S. federal agent

In this image released by the FBI shows the wanted posted for Rafael Caro Quintero. (FBI via AP, File)

NEW YORK — After years as one of U.S. authorities' most wanted men, Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was brought into a New York courtroom Friday to answer charges that include orchestrating the 1985 killing of a U.S. federal agent.

Caro Quintero pleaded not guilty to running a continuing criminal enterprise. Separately, so did Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of another cartel. He’s accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico but not accused of involvement in the death of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.

Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 other Mexican prisoners were sent Thursday to eight U.S. cities, a move that came as Mexico sought to stave off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25 per cent tariffs on all Mexican imports next week.

For Camarena’s family, the arraignments marked a long-awaited moment.

“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope — hope that this moment would come. Hope that we would live to see accountability. And now, that hope has finally turned into reality,” the family said in a statement thanking President Donald Trump and everyone who has worked on the case over the years.

The White House, in a statement Friday ahead of the arraignments, called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world.”

In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.

But members of Mexico’s Security Cabinet on Friday framed the transfer of the 29 prisoners as a national security decision.

“It is not a commitment to the United States. It is a commitment to ourselves,” said Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The problem of drug trafficking and organized crime has been a true tragedy for our country.”

Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch said the people sent into U.S. custody were “generators of violence” in Mexico and represented a security threat to both countries.

Caro Quintero has long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition.

He was one of the founders of a Guadalajara-based cartel and one of the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the U.S. in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Caro Quintero had Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1985 because he blamed the agent for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation the year prior, authorities said. Camarena’s killing marked a low point in U.S.-Mexico relations and was dramatized in the popular Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico.”

Caro Quintero had been 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his verdict in 2013.

After his release, he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities said.

Caro Quintero told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “never went back to drugs.”

“Whoever’s saying it is a liar!” he said, according to the newspaper. “I’m not working anymore, let’s be clear about that! I was a drug trafficker 23 years ago, and now I’m not, and I won’t ever be again.”

The U.S., which had added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a US$20 million reward, sought his extradition immediately after his 2022 arrest. It happened days after the Mexican and U.S. presidents at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden, respectively, met at the White House.

But the request remained in limbo as López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the U.S. to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.

Then, in January, a nonprofit group representing the Camarena family sent a letter to the new Trump administration urging it to renew the extradition request.

Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies,” who died in a botched plastic surgery in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, who was known as “The Viceroy,” continued his brother’s business of smuggling drugs over the border until his arrest in 2014.

He was sentenced in 2021 to 28 years in prison for organized crime, money laundering and weapons violations.

Among the others extradited are leading members of the six Mexican organized crime groups recently designated by the Republican administration as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

They include cartel leaders, security chiefs from both factions of the Sinaloa cartel, cartel finance operatives and a man wanted in connection with the killing of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy in 2022.

Article written by Philip Marcelo And Jennifer Peltz.

Associated Press writer Fabiola Sánchez contributed from Mexico City.