♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON: Public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY: Just say no.
REAGAN: Halting the drug problem in America is like
carrying water in a sieve.
BUSH: Take my word for it, this scourge will stop.
REPORTER 2 (over TV): There's now an understanding that the
war on drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself;
how did we get here?
TRUMP: We will build a wall.
MAN: We buy grass in Mexico,
the most important thing is your contact.
REPORTER (over TV): This is the real action, the pot party.
The trippers, the grasshoppers,
the hip ones flying high as a kite.
TURNER: You had a society that,
since the 60s, had sort of been gradually moving toward
more of a drug subculture.
REPORTER (over TV): In time, the continued use of marijuana
causes psychic and physiological changes.
Shame, arrest, prison.
TURNER: So you had an increase in marijuana use that reached
an apex in 1979 when you had one in nine high school seniors
using marijuana on a daily basis.
♪ You just gonna break my heart ♪
♪ My fallen angel ♪
TURNER: It made the government realize that the efforts in Mexico
need to be reinvigorated.
BROWN: I initially went to Mexico to work on the
marijuana cultivation and trafficking.
The state of Sinaloa was the heart of
marijuana cultivation for decades,
if not centuries.
Higher up in the Sierra Madres was a climate temperature,
water and sunlight, made it ideal for growing marijuana.
♪ ♪
Our assignment was to work with the Mexican Federal Police.
But it was a very frustrating time for what we were doing.
We saw the continued growth of organized criminal groups that
now are called cartels.
It was becoming hotter.
It was a hot environment.
GRILLO: Sinaloa to the Mexican drug cartels is like
Sicily is to the Italian mafia.
But around that time, you saw Sinaloans relocating their
operations to Mexico's second biggest city, Guadalajara.
A really strategic city, much closer to the center of power.
This is really when the Guadalajara cartel came together.
It was a group of Mexican drug traffickers saying,
okay, let's share our resources.
ESQUIVEL: One of the pioneers was Rafael Caro Quintero.
He made what now is called the Guadalajara cartel.
Using the roads of Guadalajara to send drugs
to the United States, especially marijuana.
BROWN: He came from a small village in Sinaloa.
A street thug, moved up pretty quickly.
Smart though, for somebody with a very limited education.
He saw an opportunity.
BROWN: They pretended to be sophisticated,
and they were really just thugs.
They ruled by brutality, by killing people who disagreed.
KUYKENDALL: Well this picture was taken of me in September of 1982,
standing in the middle of a 200 acre field of marijuana,
seven‐foot stalks, mature marijuana.
I'm Jaime Kuykendall.
I was the DEA agent from the time that it was created,
July the 1st, 1973.
The job that I was given in Guadalajara, Mexico
was to gather as much
intelligence as possible and
then give that information to the United States government.
There were three agents there when I got there.
One of them was Enrique Camarena.
Everyone called him Kiki.
Kiki was born in Mexico, became a naturalized United States citizen.
For a DEA agent, he was a family man,
and this is a picture of Kiki and his wife.
Her nickname is Mika.
CAMARENA: Kiki was very excited.
He couldn't wait to get a case out there.
CAMARENA: Guadalajara was beautiful.
The weather was perfect.
The people were very friendly.
Kiki was very good at befriending people.
They knew he was Mexican.
He would speak their language.
(crowd cheering)
BROWN: He was an old‐time cop.
He believes in justice on the street and going out and, and
working the case.
KUYKENDALL: He enjoyed matching wits with the bad guys.
CAMARENA: Kiki's job was to locate these traffickers,
know exactly who they were and where they hung out.
And so the way he could get a case is by finding his informants.
♪ ♪
KUYKENDALL: Well they stopped at a beer truck
'cause they were getting kind of thirsty.
And uh, asked him if he'd noticed anything unusual
in the area, any extra activity.
He said, "Well, over in the distance there, there's a farm."
And he said, "I don't know what's going on over there,
but they've got a lot of workers 'cause they buy a lot of beer
for me and I can't get in, every time I get there,
they send somebody out to pick up some beer."
After he left, they drove as close as they could.
And it looked like there was a lot of security.
Still we're not sure, right?
So we need an airplane.
They came down and flew over the area.
What did he see out there in the desert?
Big green field.
Nobody expected that.
This time they fly a little lower.
We were not 100% certain until we actually arrived and saw it;
six to eight foot tall marijuana plants out in the desert.
Literally in the desert.
We successfully helped the Mexicans to seize that,
the field of marijuana.
It was about 200 acres.
Kiki smoked a cigar.
Sort of celebratory gesture on his part to smoke the cigar.
♪ ♪
MAN: Caro Quintero had this idea to innovate the way
marijuana was growing using an irrigation system that was
kind of sophisticated.
KUYKENDALL: Rafael Caro Quintero was,
for a while, a mysterious person.
We learn of this 30 year old multi‐millionaire,
maybe billionaire, who knows?
The guy behind all of these major marijuana plantations at the time.
GRILLO: With the Búfalo Ranch, you see the ambitions of
the Guadalajara cartel.
Big ideas, big thinking.
This was this huge, huge marijuana plantation.
The biggest that the world had ever seen.
They would go for days to see the scale of it.
It dwarfed any other marijuana plantation massively.
More than 5,000 workers.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno.
BROWN: That was one of the very largest seizures of
cultivated marijuana on record.
That really hurt their profit factor big time.
(overlapping chatter)
There was no way possible for that to be forgotten about.
REPORTER (over TV): Detective Sergeant Dale Lint,
who was on a vacation hunting trip,
checking animal trap lines near this remote World War II air strip,
60 miles south‐west of Kingman, Arizona,
when he spotted two suspicious trucks heading away
from the area and radioed for help.
ESQUIVEL: 1984 confiscation of that shipment of drugs took
the DEA by surprise.
REPORTER (over TV): When he first spotted the trucks,
Lint thought they might carry marijuana.
Hobby County Sheriff's Deputies
worked through the night, weighing,
marking and cataloguing what they now say is the largest
cocaine seizure ever made west of the Mississippi.
BROWN: We had done a lot of work on uh, marijuana.
Aircraft smuggling operations.
That information was crucial in identifying who the
aircraft belonged to and who the cocaine belonged to.
ESQUIVEL: It was the first evidence for the
U. S. government that the Guadalajara cartel started
doing business with the Colombians.
GRILLO: Colombians were looking for, you know,
how can we take our drugs to the United States?
And the Guadalajara cartel had all of the trafficking routes
carved out already.
MAN: Mexico was a bouncing point.
It was smart on the part of the Mexican traffickers.
They had to go away from something as bulky
as marijuana was, and go to something that's more packageable,
more concealable, much more profit factor.
GRILLO: This would change everything.
The amount of profits they would get from cocaine
would be astronomical.
BROWN: We had developed quite a bit of information about
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
He was a Sinaloan.
They developed street sense beyond any street sense.
They learned that ruthlessness with no care about
any consequence can give you great riches.
GRILLO: The Guadalajara cartel were getting very angry and
they were particularly angry with Kiki Camarena,
this very young, aggressive agent that was out there
gathering information.
MAN: Rafael Caro Quintero wanted revenge.
♪ ♪
GRILLO: In the 1980s, as the Guadalajara cartel was growing
Caro Quintero was getting very annoyed by various busts.
He thought that the DEA were cleverer than they were and thought,
wow, they're following us around here,
and then they're busting our drugs up in Arizona.
They must be connected.
So he was getting very frustrated with the
DEA and their business, and particularly with
Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.
HEATH: I advised our people that you've got to be
very careful, be very safe.
Don't take any chances 'cause we're dealing here
with a very strong group.
CAMARENA: Kiki had been very busy.
Their work is many times during the night.
I did not wake up until 6:00 in the morning.
There was no sign of him.
I was very scared.
Very, very frightened but I had to hide that because
I needed to get the boys off to school.
HEATH: She calls the office, you know,
"Are y'all working on an investigation or whatever that took all night?"
and all that, and sometimes there is.
And they said, "No."
KUYKENDALL: As soon as I learned that Kiki was missing,
I feared the worst.
♪ ♪
BROWN: We knew we had an agent missing.
We knew we had to do everything we possibly could
now because time was so critical to find him and bring
him back safely.
MAN: There was no other suspects except the drug traffickers.
BROWN: We go balls to the wall.
With no quarter, we don't stop.
REPORTER (over TV): Camarena was last seen leaving the
US Consulate at around 2:30, Thursday afternoon.
Witnesses say suddenly four armed men grabbed him,
pushed him into the back of a car and sped away.
REPORTER 2 (over TV): The same day a Mexican pilot disappeared
known to have aided the drug enforcement administration
(radio chatter)
(wailing sirens)
BROWN: They had their AK47s.
The Mex Feds had their automatic rifles.
And the DEA agents, we had little 38 caliber revolvers.
BROWN: Watching what was going on,
Rafael Caro Quintero stood, hands on his hips.
I will never forget him.
Black mustache, black curly hair,
dressed impeccably.
Dress shirt, starched beautifully,
unbuttoned almost all the way down to his belly.
Necklaces, gold medallions.
Sleeves rolled up a slight bit because he had a very
wide gold diamond encrusted bracelet on it.
Just a sneer on his face.
Commandante Pavon of the Federal Police went up and
spoke with this man.
Quintero seemed to hand him something.
Pavon told us relax, he's on a special mission.
Very high‐level security mission and we are not to
impede his travel.
What the hell are you talking about?
This guy is not a federal comandante.
BROWN: And as the plane slowly began moving away from us,
I see Rafael Caro Quintero hold up a bottle of champagne
and yell to us in Spanish, "Boys, next time bring bigger toys."
REPORTER (over TV): In Mexico, the suspect in the kidnapping
of a US drug agent has disappeared,
and American officials are charging that Mexican Police
helped in the getaway.
REPORTER 2 (over TV): These are some of the men assigned to
the kidnapping case here in Guadalajara.
Elite Mexican Federal Police.
American authorities say the Mexican Police,
apparently on orders from Mexico City,
have taken what amounts to a three‐week siesta.
BROWN: We couldn't go forward.
We had no law enforcement authority.
We couldn't go searching places.
We couldn't ask for assistance of citizens,
we couldn't do anything without the Mexican Federal Police
because we were guests in their country.
REPORTER (over TV): Tonight, American authorities say they
will work on the marijuana fields here,
the drug traffickers, the corrupt police later.
All they want now is their agent back.
♪ ♪
(speaking in native language).
REPORTER (over TV): They were found with their arms bound
behind their backs, blindfolded
They had been dead at least 15 days and had been buried
for part of that time.
REPORTER 2 (over TV): The Commander of the
Mexican Police Task Force investigating the
disappearance of Camarena arrived.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration's top man in
Mexico was also there.
He looked shaken as he left.
HEATH: I was the only one that was approved to sit in from
the DEA at the autopsy.
Well he was tortured,
and obviously hurt very badly,
and on and on and on until he died, so.
CAMARENA: It was like, it was like a, I was feeling his pain.
It's like I wanted to feel that pain to, to be able to forgive.
ESQUIVEL: The guy in charge of that interrogation was
Rafael Caro Quintero, and he was a natural killer.
He was so upset with the DEA and Kiki Camarena because
months before that they discover a big plantation in
the Rancho El Búfalo.
(gunshots)
BROWN: Kiki was a tough guy.
He was a marine.
He put up with all kinds of stuff,
fighting for the United States.
And to have him suffer that torture at the hands of these
traffickers was outrageous.
KUYKENDALL: Kiki's body was flown to San Diego in a
Air Force cargo plane.
That was Kiki's last flight home,
that was going back to his adopted country,
The United States of America.
I was in the aircraft,
and it was a somber time,
somber flight.
BROWN: From that moment, we had a great resolve in this country
to find those who were responsible and bring them to justice.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Rafael Caro Quintero is being
held in a prison on the outskirts of Mexico City tonight.
He was captured in Costa Rica earlier this week and returned
to Mexico amid heavy security last night.
REPORTER 2 (over TV): American officials say he is living in
a country club atmosphere with his own servants,
liquor and private phone lines.
REPORTER 3 (over TV): A police comandante,
Armando Pavón Reyes, was sentenced to prison this week
for taking a huge bribe to help Caro Quintero flee after the killing.
REPORTER 4 (over TV): Félix Gallardo, reputedly
Mexico's biggest cocaine trafficker,
is also wanted for the Camarena killing
but is still at large.
(crowd cheering)
GRILLO: As a teenager, he went to college and was studying
business and he joined the police where he was assigned
to be a bodyguard for public officials and started making
strong connections in Mexican political circles.
ESQUIVEL: Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo,
a figure that had charisma.
He was like a businessman in a suit.
A narco trafficker in a suit.
He knows how to talk to politicians and corrupt officials.
♪ ♪
GRILLO: When the Mexicans got into cocaine in a big way,
this would turn the Mexican drug traffickers from what had been,
you know, at one point marijuana smugglers into these
people running multi‐billion dollar businesses and who
would use that money to build armies that would
drown Mexico in blood.
REPORTER (over TV): At least 40% of the cocaine smuggled
into the States is from the Tijuana Cartel.
MAN: To control that city, you have to kill a lot of people.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.