The impact on the foreign community of the Guadalajara cartel and its war with the DEA
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- Published on Tuesday, 29 November -0001 17:23
- Written by Allyn Hunt
With the release Friday, August 9, of one of the “founders” of Mexico’s first drug cartel, and a rather leisurely government response to this failure of good sense and common logic, a hefty slice of the media, both here and abroad, are suggesting that it appears as if the “bad old days” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) are returning with the fresh presidency (December 2012) of Enrique Peña Nieto.
Certainly several recent events have roused dark memories of those who lived through that time of shameless lies and brutal behavior by high Mexican officials in the early 1980s. That menacing chaos spiked with the kidnapping, torture and murder, February 1985, of Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Enrique (“Kiki”) Camarena — and the “disappearance” of several other U.S. citizens.
The Sinaloa cartel jefes migrated to Guadalajara in the 1980s following a ten-million-dollar-a-year, U.S.-backed Mexican military campaign that made life unprofitable for northern drug kingpins.