Original subtitles

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INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like the U.S. government

has told you the full truth about what really happened and why?

I don't think they've told anybody the whole truth.

The whole truth lies with the people that were there.

They hold the truth.

NARRATOR: The killing of Kiki Camarena in 1985

sent shockwaves through the DEA.

In the immediate aftermath, the agency launched its own investigation into the murder.

It was called Operation Leyenda.

Prior to his death, Kiki's investigations

had cost the Guadalajara cartel hundreds of millions of dollars.

The cartel's role in Kiki's murder was an open secret.

But the DEA suspected that high ranking Mexican officials

were also involved.

However, four years after Operation Leyenda began,

the DEA still had no eye witnesses with firsthand knowledge

of Kiki's abduction, torture, and murder.

That changed when Hector Berrellez took over the investigation

and began using his vast network of Mexican informants

to uncover the truth about what happened to Kiki in Guadalajara.

BERRELLEZ: Shortly after being assigned

as head of the Camarena murder investigation,

my main focus and mission was:

find out who was there that could tell me

everything that happened to Kiki.

MIKA: The last time that I saw Kiki

was when he left to work that morning.

We were laughing because he had a new truck

and he wanted to put the--

the gray on the windows, the protector.

And I said, "Just have somebody do it professionally

and it'll look nice."

"Oh, no, no, no, no, I can do it, I'll do it, I'll do it."

When I went out that morning, the whole back window was bubbled.

[LAUGHING] And I was-- I was making fun of him.

So, it was-- it was a cheerful morning,

it was a happy morning.

He calls me about noon and he says,

"Hey, you want to go to our favorite restaurant to have lunch?"

And I said, "Yes, well, what time? What time?"

I would never say no.

I don't care what time it was,

I don't care if I had already had the table

set up for dinner, I would never say no.

LIRA: At dawn on February 7th,

the day of the kidnapping.

That day in the morning,

Fonseca told me, "Stay with me,

because we are going to do a job."

LOPEZ: Rene Verdugo arrived and told Ernesto Fonseca,

"Sir,

"the person

"will come out at noon,

and we have to be there before then."

I was in Samuel's group.

Ernesto Fonseca went with Ramon Lira in one group.

Caro Quintero was with another.

BERRELLEZ: Six, seven cars,

four to five men in each car all carrying AK-47s.

He's very well armed.

LIRA: We arrived there and we parked

at the intersection of

Prisciliano Sanchez and Lopez Cotilla,

one or two blocks away from the U.S. consulate.

LOPEZ: When Kiki comes out of the consulate,

Rene Verdugo says, "That's him."

When Kiki was in the middle of the street,

Samuel gets out of the car and tells me, "Come on."

When Kiki gets on the sidewalk,

as soon as he got on the sidewalk, Samuel told him...

"DFS," shows him his credentials.

"The comandante wants to talk to you."

Kiki very calmly turns around and he says, "Esta bien,

that's okay, let me notify my office via radio,"

and he reaches for his walkie-talkie in his DEA truck,

and that's when Sammy pulled a gun on him, "No."

Samuel told him,

"Don't resist, or I'll finish you right here."

"Alright," Kiki said.

I thought he was going to react differently.

Samuel said, "Let's walk."

And Kiki walked, he was calm.

We put him in the back seat.

In between us.

Samuel said, "Lean him over,

and put a jacket over his head."

So we leaned him over and put a jacket on him.

Well, when we started driving away,

Samuel spoke on the radio.

"We are taking the package to the office."

Those were the words he used.

BERRELLEZ: He says then we drove him to the Lope de Vega house

where Caro Quintero was,

and all the military guys and other DFS bosses were.

MIKA: I go meet him at the restaurant

and he's not there, which is fine because,

you know, they- they-- it was a known fact

they get delayed for one reason or another,

whatever's happening at the office.

But this time, it was too long.

I was hungry, so I decided to eat.

And I thought, I bet you he was called back to work

and that's why he didn't show up.

LOPEZ: And the celebration began.

When we all got out of the cars and everything,

they began to embrace.

And they were excited, you know?

So they celebrated.

And Samuel gave orders, "Bring some bandages

from the kitchen."

Torres Lepe bandaged Kiki.

He covered his eyes.

And we got him out of the car,

and we brought him to-- to the room that--

that they have for servants. It was a big house.

INTERVIEWER: And where was he?

Show me the room.

I want to know exactly the layout of the room.

The room more or less was like this one.

The pool was right next to it.

You go in and here was the bed.

A window there and a bathroom here.

When we got there, Fonseca went directly

to the room where they had Camarena.

And at that moment,

I saw Camarena there, blindfolded.

Then I started noticing all the politicians...

It was kind of like a party.

I think there were about...

50, 60 people in the house.

Government officials, politicians, narcos...

the cream of the crop.

LIRA: It's no birthday party.

It's a macabre party,

because a few steps away, someone is being tortured.

"And who told you about the Bufalo plantation?"

Kiki told him, "No, wait," he says.

"I know I'm here because of Caro Quintero.

"I would like to talk to him.

I'm of more use to Caro

alive than dead."

The first interrogator leaves,

and Caro Quintero enters.

When Caro Quintero enters,

he grabs Kiki by the hair,

and he throws him to the ground.

He told him, "Look, you son a fucking bitch!

"I sent you money, fucker.

Yet you raided and destroyed my plantation."

"We were just doing our job," Kiki answered.

"Son of a bitch, you took our money!

We sent you money."

"No," Kiki said, "You're wrong.

I've never taken any money from you."

"Now I want you to tell me,

"who do you know of the politicians

who are involved in drug trafficking?"

Kiki said, "No, you know what?

"I don't know which politicians you're talking about.

"I don't know any politicians that -

are involved in drug trafficking."

"Don't play stupid, you son of a bitch."

So Caro laid him out with a blow.

Basically our job was

to stand Kiki up again and again.

And Caro said, "Tie this bastard up for me!"

And they cut the cords from the curtains.

And with those cords, they bound his feet and hands.

No shirt, no pants.

Just underpants.

They took off all his clothes, just his underwear.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of torture did they do?

LIRA: Blows, burns with cigarettes,

jumping on his chest, kicks.

BERRELLEZ: And at one point they put powder on his face

from an AK47 cartridge and lit it up.

His jaw had been broken, his teeth knocked out,

his, you know, his skull was all cracked

from all the beatings that he had on his head.

He was violated through the anal cavity.

His ribs were all broken.

So he's been tortured severely.

LOPEZ: Two hours after we brought Kiki,

Felix Gallardo's group arrived.

Felix Gallardo.

El Chapo and "Los Dormidos" were bringing the pilot,

they had kidnapped him too.

And they started torturing him as well.

Same thing.

BERRELLEZ: Rene tells us that one of the interrogators

was a comandante of the DFS

who asked him a lot of questions.

And also, he says, that this Cuban guy,

Cubano was also interrogating Kiki.

And I'm very curious, "Who is this Cubano, Rene?"

I says, "Who is this Cubano?"

He says, "I don't know."

LOPEZ: I even asked Samuel Ramirez once.

"Who's this dude? He looks Cuban."

"Well, he's also DFS."

That's what Samuel told me.

BERRELLEZ: And the Cubano, he's the one that brings in

tape recording machines to tape record the whole thing.

They were tape recording everything they were asking him.

It was a tape recorder - black color, double cassette.

BERRELLEZ: And I ask him, [SPEAKING SPANISH].

"What were they asking Kiki?"

"They were asking him about [SPEAKING SPANISH],

what he knew about the politicos protecting the drug lords."

"And what would he answer?"

Kiki would say... "I know nothing about that."

They would also ask him about

the Contras in Nicaragua.

And Kiki kept answering, "I know nothing, sir."

LIRA: They would not stop asking him the same questions.

what had he found out about the CIA,

what investigations he had into the CIA,

the nexus of the CIA with drug trafficking,

and what he knew about the relationship

between the Mexican government, CIA and the Narcos.

INTERVIEWER: And was he screaming, or begging?

Well, the last time I saw him, he couldn't...

he couldn't talk anymore.

He could hardly speak, then.

But he did beg them -

to not hurt him anymore, because he didn't know anything.

BERRELLEZ: Fonseca's not happy with the way it's going.

Kiki's in real bad shape.

He sees him and he gets mad at Caro Quintero

and he says [SPEAKING SPANISH].

"This wasn't supposed to happen. The guy's not in good shape,

get a doctor over here."

They sent for the doctor,

who was Ernesto Fonseca's chief doctor,

Humberto Alvarez Machain.

BERRELLEZ: And he looks at Camarena and he says,

"He's not in good shape.

I've got to get him to a hospital

or this guy's not gonna make it."

And Fonseca says, "Okay, get him, let's take him to a hospital."

And Caro Quintero says, "No, you can't take this guy to a hospital.

Are you kidding me? This guy's DEA."

Fonseca didn't agree.

He wanted to release him,

Fonseca wanted to take him to a hospital to be saved.

LOPEZ: We left the Lope de Vega house,

at like 7:00 or 8:00 PM.

We left with Ernesto Fonseca.

BERRELLEZ: After he leaves,

Dr. Machain starts taking orders from Caro Quintero.

He says, "We want to keep interrogating him,

the guy keeps-- keeps going unconscious."

The body can only take so much.

So Humberto Alvarez Machain was brought in

and he would administer medication to Camarena

to revive him so the torture could continue.

MIKA: Many a night I went to bed by myself.

But when Kiki was home,

I would wake up in the middle of the night

and kinda try to feel him with my leg,

and just feel the relief that he's home.

But that night, I did not wake up at all.

And when I woke up and saw that he was--

he had not come home, I panicked.

Then I called his partner and I said,

"Kiki didn't come home."

He said, "Didn't he meet you for lunch?"

And my heart just dropped again,

I knew that they did not know he was missing.

When I got to the Consulate, Kiki's vehicle was still there.

At that point in time, it became very obvious...

well, it was probable that he had been

kidnapped by drug traffickers

and we began to try to find him.

The secretaries came to the office,

made phone calls to the hospitals,

the city morgue, things like that, to no avail.

I notified my superiors in Mexico City,

I notified the Consul General.

Those people started the wheels moving

to inform the United States government in Washington DC

that we had a federal agent missing in Mexico.

MIKA: I knew, without a doubt,

that someone had taken him.

It was not gonna be good.

And all I could think of doing is praying

that they would return him, that they would not kill him.

MEDRANO: Kiki Camarena is tortured for 36 hours.

And at this time in the interrogation,

you can tell from his responses,

he's a beaten man already, he's barely hanging on.

So, his answers are very low key

and in a very low volume.

And then, every once in a while,

interspersed with,

"Please don't hit me anymore."

MIKA: The first day that he was gone,

I worried whether he had eaten,

I worried whether he was cold.

Because, unconsciously I did not want to think

that he was, no, he was not coming back.

That I would never see him again.

After he was gone two days,

I got a...

a horrible pain in my stomach

and it was like I just wanted to scream.

My gut was telling me he was gone.

LOPEZ: Early the next morning, Fonseca receives a phone call,

telling him that there was trouble,

that the gringo was dying.

It was around 6:00, 7:00 AM,

when we arrived at Lope de Vega.

When we arrived with Ernesto Fonseca,

Caro Quintero was sitting there under an umbrella.

Fonseca said, "What happened, buddy?"

Caro said, "What happened is what had to happen."

"But that was not the agreement."

"Well, it was not the agreement,

but that's how things went."

Fonseca said, "You son of a bitch,

this has totally gone to shit."

"We are going to end up fucked."

Ernesto Fonseca told Caro.

"This mess is yours to fix, asshole!"

And Caro said, "We have done worse things

"and what has happened to us?

You know very well that here in Mexico, we rule."

"No fucking way,

the devil will take us with this fight."

And Caro said, "Leave this fucking situation to me,

I will resolve it."

Fonseca says, "No, you're not going to resolve shit.

This fucking shit cannot be resolved."

Fonseca slapped Caro Quintero.

Because I was protecting Fonseca,

I had to be watching Caro Quintero's bodyguards

to make sure they were not going to kill us.

Caro's men all put [UNINTELLIGIBLE] rounds into the rifles,

and of course, Fonseca has more men,

and they all point at Caro's men.

And Fonseca then says, [SPEAKING SPANISH].

"You're doing this, you're gonna pay for this."

LIRA: I escorted Fonseca to his house.

And he arrived very angry.

He grabbed his AK-47 and fired off a whole magazine.

I think it was 60 bullets.

He emptied it all.

And he wouldn't stop drinking.

Drinking, and drinking.

He's going crazy mad.

"We are in deep shit!

We are all gonna pay for Caro's fucking mistake."

From there on out,

Ernesto Fonseca was fucked.

That night they went to bury the bodies.

INTERVIEWER: Who buried the bodies?

"Los Dormidos."

Because they were in charge of burials.

Of killing people and burying them there.

At La Primavera forest,

that was basically their graveyard.

Those lands belonged to Ruben Zuno Arce.

All the La Primavera lands, those were Zuno's lands.

Same as the house at Lope de Vega.

BERRELLEZ: And they have Zavala, Kiki's pilot, the informant,

and he's alive.

And the pilot was thrown in the same hole with Kiki

and he was buried alive.

The U.S. government is mounting an unprecedented effort this weekend

to find a kidnapped American narcotics agent and his captors.

JORDAN: Every office was working 24/7.

Kiki was the number one priority.

We have to send a clear message

to all parties concerned: traffickers, law enforcement,

businessmen alike that we want something done about it,

we want our agent back.

NARRATOR: When U.S. authorities ordered the crackdown,

they knew chances were slim they'd find any trace

of kidnapped Agent Enrique Camarena.

MEDRANO: We told the Mexican government, "give us our guy back."

They took their time, they obstructed.

But what got the job done,

and this was unprecedented

and never to be repeated to this day,

the Mexican border was shut down.

And as that pressure grew, the Mexican government

and the drug dealers had to scramble.

What were they gonna say, what were they gonna do,

who were they gonna turn over?

REPORTER: The man being hunted is Rafael Caro Quintero,

a major cocaine trafficker.

This is the man in charge of finding Caro Quintero,

Commander Armando Pavon,

the head of a Mexican federal task force.

Pavon Reyes was a Mexican federal judicial police agent.

He was sent from Mexico City

to be the supervisor/comandante of the group

that was sent up to help us look for Kiki.

We escorted Caro Quintero to the airport.

When we arrived at the airport,

there was a group of DEA agents

and a group of the DFS.

Everybody's got, pointing guns at each other,

the DEA agents are there,

and the comandante that's working with him,

Armando Pavon Reyes was with the DEA agents.

He talks to Caro Quintero, he hugs him,

and then lets him go.

And Caro Quintero gets on the plane,

and right before the plane takes off,

he gets a bottle of champagne, and he tells them, [SPEAKS SPANISH]

"My children, next time, bring better weapons, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha."

And the plane takes off.

The agents ask Pavon Reyes, the comandante who hugged Caro Quintero,

they said, "Why did you hug him and let him go?"

And he says, "That wasn't Caro Quintero,

"you guys don't even know who Caro Quintero is.

"That was a DFS comandante friend of mine.

And all those guys that were there protecting him, they're all DFS."

LOPEZ: Caro got on the plane and

gave an envelope to Pavon Reyes.

Supposedly it contained 60 million pesos.

But we didn't see the amount. We just saw the envelope.

They dug up the bodies,

because the fight was now on their doorstep.

They decided to take the bodies out of Jalisco,

to move the problem to another state.

They decided to move them to Michoacan.

When we arrived at La Primavera forest,

El Chapo and "Los Dormidos"

came out with the bodies in bags.

They threw the bodies in the truck.

And we drove to Michoacan.

When we arrived, Pavon Reyes was there.

He assigned one of his agents

to show us where to dump the bodies.

Outside of town there was a ditch,

he said, "Throw them here."

They grabbed the bags,

out of the van

and threw the bodies in a ditch,

and covered them with branches.

MIKA: The children didn't have the privacy.

I remember Danny coming home one day

with a TIME Magazine and asking me,

"Mom is this true?"

I had to tell him...

that he had been tortured.

He was six years old.

LOPEZ: After all that had happened,

Fonseca was going from one place to another.

LIRA: One day Fonseca was driving,

Samuel in the front, me in the back seat.

And Fonseca told Samuel Ramirez,

"This has gone to hell,

the politicians have abandoned us."

That's what he said.

So we changed houses every night.

We would arrive at six o'clock in the afternoon,

and by midnight, we were already in another house.

By four in the morning, we were in another one.

We never knew where we were going next.

GODOY: It was a dark night.

You could feel the devil's presence.

A storm with thunder, lightning.

The fucking horse from the devil, neighing.

LIRA: The lights went out,

so I told Fonseca, "I'm going to buy a fuse.

And I'm going to take the opportunity to go to roll call."

"Ah, it's okay, you can go," Fonseca said.

That's when I went to the precinct and stayed there.

But the truth was, when I heard

that the politicians...

had abandoned him,

I knew the whole thing was fucked.

I was carrying my AK-47,

a 9-millimeter and two grenades.

I wasn't going to let them catch me.

That was the moment I abandoned everything,

and from then on, always running.

REPORTER: The man said to be at the center

of much of the illicit drug traffic in Mexico

was captured today.

Rafael Caro Quintero was arrested in Costa Rica.

He's considered the prime suspect

in the kidnap and murder of American drug agent Enrique Camarena.

In a Mexican prison, at a news conference,

he laughs and jokes with local reporters.

REPORTER: Why did you want to visit Costa Rica?

I was told it's a quiet country,

but as far as I've seen, it's not.

Hey, Rafa, do you consider yourself a bad guy?

- No. No. - Why?

If there's anything I have, it's love for everybody.

- You've never hurt anyone? - Of course not.

And I don't plan on it either.

Rafael, did you have anything to do

with the death of Enrique Camarena?

Negative. I never saw or met him.

- Zavala, the pilot, neither? - No. Nobody.

I have nothing to do with...

What was the name of the murdered guy?

- Enrique Camarena. - It has nothing to do with me.

Or Mr. Ernesto Fonseca either.

Did you know there were DEA agents working in Mexico?

No, I never knew that.

They knew about your houses and your ranches.

Maybe so.

Maybe Camarena went there for a stroll sometime before.

Do you think the gringos are meddlesome?

No, because I don't know them.

They want you to be extradited to the United States.

What else do they want?

I'd like many things too, but you can't have it all.

I have no pending business with the United States.

So there's no reason to extradite you?

None. That's negative.

Rafael, what's your real relationship with Fonseca?

How did you meet him?

I've known him since I was born.

LOPEZ: When they told Ernesto Fonseca

that Caro was caught,

then he felt more desperate.

He was thinking about escaping

to El Salvador or Guatemala.

But finally one morning,

he decided we should hide in Puerto Vallarta.

We were guarding Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo...

and we had seen in the news

that Rafael Caro Quintero had been caught

in Costa Rica.

Then, Ernesto Fonseca realized

he was going down, too.

He would call the DFS, but they all ignored him.

Nobody answered him.

GODOY: Fonseca was very drunk.

He was alone in his bedroom,

listening to one tape over and over,

a cassette tape.

He listened to the tape again and again.

On it I heard strange grunts.

"Enough. Leave me.

Don't torture me anymore."

"Hey" (with Cuban accent).

And I heard another voice,

Caribbean, like Cuban.

"Hey, brother, you have to tell us what you did.

What did you report to Washington?"

"Nothing, I didn't report anything.

"I didn't get any money.

Let me go, please. Don't torture me anymore."

"What the fuck, you have to tell us, bastard!

Who are you reporting to in Washington?"

"To no one.

"I didn't report to nobody.

No one."

LOPEZ: When Fonseca was listening to the tape in his bedroom,

I heard the voice of the Governor of Jalisco,

also the voice of a federal comandante.

You could hear those voices.

INTERVIEWER: But why was he listening to the recording?

GODOY: He wouldn't stop listening to it

because Don Ernesto knew

he was doomed, that they would follow us

to the end of the earth.

The sun was setting...

the night was approaching...

They surrounded us,

lots of manpower.

I was told, "Surrender your badge."

I said, "No fucking way, you come and get me."

"Come out with your hands up!"

yelled the rural cop in charge of the raid.

And then the shooting began.

Against the soldiers, and the rural cops.

We were being careful to not hit our partners,

who they were using as human shields.

Ernesto Fonseca was coming down the stairs,

and I told him, "Hey boss,

the armored cars are over there, let's use them.

Let's go!"

"No, no, wait. I'll fix this right now," Fonseca said.

And Fonseca said, "Don't shoot.

"Don't shoot, everything's arranged.

We'll surrender."

"What are you saying, sir?

Are we turning ourselves in?"

"Yes, everything's arranged."

I was walking behind Fonseca, and I stopped abruptly,

because Samuel yanked me back.

That's what saved me.

And I told Godoy, "Let's fucking run, Godoy."

"No, wait, let's see what happens."

"Dude, they're gonna cuff your ass.

Let's get the hell out of here."

"No, no," he said.

And I said, "Well, I'm out of here."

Then, Don Ernesto Fonseca and I were handcuffed.

Handcuffed to each other.

I had my AR-15 and my .45.

If they followed me,

I was ready to shoot the fuck out of them.

And I escaped to the beach.

The beach was right in front of me.

It was already beginning to get dark.

When I got to the beach,

I dug a hole in the sand and hid the weapons.

I can't tell you any more because

I can't remember what happened that night,

until the sun woke me up.

REPORTER: Mexican police have arrested the man

they describe as the Godfather of Mexican drug smugglers,

Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and his associates.

Wearing borrowed sunglasses and a smile,

crime boss Ernesto Fonseca was arraigned today in Mexican federal court.

He is charged with kidnapping and murder in connection with

the killing of U.S. Drug Agent Enrique Camarena.

Also charged is one of his men, Samuel Ramirez.

Fonseca and his gang were picked up Monday in Puerto Vallarta

after a gun battle with Mexican authorities.

GODOY: We were just fucking soldiers,

pure slag, pure police waste,

we were simply being used.

We were 26 bastards.

He had a Cuban accent.

One time I even asked Samuel,

"Who is this dude who looks Cuban?"

"Well, he's also DFS."

That's what he told me.

LIRA: Max Gomez, yes, Max Gomez.

GODOY: I saw him at some of the safe houses,

taking bags of money,

of narco dollars.

And I kept wondering, what's a Cuban doing

running around with all these Mexicans and stuff?

And I'm being told that he's there interrogating Kiki Camarena.

Who is this... this unknown Max Gomez?

LIRA: Yes, Max Gomez.

He tried to hide under

a pseudonym,

but later on, we learned his real name.

Felix Rodriguez.

Right away, I go to all my people

and I says, "Run this guy all over."

And he lit up like a Christmas tree.

I mean, this guy is all over the place.

This guy is CIA.

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