Infamous drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero was arrested Friday nearly a decade after walking out of a Mexican prison and returning to drug trafficking, an official with Mexico’s navy said.
Caro Quintero was arrested after a search dog named Max found him hiding in the bush in the town of San Simon in Sinaloa state during a joint operation by the navy and the attorney general’s office, a navy statement said. The site was in the mountains near Sinaloa’s border with the northern border state of Chihuahua, The Guardian reported.
Mexico’s national arrest registry listed the time of Caro Quintero’s capture as around midday. There were two pending arrest orders for him as well as an extradition request from the US government.
A very short video segment released by the navy showed Caro Quintero – his face blurred – dressed in jeans, a soaking wet blue shirt and baggy khaki jacket held by both arms by men wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles.
The arrest came days after Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, met Joe Biden at the White House.
Caro Quintero, from La Noria, Sinaloa, is perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the Guadalajara cartel. The group’s heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, when it primarily trafficked cocaine, heroin and marijuana from Mexico to the US.
One of the group’s hitmen – or “sicarios” – was Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who founded the violent Sinaloa cartel but is now imprisoned.
Caro Quintero at one point was sentenced to 40 years in prison, over the kidnapping, torture and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, in 1985.
Caro Quintero believed Camarena was to blame for a raid on a marijuana plantation the previous year.
In 2013, a Mexican appellate court ruling set Caro Quintero free after he had served 28 years. US authorities and Mexican prosecutors were outraged. The supreme court reversed the decision.
But Caro Quintero had gone into hiding. US officials have since accused him of assuming a leadership role in the Sinaloa cartel after El Chapo’s downfall while also running his own organization in the same region.
Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, said: “It is probably one of the most important captures of the last decade in terms of importance to the DEA.”
Before Caro Quintero’s reported arrest on Friday, the US government was offering a reward of up to $20m for information leading to his capture.
Caro Quintero, who last year lost a final appeal against extradition to the United States, will be extradited as quickly as possible, another Mexican official said.
While the 69-year-old Caro Quintero is no longer considered a major player in international drug trafficking.
