ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano Read Free Book Online

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    El Padrino and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo are behind bars, but Caro Quintero is another matter: On August 9, 2013, he was allowed to breathe the fresh air of freedom again. A federal court in Guadalajara found a “formal” irregularity in Caro Quintero’s trial for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Kiki Camarena: The federal court that tried him was not authorized to do so because Kiki was a DEA agent, not a diplomatic or consular agent, so Caro Quintero should have been tried in a regular court. Such quibbles were enough to set one of the biggest Mexican bosses free. But he is still wanted for various federal crimes in the United States, and the U.S. Department of State has allocated a $5 million reward for anyone able to provide information leading to his arrest. The Americans want to see him behind bars again, American bars this time.
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    The murder of Kiki Camarena and all that ensued represents a turning point in the fight against Mexican drug trafficking. The level of impunity that the cartels enjoyed was revealed: To kidnap a DEA agent in plain daylight, right outside the U.S. consulate, and then torture and kill him far exceeded anything they had done in the past, all they had dared to do up till that moment. Kiki had been remarkably insightful: He had understood before anyone else that the structure had changed, that it had become much more than a band of gangsters and smugglers. He’d understood that they were now battling drug managers. He’d understood that the first step was to break the ties between institutions and traffickers. He’d understood that mass arrests of the small-time henchmen who do the dirty work were pointless if they didn’t behead the bosses, if they didn’t radically alter the dynamics that allowed the bosses to flood the markets with money and grow stronger. Kiki witnessed the birth of this unstoppable criminal bourgeoisie. He was more interested in the flow of money than in stopping the killers or dealers. Kiki had understood what the United States has trouble grasping even today: You have to strike at the head. You have to hit the bosses, the big bosses—the limbs merely carry out orders. He had also understood that the producers were weakening compared with the distributors. It’s a law of economics, and thus also of drug trafficking. The Colombian producers were in crisis, as were the Medellín and Cali cartels, as were the FARC fighter groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
    Kiki’s death ignited American public opinion about the drug problem in a completely new way. After his body was found, many Americans, starting in Calexico, California, Kiki’s hometown, began wearing red ribbons, a symbol of pain and profanation of flesh. And they asked people to stop doing drugs in the name of the sacrifice Kiki had made in the war against drugs. In California they organized Red RibbonWeek, a campaign that later spread throughout the country. It’s still celebrated every October as part of a drug prevention campaign. And Kiki’s story ended up on TV and film.
    Before he was arrested, El Padrino had managed to convince the bosses to give up opium in order to concentrate on cocaine coming from South America on its way to the United States. Not that marijuana and opium poppy cultivation have disappeared from Mexico. They’re still there, and the export business carries on. They’ve become less important, though, supplanted by cocaine and later by ice or methamphetamines. The decisions made during that meeting in Acapulco a few months before El Padrino was arrested helped the organizations grow, but without the guidance and recognized authority of the boss a fierce territorial dispute broke out among those who were still free. By the early 1990s the cartels had started warring among themselves, a war waged far from any media hype, since very few people believed in the existence of drug cartels. But as the conflict gradually became more bloody