From torture to terrorism: How DEA case led to extraordinary rendition

[Judi Lynn]

From torture to terrorism: How DEA case led to extraordinary rendition

By CHRIS KRAUL
Los Angeles Times
February 26, 2015

BOGOTA, Colombia — Of all the cases of troubling corruption and stunning violence that have characterized the war on drugs in Latin America, few linger as powerfully among U.S. drug agents as the case of Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, who vanished on a busy street in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1985 while walking to meet his wife for lunch. His body was found nearly a month later. His skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones and windpipe were crushed. His ribs were broken. His head had been drilled with a screwdriver.

The campaign to prosecute those responsible - the tentacles went from Mexican police to fabled drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero - took years. Even today, in the Drug Enforcement Administration's offices in Bogota, federal agents say the Camarena case has established a steely template for how the U.S. pursues drug investigations in what remains one of the world's most perilous law enforcement terrains.

The 30-year-old case, whose anniversary has been quietly observed this month in DEA offices all over Latin America, opened one of the first windows on the brazen violence that would come to characterize the drug trade in Mexico.

There was another, more lasting legacy. The effort to bring Camarena's torturers to justice in a Los Angeles courtroom, analysts say, was a key legal catalyst for what came to be one of U.S. counterterrorism's most controversial practices: the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects from foreign lands, outside the purview of international laws or extradition treaties. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the practice stemmed from the 1990 seizure by bounty hunters of a Guadalajara doctor, Humberto Alvarez Machain, accused of injecting drugs into Camarena to keep him awake during his torture.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/02/26/257962/from-torture-to-terrorism-how.html#storylink=cpy

[MinM]

1. Gary Webb on Kiki Camarena (audio)

Although the Kiki Camarena story was long before the issues Gary Webb investigated in the '90s he briefly touched on it in the interview below. Gary points out that DEA Agent Celerino Castillo suggested looking into the CIA's role in Camrena's death only to find himself on the outside looking in ...

Show #703
Original airdate: October 23, 2014
Guests: Jim DiEugenio / Gary Webb
Topics: Gary Webb / CTKA / Treefrog / Letters

Gary Webb (1:07:51) Real Media or MP3 download or YouTube Video

*Gary Webb with Len and Anita Langley on BOR Show #47, August 23, 2001
*Gary was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in California
*Drug asset forfeitures, cocaine, Crips and Bloods
*Some of the money was used to buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras
*"Freeway" Ricky Ross, the start of the crack epidemic, Dark Alliance: (Webb 1999)
*CIA was running the drugs into the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles
The group included an MBA in marketing, a weapons advisor, a macro-economist
*Norwin Meneses, they were untouched by law enforcement for many years
*A professional marketing operation, not a lot of moral examination
*Crack democratized cocaine, a cheaper unit cost, a bigger kick
*Dr. Robert Byck congressional testimony on the smoking of cocaine
*Increased prison sentences, not allowed to study it
*Political overtones to the crack market, Miami, Haiti
*An LAPD Rick Ross task force, civil rights violations
*CIA/Contra evidence disappeared, CIA/Meneses, operated fairly openly
*He could be blatant about it because he was a useful money launderer
*The Sandinista revolution, the Somozas, Reagan, a PR campaign
*"The moral equivalent of our founding fathers", [font color=blue]DEA Agent Celerino Castillo[/font]
*A DEA Investigation of CIA, these things get rooted in systems, they're protected
*Did Gary make a difference? Yes. In African-American society this is still an issue
*This story took off in 1996 on the world wide web, linked to source documents
*The backlash was enormous, the Washington Post, the newspaper's reputation
*CIA was allowed to investigate itself, cocaine brought in on freighters
*3 million dollars a day in crack sales, Dr. Hugo Spadafora
*Cocaine trafficking was the coin of the realm in Central America
*Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Department of Justice
*Agencies were profiting from the Drug War
*Asset forfeiture, property confiscated without being charged

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