Hunting El Chapo: Taking down the world’s most-wanted drug-lord. Douglas Century

      “We’ll see, sir,” I said, smiling. “I’ll give it my best shot.”

      One thing I had vowed: I was not going to fall into the trap of believing all the legends and hype. Even some of my DEA colleagues had lost hope, so I disengaged emotionally from the Chapo mythology, instead focusing on it from the most basic policing perspective. No criminal was impossible to capture, after all, the failed Cabo operation proved that Chapo was more vulnerable now than ever.

      NO SOONER HAD I settled into my seat in the Enforcement Group than I was assigned to be the DEA liaison on a case dominating all the Mexican headlines: a drug-related murder in broad daylight inside the terminal at the Mexico City International Airport. The airport was known to be among the most corrupt in the world; inbound flights from the Andes, especially Peru, almost always had cocaine hidden in the cargo. What made the incident all the more shocking was that the murders involved uniformed Mexican cops shooting fellow Mexican cops.

      Two Federal Police officers assigned to the airport were just getting off their shift, walking through Terminal 2. They were attempting to smuggle several kilos of cocaine hidden underneath the navy blue jacket of one of the officers—marked policía federal in white on the back—when they were approached by three PF officers coming on shift, who had become suspicious of them.

      A quick argument ensued between the two groups as they stood near the public food court. The dirty cops drew their service pistols and began gunning down the honest cops. One was executed with a point-blank shot to the head; two others were hit and died. To outsiders, the carnage looked like a terrorist attack; horrified travelers were screaming and scrambling for cover. Meanwhile, the corrupt officers took off running through the terminal, jumped in a truck, and sped away.

      “Can you believe this shit?” I turned toward a senior agent in the group. “Blue-on-blue in broad daylight in the middle of an international airport? Who are these guys?”

      The agent wasn’t fazed; he didn’t even look up from his computer screen.

      “Bienvenidos,” he said. Welcome to Mexico.

      Though I tried to assist the Federal Police and the PGR—the Mexican Attorney General’s Office—tracking down the murderers, I soon came face-to-face with a harsh reality: there were too many layers of corruption. The investigation into the blue-on-blue killings faltered and eventually went cold. It was a stark introduction for me—I saw firsthand, within weeks of my new assignment, why fewer than five percent of homicides in Mexico are ever solved.

      OF ALL THE STUNNING cases of corruption and violence in Latin America, few lingered like the case of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who vanished on a busy street in Guadalajara in 1985 while walking to meet his wife for lunch. Camarena’s body wasn’t found for nearly a month. When it was, it was discovered that his skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones, and windpipe had all been crushed; his ribs had been broken and he’d been viciously tortured; he was even sodomized with a broom handle. Perhaps worst of all, his head had been drilled with a screwdriver, and he’d been buried in a shallow grave while still breathing.

      Kiki Camarena’s disappearance became a major international incident and heavily strained relations between the United States and Mexico—the US government offered a $5 million reward for the arrest of the murderers.

      When I arrived at DEA’s Mexico City Country Office more than twenty-five years later, the circumstances surrounding Camarena’s death had not been forgotten. His memory was kept vividly alive. Along the main embassy hallway, a conference room dedicated to the slain agent—we referred to it simply as the Kiki Room—featured a small bust of Camarena and a plaque. Convicted of Kiki’s torture-murder was none other than Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, “El Padrino,” a former Federal Police officer turned godfather of the Guadalajara Cartel—and Joaquín Guzmán’s mentor in the narcotics business.⁷