laweekly: L.A. DEA Agent Unraveled the CIA's Alleged Role in the Kiki Camarena Murder

[MinM]

How a Dogged L.A. DEA Agent Unraveled the CIA's Alleged Role in the Murder of Kiki Camarena

In January 1989, Hector Berrellez reported to Los Angeles, handpicked by the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to get to the bottom of a 4-year-old murder investigation that was a top agency priority. This wasn't just another killing in the seemingly endless bloodshed in the Mexican drug wars; the victim, like Berrellez, was a DEA agent. Enrique "Kiki" Camarena had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered at the hands of a Mexican drug cartel four years earlier. The identity of the killers was clear enough; two cartel bosses had been convicted of the killings and were imprisoned in Mexico. But the DEA had reason to believe there were many more guilty parties in addition to the two capos behind bars.

Berrellez was 42 at the time. A former homicide cop, he'd joined the DEA more than a decade earlier as a prized recruit, a thrill-seeker and trained investigator who spoke Spanish without a trace of an American accent — a natural-born undercover narc. He was posted to DEA operations in Colombia and Mexico, living under assumed identities, infiltrating the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel, the Guadalajara cartel. " I was good," he says. "I could penetrate cartels as Mexican. When I was asked if I was a cop, I'd tell them, 'Yo ni tengo papeles!'"

One retired fellow agent called him the Wyatt Earp of the DEA. His supervisor in the Los Angeles office said Berrellez had better sources than the CIA. But of the 200 investigations Berrellez had run in his 12 years with the administration, the Camarena case would be the one where he got more information than he bargained for.

Given his experience, Berrellez was an appropriate choice to lead the investigation. Nonetheless, on the day he got the assignment from DEA headquarters, he believed he was the butt of a practical joke. It was December 1988, a month after his cover had been blown in Mexico and he and his wife and children had to be evacuated from Mazatlán under threat of death. A month of kicking around his hometown of South Tucson, Arizona, on administrative leave, bored stiff, steeling his excitable nerves for a desk job in Phoenix. Boy, the guys must have really pulled out all the stops this time; the woman's voice on the phone sounded official: "Yes, Agent Berrellez, please hold for the administrator." Berrellez was a proud rank-and-file agent, wary of Washington, D.C.; he'd managed to fly under the radar at headquarters. He had certainly never fielded a call from the administrator before, and what he expected to hear now were the snickers of his fellow agents over speakerphone, not the voice of Jack Lawn asking if he would like to take over the investigation code-named [font color=darkred]Operation Leyenda[/font]...

http://www.laweekly.com/news/how-a-dogged-la-dea-agent-unraveled-the-cias-alleged-role-in-the-murder-of-kiki-camarena-5750278

[marble falls]

1. A lot of times I can't tell the cops from the criminals in a lot of shows - "24" to "Cops" to news..

sometimes its bad enough that I understand the cops get it, too; and thats why they pull out shirts and jackets with 'Police" printed front and back in florescent 2ft tall letters. So they don't shoot each other and so the bad guys don't shoot cops thinking the cops are other competing bad guys.

I have to think the numbers of "true believers" in CIA, DEA, most police departments in major towns pretty darn low.

[Galileo126]

2. What's the difference?

Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello in "The Departed":

"When you decide to be something, you can be it. That's what they don't tell you in the church. When I was your age they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this: when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?"

[MisterP]

3. 1,500 kilos is a lot for one instance--no wonder Ollie North's hair's so white

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/

also they repeatedly closed Panama City and Tegucigalpa's DEA offices and shuffled the Mexico City guys when they started sniffing around Medellin too much

[MinM]

4. Gary Webb on Kiki Camarena (audio)

Of course Gary Webb was on to this story long ago (DU related links below).

Release of DEA Agent Kiki Camarena’s "Murderer" Is Game Changer for CIA

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014621414

[shadowmayor]

5. Not the Times

LA Weekly has the stones to print this story. Where's the Times? Crickets again.

The Shadow Mayor