From torture to terrorism: How DEA case led to extraordinary rendition [View all]
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
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