Rafael Caro Quintero, whose role in the 1985 murder and torture of an American anti-narcotics agent was profiled in the Netflix drama series Narcos: Mexicohas been captured by a joint legal task force.
Quintero co-founded the Guadalajara Cartel, which was considered one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Mexico in the 1980s.
The Netflix series focused on the early days of the Mexican drug cartels. Several factions united and expanded the activities of a loosely organized group of growers and dealers into a sophisticated multinational corporation. In the series, Quintero was played by Tenoch Huerta.
AP
The violent group was notorious for torturing and murdering Kiki Camarena, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Caro Quintero was one of those convicted in that death.
Caro Quintero spent 28 years in prison for Camarena's murder, but was technically released by a Mexican judge in 2013, embarrassing the previous government. He then disappeared and reportedly returned to the drug trade as part of the Sinaloa cartel, according to US officials. He was in the FBI's top 10 most wanted fugitives and had a $20 million bounty on his head, a record for a drug trafficker.
"It's probably one of the most significant catches of the last decade in terms of importance to the DEA," said Mike Vigil, the DEA's former head of international operations.
The US government has welcomed the arrest of Caro Quintero and has asked for his extradition. "This is huge," Juan Gonzalez, White House senior adviser to Latin America, said on Twitter.
The Mexican Navy said Caro Quintero was caught in the Choix municipality in northwestern Sinaloa state, one of Mexico's heartland for drug trafficking. He was found in undergrowth by a military-trained female bloodhound named Max, the Navy said.
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