Johanna Mendelson Forman: Judicial Reform in Mexico is a Work in Progress Johanna Mendelson Forman - VOXXI
go to original August 13, 2013

Twenty-eight years after being imprisoned for the murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, Rafael Caro Quintero was released from a Mexican prison in Jalisco.

Caro Quintero, a notorious drug dealer, specialized in the mass production and distribution of marijuana and cocaine. He was serving a 40-year prison sentence.

For those of you too young to remember, the Camarena affair, which became the subject of a made-for-TV docudrama in the 1990s, marked a low point in U.S.-Mexico relations. Caro Quintero’s kidnapping and brutal murder of the DEA agent became a symbol of the failed war on drugs that had been so much a part of our foreign policy toward the region. The decision to free the agent’s killer 12 years before his prison term was completed surprised U.S. Justice Department officials and angered the DEA, who in a public statement noted that it would continue to seek extradition of Caro Quintero.

According to a BBC report, Caro Quintero was released from his Jalisco jail cell in the middle of the night, having been informed by prison officials that a federal judge had overturned his conviction. The specifics are not clear, but reports noted that the decision stated that Caro Quintero should have been tried in state court, not in the federal system.

Observers of Mexico’s judicial system note that the legal reasoning appeared suspect, given the ongoing complaints of bribery that still plagues the Mexican legal system. What some also noted is that the release could inject new tensions in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico’s president, Enrique Pena Nieto, early in his term.

Read the rest at VOXXI

Johanna Mendelson Forman is a scholar-in-residence at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, D.C.

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