Release Of Mexican Drug Lord Caro Quintero Painful For Victims' Relatives David Goldman - Associated Press
go to original August 19, 2013

In this undated photo provided by Keely Walker Muse, her father journalist John Clay Walker poses for a portrait with his daughters Lannie, left, and Keely in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Keely Walker-Muse/AP)

MEXICO CITY — On a sunny winter morning in 1984, two young American couples dressed in their Sunday best walked door to door in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, trying to spread their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses. A few hours later they disappeared.

The next month an American journalist went out with a friend at the end of a yearlong sabbatical writing a mystery novel. The two men also vanished.

Within 10 days, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was kidnapped too, then tortured and killed by Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, setting off one of the worst episodes of U.S.-Mexico tension in recent decades. As DEA agents hunted for Camarena's killers, some witnesses told them that the cartel had mistaken the other six Americans for undercover agents and killed them just like Camarena.

Cartel leader Rafael Caro Quintero walked free this month, 12 years early, after a local appeals court overturned his sentence for three of the murders. For the U.S. and Mexico, Caro Quintero's secretive, pre-dawn release has set off a frantic effort to get the drug lord back behind bars. For the families of the six Americans slain before Camarena, the decision has awakened bitter memories of the brutality that ushered in the modern era of Mexican drug trafficking.

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