#Dea informant trial

Under the administration of Salinas's predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid, he became a special assistant to Manuel Ibarra, then director of the Federal Judicial Police. The senior DEA official said Saavedra is a Cuban who came to Mexico and rose to a high position in the DFS. Nor did we participate in any coverup of the Camarena case.' The CIA declined as a matter of policy to address whether it had any relationship with specific persons, or address questions about drug and arms trafficking in Mexico.ĬIA spokesman Mark Mansfield would say only, 'I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that the CIA neither engages in nor condones drug trafficking. The only thing they didn't know was the information we had on corruption.' As proof of the monitoring, after the murder the DEA received a voice-activated tape recording of DEA radio communications that Mexican authorities said was seized from the traffickers.Īngered by heavy losses in DEA-instigated raids on huge marijuana plantations, the Guadalajara cartel kidnapped Camarena to interrogate him on what the DEA knew about the traffickers' operation and high-level Mexican corruption, DEA officials have said. 'Indirectly, they knew everything we were doing. 'The CIA didn't give a damn about anything but Cuba and the Soviets,' said James Kuykendall, a DEA agent - now retired - who worked with Camarena in Guadalajara. national security interests in Mexico and Central America.

Whether or not this was the case, DEA and Mexican officials interviewed for this article said that at a minimum, the CIA had turned a blind eye to a burgeoning drug trade in cultivating its relationship with the DFS and pursuing what it regarded as other U.S. narcotics agent has brought to the surface years of resentment by Drug Enforcement Administration officials of the Central Intelligence Agency's long collaboration with a former Mexican secret police unit that was heavily involved in drug trafficking.Īccording to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sources and documents, the Mexican drug-trafficking cartel that kidnapped, tortured and murdered DEA agent Enrique Camarena in the central city of Guadalajara in February 1985 operated until then with virtual impunity - not only because it was in league with Mexico's powerful Federal Security Directorate (DFS), but because it believed its activities were secretly sanctioned by the CIA.

#Dea informant trial

MEXICO CITY, JULY 15 - The trial in Los Angeles of four men accused of involvement in the 1985 murder of a U.S.