When Rafael Caro Quintero, who was a Mexican drug lord in the 1980s, was arrested in Mexico this week, the news revived old and terrible memories for Lannie Walker, daughter of American writer John Clay Walker.
Although Caro Quintero was only convicted in Mexico for the murder of United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Enrique Kiki Camarena and Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar in 1985, his gang allegedly murdered up to six citizens. Americans in the Mexican city of Guadalajara around the same time.
One of them was John Clay Walker, a writer who was then 36 years old and had moved to Guadalajara to finish a book.
We were very happy to hear that (Caro Quintero) had been captured, and it also reopened a great trauma for us, said Lannie Walker. My sister and I have lost almost 40 years without our father, there is nothing that can make up for that.
The American writer and his friend Alberto Radelat, a dentist student from Fort Worth, Texas, had entered an upscale seafood restaurant in Guadalajara to celebrate Walker’s expected return to the United States.
They did not expect that Caro Quintero and his collaborators were holding a private party in a room at the back of the restaurant.
Our father was a US citizen with no involvement in the US-Mexico drug war, an innocent bystander who unknowingly found himself caught in the fire of a dangerous drug cartel, Lannie Walker said. They started questioning my father and Al, asking them what they knew about the anti-drug agents in Mexico, what they knew about the investigation. My father knew nothing, he was an innocent writer. They tortured him with an ice pick for an hour.
Mike Vigil, former director of international operations for the DEA, said that Caro Quintero was one of those individuals who now had power, he had wealth, he crossed the line many times in terms of the people he killed.
Regarding what happened in the restaurant, Vigil said that they looked and saw the two Americans and immediately their paranoia made them think that they were DEA agents. They took him to the back and stabbed him to death.
Radelat and Walker’s bodies were found wrapped in a rug in June 1985, almost five months after their disappearance.
In December 1984, two young American couples went door to door in Guadalajara in an attempt to spread their faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses. All four were kidnapped and were never seen again.
Two state police officers later said they had helped kidnap and murder the couples on the orders of Caro Quintero and another capo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Apparently they had knocked on Fonseca Carrillo’s door without knowing it when trying to evangelize.
Vigil, who was in Mexico and working on the Camarena case at the time, explained why the investigation focused on the murder of the DEA agent.
I think the DEA focused on the Kiki Camarena case and then on the drug trafficking charges. I don’t think the DEA, it’s not that they weren’t interested in the other murders, but it probably would have come into maybe another agency’s jurisdiction.
One of the things that we focused on a lot was bringing these people to justice, simply because the DEA is committed that if one of our agents is killed, we will hunt these people to the end of the world, and we will not notice. expenses or in any activity that we have to do to get it, he said.
Lannie Walker said that if Caro Quintero is extradited to the United States and is convicted and punished here, that would be a bit of justice.
That probably won’t happen soon. Caro Quintero’s lawyers appealed to the court – and the judge agreed – to make sure that he goes through the entire extradition process and has the possibility to present the corresponding appeals if necessary. The extradition of former Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán took a year.
We have hope, Walker said. But we are well aware of how the Mexican government and the Mexican judicial system have functioned, as far as our father’s case is concerned, up until now. So we are hopeful, but nervous that what happened in 2013 could happen again, he said, alluding to a misguided decision by a Mexican appeals court that allowed her to leave prison until his capture this month.
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