U.S. officials are celebrating the capture of Rafael Caro Quintero, the Mexican drug lord wanted for the kidnapping, torture, and execution in 1985 of a DEA agent named Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who had been assigned to operate in Mexico as part of the U.S. war on drugs. Caro Quintero had already served 28 years in jail in Mexico for his role in the Camarena crime when he was released in 2013 by a Mexican judge. U.S. officials have never given up trying to find him and bring him to justice here in the United States. In 2018, they offered a $20 million reward for his capture.
The entire Camarena saga is set forth in Netflix’s great series Narco Mexico. According to Wikipedia, after Camarena’s murder, the DEA launched Operation Leyenda, “the largest DEA homicide investigation ever undertaken.” It involved sending a DEA team to Mexico to investigate and bring to justice every single person involved in Camarena’s kidnapping, torture, and murder. Their actions included kidnapping suspects and forcibly bringing them back to the United States for trial.
DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena
Under deep pressure from U.S. officials, Caro Quintero, who was in charge of the Guadalajara drug cartel, was ultimately convicted in Mexico of participating in the crime. He received a 40-year jail sentence. With his recapture, the U.S. government is now seeking his extradition so that he can be prosecuted here in the United States for Camarena’s murder. (It goes without saying that Caro Quintero’s long jail sentence did nothing to help win the war on drugs, which continues to this day.)
That’s how we expect federal officials to operate. When a federal official is murdered, federal officials will pull out all the stops to determine all of the people involved in the crime, if for no other reason than to deter others from killing federal officials.
Many years ago, a federal judge in San Antonio named John Wood was assassinated. Just like in the Camarena case, federal officials pulled out all the stops to investigate and bring to justice everyone involved in the assassination. That included monitoring communications between lawyers and their clients.
None of this should surprise us. That’s exactly how we expect federal officials to operate when a federal official is murdered.
It’s no different, of course, at the state and local level. When someone kills a cop, all the other police officers immediately make that crime their top priority. Just like federal officials, they pull out all the stops to investigate and bring to justice all of the people involved in the cop-killing.
What does all this have to do with the Kennedy assassination?
As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, things worked completely differently in the Kennedy assassination. That’s how we know that something serious was amiss with respect to that assassination of a U.S. president.
The official narrative in the Kennedy assassination is that Kennedy was assassinated by a purported lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald who just happened to be at the right place at the right time. The JFK assassination occurred on Friday, November 22. Two days later — Sunday, November 24 — Oswald was himself assassinated.
On that day — November 24, only two days after Kennedy had been assassinated — FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover decided that official investigations into the president’s murder should now be terminated. He said that there could be no doubt that Oswald was a lone shooter.
The very next day — Monday, November 25 — Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent out a memo stating that it was imperative that Americans be convinced that Oswald was a lone assassin.
How in the world could Hoover and Katzenbach possibly know that? Even if Oswald was a shooter, how could they decide so quickly that he didn’t have confederates?
Like I stated above, that’s just not how federal officials operate when a federal official is murdered. They pull out all the stops to bring to justice everyone involved in the crime. With the murder of a U.S. president, the efforts to ascertain everyone involved in the crime and bring them to justice would be much greater than with the murder of a DEA agent or a federal judge.
As the risk of belaboring the obvious, in order to ascertain everyone involved in the Kennedy assassination, a full investigation would be needed, one that we would last at least several weeks, if not months.
There was a very good reason why everything worked differently in the Kennedy assassination and why Hoover and Katzenbach and other federal officials felt the urgent need to break with standard practice by immediately shutting down any further investigation into determining all the people involved in the assassination of a U.S. president. It’s all set forth in Chapters 18 and 19 of my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. Buy it today at Amazon. $14.95 print version. $9.95 Kindle version.