Rafael Caro Quintero, Notorious Mexican Drug Lord, Is Arraigned in New York

A Mexican drug lord notorious for his role in a U.S. drug enforcement agent’s brutal 1985 murder was arraigned on sweeping drug-trafficking charges in New York on Friday.

The arraignment of the drug lord, Rafael Caro Quintero, a founding member of the Sinaloa Cartel, came a day after he was transferred to the United States from Mexico in a move that potentially signaled a new era of cooperation between the two countries.

Mr. Caro Quintero was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn along with Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, a former leader of the Juarez Cartel.

Mr. Caro Quintero, 72, was charged in a superseding indictment in 2020 with smuggling thousands of kilograms of illegal drugs across the U.S. border as well as with a four-decade effort to murder his rivals. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, 62, was charged in a separate indictment with similar crimes from 1990 to 2014. Both men pleaded not guilty on Friday and were held without bail.

Saritha Komatireddy, an assistant U. S. attorney, said at the arraignment that Mr. Caro Quintero and his associates had “pioneered the Mexican drug-trafficking industry.”

The arraignments came a day after the Mexican authorities turned the two men and 27 other top drug-cartel operatives over to their American counterparts in an extraordinary move. The transfer was widely seen as a sign of Mexico’s willingness to increase its cooperation with U.S. plans to crack down on its criminal mafias.

President Trump and his allies have pressured Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, with threats of tariffs on her country’s goods and suggestions that the United States might take military action in Mexico if officials there did not work to stem the flow of drugs.

But while the handovers of Mr. Caro Quintero and Mr. Carrillo Fuentes on Thursday came against that backdrop, they were also the product of highly sensitive negotiations between U.S. and Mexican officials that unfolded over several weeks, aided by American experts with deep experience in dealing with the cartels, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Bringing Mr. Caro Quintero, in particular, to the United States has been an obsession for U.S. officials since long before Mr. Trump became fixated on defeating the cartels.

And as word of Friday’s court appearance spread in law enforcement circles, federal agents and prosecutors, along with retired colleagues who had worked on cases connected to Mr. Caro Quintero, hastily made plans to travel to the Brooklyn courthouse.

He and a second man were convicted in Mexico in 1989 of murdering Enrique Camarena, an undercover drug enforcement agent known as Kiki, four years earlier. Both defendants were sentenced to 40 years in prison in the killing; convictions on other charges that included kidnapping and drug trafficking stretched the sentences to more than 100 years apiece.

The gruesome killing of Mr. Camarena, whose body was found mutilated and wrapped in a plastic bag on a ranch southwest of Guadalajara, was a seminal moment in U.S.-Mexico relations.

It is considered to have accelerated the war on drugs, intensifying both countries’ efforts to eradicate the cartels and increasing American involvement in targeting the organizations’ leaders.

The wound left by Mr. Camarena’s murder was reopened in August 2013, when Mr. Caro Quintero was released from prison in the middle of the night after serving only 28 years of his sentence, thanks to a legal loophole.

The United States asked Mexico to rearrest him, but he evaded the authorities for nine years before being captured in Sinaloa in 2022.

“He was a fugitive hiding in the jungles of Sinaloa, hoping we would forget,” Ms. Komatireddy said during the arraignment. “But justice never forgets.”

Ms. Komatireddy noted that more than 100 drug enforcement agents were in the courtroom to “honor the memory of one of their own.”

The transfer to the United States of Mr. Caro Quintero and the others took place not under the longstanding extradition treaty between the two countries, but rather in response to Mr. Trump’s recent order designating six drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement Thursday night.

The order allowed for the men to be sent across the border without protracted court proceedings in Mexico. It also opened the possibility that federal prosecutors in the United States could seek terrorism and death penalty charges against them, Ms. Bondi said.

In a news release announcing the transfers, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called Mr. Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world.”

The Sinaloa Cartel, the indictment says, employed vicious hitmen known as sicarios who exacted brutality on anyone who stood in their path.

While Mr. Caro Quintero was the focus of attention in court on Friday, prosecutors also arraigned Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, a significant figure in his own right.

Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, who is known as El Viceroy, was a longtime leader of the Juarez Cartel. He took over the border gang from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, his older brother, who died unexpectedly in 1997 while having plastic surgery.

The younger Mr. Carrillo Fuentes was first charged in Brooklyn in 2009 in an indictment that was updated 10 years later. It accuses him of smuggling thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States and conspiring to murder his organization’s rivals.

Until 2004, Mr. Carrillo Fuentes and the Juarez Cartel were closely allied with the Sinaloa Cartel, which was run at the time by the infamous drug lords Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada García, who is also known as El Mayo.

But after bitter disputes over turf and trust, the Juarez organization split with Sinaloa and the two criminal groups fought a bloody battle for control of Juarez, resulting in one of the goriest urban conflicts in the history of the drug war.

The Mexican authorities arrested Mr. Carrillo Fuentes in 2014 and tried, convicted and ultimately sentenced him to 28 years in prison.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York has a long history of pursuing Mexican cartels and their leaders, including Mr. Caro Quintero’s organization and his associates.

Mr. Guzmán was prosecuted in the Eastern District, where he was convicted on a vast set of criminal-enterprise charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2019.

The office is currently handling the case against Mr. Zambada García, who will go on trial in Brooklyn after being abducted in Mexico over the summer by one of Mr. Guzmán’s sons and forcibly flown across the border into U.S. custody.

In 2023, Ismael Quintero Arellanes, whom prosecutors have said is Mr. Caro Quintero’s nephew and right-hand man, was extradited and arraigned in Brooklyn federal court on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

Craig Heeren, a former Eastern District deputy chief of national security and cybercrime, said the arraignments on Friday reflected the “aggressive and international focus” of the office.

“The prosecutors at E.D.N.Y. are tenacious and take the long view on their investigations,” Mr. Heeren said.

The office also secured the October 2024 conviction of Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former top law enforcement official, who was sentenced to 38 years in prison for taking millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.