Defective and even false: This is how the material evidence that allowed the United States to convict a former Mexican police officer for the kidnapping and murder of the DEA agent is considered, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar, a case that dates back to 1985, in which the drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero is also involved, and which will now be reopened by order of the judge John A. Kronstadt, Member of the Court for the Central District of California.
The main beneficiary of this measure is Raul Lopez Alvarez, a former judicial police officer from the state of Jalisco, arrested in October 1987 on US soil, who was sentenced to 240 years in prison for aiding, abetting and participating -in aid of organized crime- in Camarena’s kidnapping; conspiracy to kidnap a federal agent; kidnapping of a federal agent, and participating in the felony homicide of the DEA agent.
This is a decision with which the United States Attorney’s Office agreed, because the defendant was found responsible for participating in the crime of Enrique Camarena based on evidence that is now known to be doubtful, according to the ruling of the Judge Kronstadt, whose copy he owns HIGH LEVEL.
These pieces of evidence were provided in the trial of López Álvarez for Michael Malone, a senior examiner in the FBI’s Hair and Fiber Unit, who “repeatedly created scientifically unsupportable laboratory reports and provided false testimony, misleading or inaccurate in criminal trials”, reveals a report by a Working Group of the US Department of Justice, which served to justify the reopening of the case.
Malone was one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who traveled to Mexico weeks after the discovery of the body of agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who was kidnapped and killed in Guadalajara, in February 1985, on the orders of the drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero.
At that time, the Mexican government allowed FBI personnel to collect evidence at the house where Camarena Salazar, an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who was investigating the now-defunct Guadalajara cartel, was held captive. whose leader was Caro Quintero.
Part of the findings that were allegedly obtained in the property served to accuse the former police officer Raul Lopez Alvarez, who was located on the farm where Camarena was tortured from a hair. This evidence was reinforced with the statements that the defendant himself made to an undercover DEA agent, in which he presumed to have been a witness to the crime.
Malone’s Inventions
Michael Malone is described in the US Department of Justice Task Force report as a forensic expert who “became well known to many judges and the law enforcement community” due to his involvement in numerous high-profile cases.
In the criminal proceedings against López Álvarez, he claimed to have found several hairs in the house where Enrique Camarena was held captive, one of those strands presumably belonged to the former police officer. In that trial, the evidence collected by the expert was not questioned, since the defendant himself had given details of the torture to which the DEA agent was subjected.
However, over the past 20 years, the United States Department of Justice has had several cases reversed after it was found that Malone’s evidence cannot be supported in scientific terms.
“Their testimony that an individual hair could be determined to belong unequivocally to only one person in the world, based solely on microscopic analysis, had no scientific basis,” the Task Force report said.
With this, the judge John A. Kronstadt decided to annul the long sentence of Raúl López Álvarez so that he can be tried again next September, which brings the entire Camarena case to the fore, since the former judicial police officer from Jalisco was convicted in a trial whose main defendant is Rafael Caro Quintero .
As it will be remembered, this Mexican drug trafficker was arrested by elements of the Navy on July 15, 2022. A month later, the United States asked Mexico for his extradition to be tried for violent crimes in aid of organized crime; help and criminal complicity; and the murder and kidnapping of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar.
Caro Quintero, 69, has remained since then in the maximum security prison of the Altiplano in the State of Mexico, although his shipment to the American Union is on hold thanks to a suspension that was granted to him -in an amparo trial- by a Court of the state of Jalisco, a precautionary measure that was later ratified by a judge of the Mexican entity.
In this sense, when this case was reopened in the United States, the Prosecutor’s Office of that country will have to prove again everything that happened with the kidnapping and murder of Camarena Salazar, a crime that remains unpunished, at least as far as its mastermind is concerned.
As for Raúl López Álvarez, his new trial does not necessarily imply that he will be able to go free, since the ex-policeman can be sentenced again, despite the fact that now He claims he was just “bluffing” when, without knowing that his interlocutor was an undercover DEA agent, he detailed what happened 38 years ago with Enrique Camarena, in a house on Lope de Vega street in Guadalajara.
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surya palaces Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal analysis and human rights. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.