MEXICO CITY — Mexico extradited 29 alleged drug traffickers to the United States on Thursday, including Rafael Caro Quintero, a prized target long sought in the killing of a U.S. narcotics agent, and two leaders of the hyper-violent Zetas cartel, in a dramatic gesture apparently aimed at heading off crushing economic sanctions, according to U.S. officials.
President Donald Trump has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico next week for what he calls its failure to stop drugs – especially fentanyl – from crossing the border. A high-level Mexican delegation met Thursday with senior Trump administration officials in an effort to hammer out a deal to avoid the economic penalties.
“Twenty-nine, that’s huge! What they’ve done is literally cleaned out the cupboard,” said John Feeley, a former U.S. diplomat who served as deputy chief of mission in Mexico from 2009 to 2012. Normally, he said, extraditions of major capos were handled one by one, often involving long negotiations. But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was “pulling out all the stops” to avoid the tariffs, he said.
The government did not identify those extradited. But the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release that they included Caro Quintero, who was long the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted man. He was accused in the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena in Mexico in 1985. Caro Quintero was freed from a Mexican prison on a technicality in 2013, to the outrage of DEA officials. After years of pursuing the drug lord, Mexican troops finally arrested him again in 2022.
Also sent to the United States were Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, according to the DOJ statement. Their Zetas cartel dominated much of central and northern Mexico starting around 2007. The group was dismantled a decade ago by the Mexican armed forces, but U.S. authorities alleged the brothers continued to run a Zetas offshoot, the Northeast cartel, from a Mexican prison.
The DOJ release said Mexico carried out the extraditions in response to a recent decision by Trump to designate six Mexican cartels as terrorist groups. The Mexican government did not comment, beyond a brief statement saying the 29 people were sought “because of their ties to criminal organizations” involved in drug trafficking.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a drug-policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the extraditions are “all part and parcel of the package the Mexican government is putting on the table to avoid the 25 percent tariffs.” Mexico also has been alarmed by suggestions from some Trump administration officials that U.S. military strikes should be carried out to weaken the cartels.
While the extraditions were welcome, the U.S. government should instead emphasize a broader demand for law enforcement to actively collaborate with Mexico in rounding up and dismantling criminal networks, Felbab-Brown said.
The Caro Quintero case has long been extremely sensitive for the DEA; U.S. officials at the highest levels had pressed Mexico to find and rearrest him after he managed to leave prison. He is accused of ordering the kidnapping of Camarena, allegedly as a punishment for the agent’s investigations. Camarena’s body was found on March 5, 1985, in a plastic bag on a remote Mexican ranch.
The murder was a central plotline of the Netflix series “Narcos, Mexico.”
Caro Quintero “has spent four decades atop DEA’s most wanted fugitive list,” said the agency’s acting administrator, Derek S. Maltz. “This moment is extremely personal for the men and women of DEA.”
Caro Quintero, 72, was being sent to New York, the DOJ said. He faces charges of leading a criminal organization and participating in the kidnapping, torture and murder of Camarena. Prosecutors have accused his drug organization of sending tons of methamphetamines, cocaine and heroin from Mexico to the United States from 1980 to 2017.
The Treviño Morales brothers have been indicted in the District of Columbia on charges of “trafficking massive quantities of narcotics into the United States,” Nicole Argentieri, then-head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in October.
The Zetas were originally formed as an armed wing of the Gulf Cartel. Many of the group’s early members were recruited from Mexican army special-forces troops. The group was known for its extreme cruelty – including beheading its enemies, killing Central American migrants it suspected of alliances with other groups and burning its enemies’ bodies in diesel-fueled fires.
Miguel Ángel Morales, in his early 50s, started out as a local gangster in the border town of Nuevo Laredo before joining the Zetas. He was known as Z-40. His younger brother, Omar, or Z-42, succeeded his brother as the Zetas leader following his arrest. Omar was himself detained in 2015.
Trump had initially said the penalties on Mexico and Canada would take effect in early February unless those countries drastically curbed the flow of migrants and illegal fentanyl over their borders with the United States. Mexico won a temporary reprieve by sending 10,000 extra National Guard forces to the border. But Trump posted on his Truth Social platform Thursday morning that he intended to go ahead with the sanctions.
“Drugs are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels,” he wrote.
Fentanyl has set off the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history. But deaths from overdoses, and quantities of the opioid seized in the United States, have declined over the past year, officials say.