One of the founders of the notorious Guadalajara Cartel from the 1980s has been released from prison after serving 40 years.
Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, also known as “Don Neto,” who is reportedly 94 years old, had been under house arrest since 2016 due to ill health and old age. He was arrested in 1985 at a luxury residence in Puerto Vallarta following the murder of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
Fonseca never admitted to directly participating in Camarena’s murder but was convicted for his role in the crime and other drug-related charges. He referred to the DEA agent’s abduction and killing as “a serious error” and placed the blame entirely on his fellow Guadalajara Cartel founder, Rafael Caro Quintero.
Caro Quintero, the DEA’s number-one target, served three decades in Mexican maximum-security prisons before being extradited to the United States in February of this year.
Although U.S. authorities have never abandoned their pursuit of justice for Camarena’s murder, reports confirm that Fonseca Carrillo was removed from the list of “extraditables” during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto.
In the 1970s and 80s, “Don Neto” and the Guadalajara Cartel dominated the trafficking of marijuana and opium poppies in Mexico’s Golden Triangle—a mountainous region in northern Mexico, particularly Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua, known for cultivating these illicit crops.
As noted by El País, Fonseca Carrillo “rewrote the history of drug trafficking, established ties with cartels abroad, and professionalized the mechanics of his organization—a model that would be followed, to varying degrees, by subsequent cartels.”