A portion of this story, which appears in Spy Talk, is being republished here with permission.
By Elaine Shannon
Does the world need another Deep State conspiracy theory?
Amazon Studios obviously thinks so.
In these grim times, with tens of millions of Americans frightened, angry and ready to believe the worst about their government and each other, Amazon Studios and Amazon Prime have inexplicably chosen to stream a disturbing pseudo-documentary that falsely claims that the CIA and the DEA conspired with Mexican drug kingpins to torture and murder a brave American.
The Last Narc, produced by Texas filmmaker Tiller Russell, is a cynical reimagining of the 1985 death of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who was dragged into a car outside the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara on February 7, 1985. DEA and FBI agents assigned to Operation Leyenda, as DEA called the murder investigation, plunged deep into Mexico. They didn’t find every fact, but they got enough of them to be sure that the horrendous crime was orchestrated by Guadalajara cartel kingpins and corrupt Mexican officials at all levels.
As a correspondent for Newsweek, then Time, I followed the investigators as they pounded the streets of Guadalajara, the dirt tracks along the border, the sterile hallways of the FBI forensics lab and government executive suites in Washington. I broke dozens of stories about the murder and the growth of the Latin cartels. I wrote a best-selling book, Desperados, published in 1988, about the Camarena case and the narcokleptocracy that killed him.
Along the way I met dozens of heroes—honest men and women, badge-wearers and civilians, citizens of several countries, who turned up truths deemed inconvenient by much of official Washington, Mexico City, Wall Street and international banks addicted to drug money.
One hero was U.S. Customs Commissioner Willy von Raab, who, a week after Camarena disappeared, ordered 100 percent inspections of all people and vehicles attempting to cross from Mexico. He effectively slammed the border shut and unrepentantly incurred the wrath of his boss, Treasury Secretary (and future secretary of state) James Baker, one of the most formidable humans ever to park his wingtips under a mahogany desk in the nation’s capital. But Von Raab’s bold move worked. On March 5, after merchants on both sides of the border howled in financial pain, the Mexican police “discovered” Camarena’s body, exhumed from a shallow grave in Guadalajara and dumped on a roadside in the next state.
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