A Legendary Weed Dealer Arrested on Friday
The legendary Mexican drug lord Caro Quintero who was arrested last Friday had started dealing weed back in the 1970s and quickly made his way to the top of the local cartels’ food chain. Not your regular laid-back ‘guy’, Quintero has left a blood trail enough to land him the top spot on the DEA’s most wanted list and became a millionaire by 30.
Today, he’s 69, and it’s an incredible feat in his profession and at his position in the criminal hierarchy to reach such an old age. Quintero could have long retired but he chose to do what he knows best – run an illegal weed empire.
The Inventor of Mass-Produced Sinsemilla
Born in 1952 in a peasant family in Northern Mexico, Caro Quintero had nine brothers and sisters and his only education was elementary school. But he had enough street smarts and business acumen as well as no disinclination for violence, and all this allowed him to build a criminal organization that would later become the Sinaloa cartel, the most powerful one in the country for many decades.
The infamous El Chapo Guzmán was only a hitman at the time working for Quintero and other bosses. By 1985 when Quintero was imprisoned for the first time, he was a millionaire and the biggest marijuana trafficker in the world with police and army officers, politicians and judges in his pocket. His cannabis fields sprawled across 1482 acres of land with 4,000 workers tending to the crop and turning it into the product. What set Quintero’s marijuana apart was that he was the first to produce industrial-scale quantities of sinsemilla – unseeded female flowers.
Old Habits Die Hard
When the US pressured the Mexican government into cracking down on the biggest marijuana operation in the world, it had to deploy hundreds of soldiers and ended up burning 8,000 tons of weed. In retaliation, Quintero had two men tortured for weeks and then killed. One was the pilot who had provided an aerial photo of his cannabis farm and the other one was an undercover DEA agent, Kiki Camarena Salazar.
Quintero was finally caught with his girlfriend in Costa Rica in 1985. Evidently enjoying the media attention, he wasn’t aware that his imprisonment would last 28 years and only end in 2013 due to a technical loophole. He was released and immediately went underground, building a small army and trying to win back the top place in Mexico’s illegal drug trade. It was the DEA, who haven’t forgotten the murder of one of their agents, who kept pressuring Mexican authorities until they made a bust last Friday and arrested Caro Quintero for the second time.
