Chapter Eleven

THE TORTURE BEGINS

Raul is a soft-spoken man, his skin is smooth and unworried, a handsome face like something seen in cinema, not narco hit squads. He has moved on, and thanks to witness protection, he has embedded himself in America. He runs several small businesses and he has a new family. He has left the past behind, and he only talks now because agent Hector Berrellez has asked him to return to those days and tell what he saw and heard.

Raul comes from the state police. He recalls the same meetings as Berrellez’s other main informations — Godoy and Ramon—leading up to the kidnapping of Camarena, with the same cast of capos, law enforcement, major politicians, and the military. He remembers the day the Jehovah’s Witnesses rang the doorbell. They are praying to God to save them when the bullets tear into them.

“Now,” he allows, “it is a horrible thing but at the time it was what everyone was doing.”

He is at La Langosta restaurant when the two Americans enter and Caro Quintero orders them seized.

He hears Caro Quintero tell presidential hopeful Bartlett Diáz, “Remember us when you get up high.”

Twice Raul sees a different American agent at Fonseca’s home, the guy who comes for money and packs it in a garment bag. He says he’s there when Max Gomez and Bartlett Díaz come by for the money packed in cardboard boxes and Caro Quintero says, “Here’s your money, now let’s get to work.”

And he’s there at the house on Lope de Vega Street on February 7, 1985, the morning of Camarena’s capture. About 40 people have gathered including Caro Quintero and Félix Gallardo and their bodyguards. DFS personnel and state police also attend. At 12:30 p.m. a man shows up who is known to work at the American consulate and immediately the group focuses on the actual kidnapping of the DEA agent. The consulate figure tells Fonseca’s key henchman that everything is set according to the schedule “I gave you earlier.”

A caravan of four vehicles heads for the consulate. One car is dropped off as an escape option if things go bad, the others take up surveillance positions. Fonseca parks two blocks away.

Raul is in the car with the consulate employee who had insisted that Camarena would exit from the south door on Calle Libertad. It is sometime after 2 p.m. The consulate employee suddenly signals “Mira ese es [Look, there he is].” Raul and two other men exit the car and approach Camarena.

The henchman flashes his DFS credentials and says, “The comandante wants to see you.”

Camarena begins to reply, “When we are summoned and our services are needed it is done through…” This response is cut short when the officer sticks a gun into Camarena’s ribs and shoves him into the backseat of the car. Raul pulls Camarena’s jacket over his head and the man from the consulate drives the car back to the house on Lope de Vega Street. The henchman makes a brief radio announcement to those involved in the operation: “The doctor has seen the patient.”