California family’s anti-terrorism suit trods new ground in targeting Sinaloa cartel for DEA agent’s killing

When the family of a slain U.S. federal agent sued the Sinaloa cartel and three infamous drug traffickers this month, it was believed to be the first Anti-Terrorism Act lawsuit ever filed in the San Diego region, as well as the first such lawsuit in the nation targeting a Mexican drug-trafficking organization.

An attorney for the family of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent killed in 1985 in Mexico, said the unprecedented lawsuit had been in the works for more than a year, but the process was accelerated by two recent events — the designation of the Sinaloa cartel as a foreign terrorist organization and the arrival in the U.S. of former drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, the alleged mastermind behind Camarena’s death.

“We expected Kiki to come back from Guadalajara and settle in San Diego and continue with his family and raise his kids — Caro Quintero took that away from us,” sister Myrna Camarena said Friday. “He took away Kiki from us and his three children.”

While Caro Quintero is now facing federal criminal charges in Brooklyn related to drug trafficking and Camarena’s death, his family’s anti-terrorism civil suit in San Diego federal court will highlight a unique area of the law in which U.S. citizens seek justice through civil penalties against terrorist groups. In most such cases, the designated terrorist groups don’t defend themselves, which often results in default judgments for plaintiffs that can be worth tens of millions of dollars — if the plaintiffs can collect on the damages awarded them.

Myrna Camarena, who worked for the DEA in an administrative role at the urging of her brother, said money is not the motivation for her family after they waited 40 years for Caro Quintero to be brought to the U.S.

“That has nothing to do with it,” she said. “This is justice being brought because Kiki paid his life.”

The agent and the drug lords

Camarena, who was born in Mexico but raised in Calexico, was 37 years old on Feb. 7, 1985, when five gunmen abducted him off the street in Guadalajara near the U.S. Consulate. Another group of gunmen kidnapped his pilot, Alfredo Zavala-Avelar, at a different location. Both men were taken to the same house and tortured for about 30 hours and then killed.

U.S. officials have said that the leaders of the Guadalajara cartel, including Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo and Caro Quintero, blamed the DEA agent for a raid by Mexican law enforcement on a marijuana plantation, and that they ordered his death as payback.

The DEA launched “Operation Leyenda” to investigate Camarena’s death. Caro Quintero initially fled to Costa Rica, but eventually he was captured and extradited to Mexico, where he, Félix Gallardo and Fonseca Carrillo were all convicted for their roles in Camarena’s slaying.

Each of the drug lords was sentenced to 40 years in Mexican prison, though a judge ordered Caro Quintero released in 2013 on a technicality. He immediately went underground but was recaptured in 2022.

Last month, the Mexican government expelled 29 imprisoned cartel figures to the U.S., bypassing the normal extradition process. Caro Quintero was among the group.

“I was very skeptical (I would ever see this day),” said Notre Dame law professor Jimmy Gurulé, who as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s helped lead the investigation into Camarena’s slaying and in 1987 indicted Caro Quintero and several co-defendants on federal charges in Los Angeles.

Gurulé said Mexico’s expulsion of Caro Quintero and others last month was “politically motivated” by President Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs. Mike Elsner, legal counsel for the Camarena family in their anti-terrorism lawsuit, also credited Caro Quintero’s expulsion on Trump’s economic pressure on Mexico. Elsner said that move “further opened the door” for his firm, Motley Rice, to sue Caro Quintero in the U.S., though it was a decision one week earlier that had the biggest impact.

From TCO to FTO

On Trump’s first day back in the White House for his second term, he signed an executive order directing the State Department to designate drug-trafficking cartels operating in the Western Hemisphere as foreign terrorist organizations. The order did not name specific cartels, but on Feb. 20 the State Department designated six Mexican drug-trafficking groups, among them the Sinaloa cartel, which it described as “one of the world’s most powerful drug cartels … (that) has used violence to murder, kidnap, and intimidate civilians, government officials, and journalists.”

Gurulé became an expert in terrorism financing after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, while serving as undersecretary for enforcement with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He said the terrorist designation for drug cartels made sense.

“It was certainly unprecedented because you think of foreign terrorist organizations as al-Qaeda and ISIS,” he said. “So this was unique, but I think it has some merit. Because you look at the power the drug cartels wield in Mexico … Those acts of violence are intended to intimidate a civilian population. They’re intended to influence government policy, like the Camarena kidnapping, torture and murder was intended to send a message to the U.S. government and to the DEA – ‘don’t investigate us, and if you do, this is what’s going to happen.’”

Tricia Bacon, the director of the Policy Anti-Terrorism Hub at American University in Washington, D.C., said that while drug-trafficking cartels likely meet the legal definition of terrorist organizations, designating them as transnational criminal organizations typically achieves the same objectives.

“A TCO is about making money, and an FTO is about an ideological and political objective,” said Bacon, who spent more than a decade working on counterterrorism initiatives for the State Department. “We should not treat financially motivated organizations as terrorist organizations.”

Bacon said that street-level drug dealers, drug users buying from them or undocumented immigrants led across the border by someone linked to a terrorist-designated cartel could now be charged under the wide-ranging federal law that criminalizes material support for terrorism.

“Treating narcotics and criminal activity as terrorism, in my mind, encourages the worst impulses of politicizing the term ‘terrorism,’” Bacon said. “Terrorism becomes this meaningless term that’s used to basically describe anyone you don’t like.”

For the Camarena family and their attorneys, the designation opened a new avenue to try to seek justice for Kiki.

The Anti-Terrorism Act

For more than three decades since Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism Act in 1992, U.S. citizens harmed by acts of terrorism have had the option to sue the terrorist groups responsible. The most well-known cases involve the survivors and families of the 2,977 people killed in the 9/11 attacks. They have sued not only al-Qaeda but also the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, alleging that the Saudis provided financing and other support for the hijackers.

While Saudi Arabia has hired attorneys to defend it against the allegations, most designated terrorist organizations don’t respond to summons or participate in any way in the civil litigation. Even just serving a summons to such a group can be difficult for plaintiffs if the defendants are based in a country where U.S. mail can’t be delivered, though judges can approve workarounds, such as the filing of notices in media outlets based near the defendants.

Elsner, the attorney for the Camarena family, said serving notice of the lawsuit to Caro Quintero will be much simpler since he is in U.S. custody, and there are proven ways to serve notice to those in Mexico such as Félix Gallardo and Fonseca Carrillo, who are also named as defendants.

But the attorney acknowledged that most terrorist groups have “very little” motivation to participate in a civil lawsuit. This usually results in a judge entering a default judgment for damages in favor of the plaintiffs.

Those awards can be hefty but can also turn out to be largely symbolic without a good way to collect, Gurulé said.

Both Gurulé and Elsner said plaintiffs can go after assets controlled by a designated terrorist group, but Bacon said that might be difficult when it comes to the Sinaloa cartel, since it’s long been designated a transnational criminal organization, and U.S. firms and banking institutions have been barred from doing business with figures linked to the cartel.

There can be other ways to make terrorists pay, however. In a previous terrorism-related case in San Diego, a judge ordered a San Diego defense contractor that had previously done business with Iran to pay $9.4 million to victims of Iranian-linked terror attacks.

In the Camarena family’s case, there is also the question of naming the Sinaloa cartel as one of the defendants when it did not yet exist in 1985. But Elsner argued the Sinaloa cartel can be properly named as a defendant since it was formed by leaders of the Guadalajara cartel.

“If members of a group subsequently form a different organization, they can be held responsible for the prior bad acts” of the first group, Elsner said. He likened it to a new business that buys an older business and takes on both its assets and liabilities.

“It’s the same general theory with the Sinaloa cartel — here you have a bunch of people who were engaged really in the foundation and formation of cartels in Mexico … and they subsequently formed these other cartels, which are now FTOs,” Elsner said. “So they can be held responsible for the acts of the prior group.”