‘Desperados’ Relives the Brutal Murder of a U.S. Drug Agent

Michael Mann and NBC aren’t going to Mexico to shoot “Desperados,” their miniseries about the 1985 kidnapping and murder of an American drug enforcement agent in Guadalajara. “No one in this production has suicidal tendencies. We aren’t taking stupidity pills here,” says Mann, the executive producer.

Instead, most of the filming is being done here, with Spain set to stand in later for Guadalajara, where agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena was snatched off the street one February afternoon while on his way to have lunch with his wife. Camarena was tortured and interrogated by drug smugglers for three days before being killed--with the complicity, the film makers contend, of Mexican police and politicians.

The six-hour miniseries shows how Camarena’s “compulsion to get to the source, the guys who became rich victimizing America’s youth, got him taken out,” says Steven Bauer, who plays Camarena. “He was close, so they killed him.”

Based on Elaine Shannon’s 1988 similarly titled investigative book, “Desperados” describes Camarena’s quest and the U.S. government’s lengthy pursuit of his killers and their official protectors. Three Mexicans were convicted in Los Angeles of the murder but others believed to have taken part have eluded U.S. prosecution.

“The Drug Enforcement Agency’s relentless push to bring Camarena’s killers to justice caused untold damage to the traffickers’ network,” says Mann, the former executive producer of “Miami Vice.” “They’d give their right arms to roll the clock back.”

Nevertheless, despite the action in the Camarena case, more drugs than ever enter the United States through Mexico. From 15% to perhaps as much as 33% of all the cocaine consumed here comes via Mexico, up from 1% to 2% in 1985, according to U.S. officials.

Mann’s miniseries takes the view that Camarena and other Drug Enforcement Agency men lacked Washington’s full support. “Other branches of the Reagan Administration had different agendas,” Mann says. “If you’re going to declare a war on drugs, it’s a little hypocritical to put impediments in the way.”

“Partly, the show is an indictment,” Bauer says. Quoting the slogan of former First Lady Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign, he adds, “ ‘Just Say No’? The DEA guys I’ve met--quite a few--say that if the U.S. government pressured the Mexicans into giving us diplomatic immunity, then we’d believe they meant, ‘Say no.’ ”

The Drug Enforcement Agency is cooperating with “Desperados” to the extent of stationing agent John Marcelli on the set, taking time out from his usual interdiction duties at Los Angeles International Airport.

“Desperados” shows the agency “doing everything possible, up to the present, to pursue the killers and their protectors,” Mann says. “The head of the agency went on ‘Nightline’ to accuse the Mexicans of corruption. Most of the guys on the DEA are the kind who are so committed they’re in the car on the way to work while their wives are still pouring the coffee.”

Camarena was such a man. He fought the restrictions on DEA activity on foreign soil. In the scene being shot today, in which the Van Nuys airport is standing in for Guadalajara, Camarena and another agent are “overflying” a vast marijuana farm in central Mexico. Actually, the light plane they’re in never leaves the ground, for it’s mounted on a special platform called a gimbal, which pitches and yaws in movements simulating buffeting in flight. A light is rotated in front of the plane’s windshield, suggesting the play of sunlight.

After his “flight,” Bauer addresses one of the Camarena story’s imponderables: Why did Mexico’s biggest marijuana and heroin traffickers jeopardize their operation by antagonizing the U.S. government? As Bauer sees it, “They felt Camarena was the face of the disturbance they we1919230067police he worked with furnished a picture of him.

“So the bosses singled him out as one of the main pests. They wanted to know how much the U.S. government knew. They never communicated or asked for a ransom because they had no demands. They killed him afterwards because they had no use for him and to prove they didn’t give a damn for what any government could do to them--because they had all the money in the world.”

But they made one mistake: Inexplicably, they taped Camarena’s interrogation. A transcript was later filed in Los Angeles federal court by the U.S. government in support of murder charges against three men who last year were convicted and sentenced in connection with Camarena’s death. Six other Mexicans who were indicted with them have not been apprehended by U.S. authorities.

“It’s stranger than fiction,” Bauer says. “Why did they tape it? Why were the tapes kept? I don’t know.”

The miniseries will include scenes of the interrogation, with dialogue taken from the tape.

“It’s awful,” Bauer says. “I was wiped out when I read the lines. They broke his nose, his ribs, so his voice was affected. They’d turn the machine off, beat him up some more, then turn it back on.

“It seems like the boss trafficker who grabbed Camarena let all the corrupt higher-ups in Mexico know. He said, ‘Come to my house and ask Camarena if the U.S. knows about you. And you can slap him around if you want.’ On the tape there are up to 40 voices of people who all took a crack at Camarena.”

After Camarena’s death, his widow “kept the pressure on the U.S. government,” says Elizabeth Pena, who plays Mika Camarena. “When they came to Mika after Kiki’s death, they thought it would be a condolence meeting. They weren’t aware of the extent to which she knew about his work. They were shocked by her educated demand for action.

“When I met her, I found her very centered, very much sustained by faith in God. She felt then and feels now that Kiki was being used--though she’s not bitter. I asked her how Kiki would feel about a miniseries telling his story. She said, ‘He’s up there laughing.’ ”

Pena says she is relieved not to be playing the part of “another woman who gets beat up,” as she did in “La Bamba” and does again in the upcoming film “Blue Steel.” Today, she is dressed in black to play a scene in which she scatters Camarena’s ashes from a plane--in fact, the same plane in which Bauer played his scene earlier that day.

Pena and Bauer are both of Cuban origin, and Bauer first came to wide notice playing one of drug kingpin Al Pacino’s Cuban sidekicks in “Scarface.” Bauer has also played an Israeli in HBO’s “Sword of Gideon,” an Afghan in “The Beast” and a number of other roles of unspecified national origin in films such as “Gleaming the Cube” and “Thief of Hearts.”

“I’m fortunately Hispanic enough to fit this role, even though I don’t have the map of Spain on my face,” he says. Early in Bauer’s career, he changed his name from Echevarria “to remove the first-impression response to my name at auditions. Echevarria, which is Basque in origin, makes a strong Latin statement. Dad said, ‘Lose that name,’ so I took my mother’s side’s name. The change did what Dad told me it would.

“I’m a realist. If my looks were more . . . inflexible . . . more limiting. . . . I’m going to insult every Latin actor I know here . . . a lot of my friends are proud not to have changed their name. I’m proud to take Latin roles; that doesn’t mean I want to do only Latin roles.”

After playing Camarena, Bauer may find it politic not to play other characters of Mexican origin right away. “I’m not going to be able to vacation in Acapulco,” he jokes.

Speaking of Mexican attitudes toward Americans, he says, “The Mexicans already made a movie about these events. In their version, the trafficker was the hero and Kiki was the villain.

“To many Mexicans, this trafficker is like a Robin Hood. He’s the one making the U.S. look stupid, which is what Mexicans live for. They don’t like us; they really don’t like us. There’s this underlying contempt for us: ‘We’re infecting your youth? Tough.’

“They could use a better government down there. There’s a lot of poverty. When it comes to these traffickers they romanticize, the people don’t know any better. And the cops, they’re just earning a buck. It’s the higher-ups who play patty-cake with these brutal drug billionaires while begging America for aid--those are the bad guys.”