DEA Confirms Mexican Drug Kingpin’s Death

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials confirmed Sunday that the man identified as Mexico’s most powerful drug lord is dead--apparently of a heart attack after extensive surgery to alter his face and body--and they warned that his death is likely to touch off a bloody war for control of the multibillion-dollar Mexican narcotics trade.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who had escaped gangland-style assassination attempts and intensifying manhunts, died in Mexico City’s Santa Monica Hospital after a nine-hour operation that included facial surgery and liposuction, DEA Administrator Thomas A. Constantine said in a telephone interview Sunday.

“For the past year, Carrillo Fuentes has been the most powerful guy in the world of cocaine,” Constantine said of the drug baron nicknamed the “Lord of the Skies” for his use of large aircraft to send tons of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States. “I never would have predicted this as an end for him.”

Constantine said the DEA based its confirmation on evidence gathered by Mexican federal investigators, the DEA’s own sources inside Carrillo’s powerful Juarez cartel and a physical inspection of his body by DEA agents in Mexico.

The Mexican attorney general’s office made no immediate comment on the DEA’s statement declaring Carrillo dead. In a communique issued just before midnight Saturday, Mexico’s top prosecutor’s office had confirmed the details of the death, which it said occurred at 4 a.m. Friday.

The attorney general’s office communique said, “Although there are indications that the corpse . . . in reality is that of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the attorney general cannot, for the moment, confirm that with total certainty.”

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But the Mexican communique stressed that the death certificate was made out in the name of Antonio Flores Montes--the same name used in the hospital to identify the corpse that was shipped to Carrillo’s native state of Sinaloa. There, Mexican federal medical examiners conducted an autopsy on the body Saturday and matched its fingerprints with Carrillo’s, Constantine said.

Constantine said the attorney general’s office was planning DNA tests to make absolutely certain.

But Constantine said he harbors no doubts the body is that of Carrillo, a 41-year-old drug baron indicted twice in Miami and once in Dallas and the subject of 25 ongoing investigations in the United States and Mexico.

“Plastic surgery fits all the things we have been hearing and seeing as he has been trying to get away,” the DEA chief said of an expanding hunt for Carrillo that began after the arrest of Mexico’s top anti-drug czar earlier this year. “His whole mental state since February has been one of a fugitive.”

Carrillo’s fortunes reversed after Mexican prosecutors charged Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the nation’s top counter-narcotics official, with taking bribes to protect Carrillo and his organization.

“After the arrest of Gutierrez Rebollo,” Constantine said, Carrillo “changed overnight. . . . A number of sources told us he’d been to Russia. Other sources said he’d been to Cuba. All of the information was that he was looking for someplace to land because of the pressure.

“So plastic surgery is a fairly reasonable alternative. If you look back to history, back to John Dillinger, when he was trying to avoid arrest, he was having physicians put acid on his fingerprints.”

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Constantine predicted a power struggle among Mexico’s major drug-smuggling cartels--especially by the rival Tijuana cartel. And he said Carrillo’s death also will leave a power vacuum that U.S. and Mexican law enforcement can use to crack down even harder on Mexican drug traffickers.

Perhaps the most compelling confirmation Sunday of Carrillo’s death was at the family’s ranch in the Sinaloa village of Guamuchilito, where his 63-year-old mother, Aurora Fuentes de Carrillo, had told reporters Saturday that her son was, in fact, dead. The family home was filled with wreaths, mourners and tears--everything but the corpse, which was under military guard undergoing additional tests.