Drug Lord Slain in Inside Job, Officials Allege

The death of Mexico’s No. 1 cocaine trafficker, slain by his own plastic surgeons, was ordered by his own cartel because he had become a liability to a thriving business, investigators allege.

Casting new light on the slaying, Mexico’s top drug fighter said in an interview this week that investigators now believe that Amado Carrillo Fuentes was killed because the manhunt for him hurt the cartel’s business.

Investigators also now theorize that the three doctors responsible for Carrillo’s death were tortured to death by his relatives in an attempt to determine the mastermind behind the drug lord’s slaying, top Mexican anti-drug prosecutor Mariano Herran Salvatti said.

“We believe that it was an internal deal. Amado Carrillo wasn’t killed by outsiders but by people within his own organization,” Herran Salvatti said. “He was becoming uncomfortable for the organization.”

The manhunt for the head of the Juarez cartel “was at such a level it put in danger” drug trafficking deals, Herran Salvatti said.

Known as the “Lord of the Skies” for his use of huge passenger jets to bring tons of cocaine to Mexico from Colombia, Carrillo was the country’s No. 1 cocaine trafficker at the time of his death.

After Carrillo’s death July 4 following plastic surgery to change his appearance, attention focused on other drug lords battling to move into his old territory.

Several theories emerged in the media as to who was responsible, including the possibility that Carrillo was killed by followers of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix brothers, who lead Mexico’s most violent drug gang.

Carrillo successfully eluded authorities for years. Once, local police officers allegedly in his pay helped him flee his planned arrest by federal agents at his sister’s wedding.

But his boldness led to his death.

“Amado Carrillo began to lose his anonymity when he began to have more girlfriends,” Herran Salvatti said. “He went to restaurants a lot more, and people began taking photographs of him.”

Authorities believe that pressure led him to a Mexico City clinic for plastic surgery to change his looks. But doctors at the clinic injected a dose of the sleeping drug Dormicum that “they must have known would kill him,” Herran Salvatti said at a news conference in November.

Investigators allege that Carrillo’s relatives, led by his brother Vicente, tortured the doctors. The doctors’ bodies were found four months after Carrillo’s death, stuffed into oil drums on a seldom-traveled highway in the southern state of Guerrero.

“The most accepted version is that the family killed them in revenge,” Herran Salvatti said. “And that they may have been trying to investigate themselves as to where the order [to kill Carrillo] had come from.

“The degree of torture was such . . . that they were trying to get something out of them,” Herran Salvatti said.

Four days after the doctors’ bodies were found, prosecutors announced that two of the three had faced formal charges for intentionally killing Carrillo. The third doctor, though not charged, participated in the surgery.

Sergio Aguilar, the drug lord’s lawyer, was reported missing soon after the doctors’ bodies were discovered.

“I think he disappeared on his own initiative,” Herran Salvatti said, “after he saw what happened to the doctors.”