U.S. law enforcement officials expressed outrage over the release from prison of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and vowed to continue efforts to bring to justice the man who ordered the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.'The reason I bring this up, of course, is that it is generally believed that the impending release of over 100 terrorists from Israeli prison in return for "peace talks" was pushed by the Obama administration and reluctantly accepted by the Israeli government to keep good relations with the US. Israel has released prisoners in lopsided swaps before, but never for literally nothing.
Caro Quintero was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the 1985 kidnapping and killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena but a Mexican federal court ordered his release this week saying he had been improperly tried in a federal court for state crimes.
The 60-year-old walked out of a prison in the western state of Jalisco early Friday after serving 28 years of his sentence.
The U.S. Department of Justice said it found the court’s decision “deeply troubling.”
“The Department of Justice, and especially the Drug Enforcement Administration, is extremely disappointed with this result,” it said in a statement.
The Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents in the United States said it was “outraged” by Caro Quintero’s early release and it blamed corruption within Mexico’s justice system for his early release.
It is worth reading this article from Adi Moses, one of the victims of a murderer slated for release, and compare the depravity of freeing scores of similar terrorists against releasing a Mexican drug lord:
You know the story of my family. In 1987 a terrorist threw a firebomb at the car my family was traveling in. He murdered my mother and my brother Tal, and injured my father, my brother, his friend and myself. It is a story you know. But me, you do not really know. I was eight years old when this happened.
While my father was rolling me in the sand to extinguish my burning body, I looked in the direction of our car and watched as my mother burned in front of my eyes.
...In the room next door, my brother Tal is screaming in pain. I call out to him to count sheep with me so he can fall asleep. Three months later, little Tal dies of his wounds. I am seated, all bandaged up, on a chair in the cemetery and I watch as my little brother is buried.
...I am thirty-four years old but the last few days I have returned to being that eight-year-old facing that burning car and waiting for her mother to come out of it. Yitzhak Rabin, who was minister of defense at the time of the attack, promised my dad they would catch the terrorist. And they did. And they sentenced him. To two life sentences and another seventy-two years in prison. And you Cabinet ministers? With the wave of a hand you decided to free him – he who caused all of this story.