DEA uses murdered agent
as a tool for political goals

Dear A.M. Costa Rica:

Your story about Red Ribbon Week is well written, but it doesn't go far enough about the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. There are in fact two DEAs. The first is totally political -- it is charged with creating and maintaining draconian drug laws that affect the entire world. The second is the DEA of the agents — the men and women who enforce the laws at great personal risk.

Enrique (Quiqui) Camarena was one of those agents. Your story did not fully describe the events surrounding his death. It was more than a killer and a physician who tortured him for over 24 hours. It was half a dozen men operating on the orders of a drug cartel. The physician actually kept him alive so the torture could continue. They tape recorded his torture and sent the tapes to the DEA. Imagine the horror of the agents who got and listened to those tapes!

The U.S. government was slow to react, and the reaction was muted because the DEA politicos did not want the "incident" to interfere with other ongoing negotiations with Mexico. Incensed at their superior's failure to respond, three government employees took action on their own. Quiqui's supervisor and another agent in his unit made arrangements with a deputy attorney general in California to indict whoever they brought back to the U.S. Only after the fact did the DEA politicos take responsibility for the actions of their agents in kidnapping the physician who kept him alive and bringing him to the U.S. for trial.

And on top of the political machinations of the DEA in not responding instantaneously to this horror, the Mexican government, which also had not responded, actually protested the kidnapping!!

Drug law enforcement is a strange beast. The politicos dictate the laws, and agents enforce them. But virtually every narcotics enforcement officer I have known, whether federal, state, or local, by the time they finish their 25 years and retire, tends to be anti-prohibition, and pro-prevention. There is an organization well known amongst law officers, L.E.A.P. (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), which has few members among active officers but with a large membership among retired officers, whose mission it is to bring the public to awareness of this.

Quiqui Camarena was a hero. I am saddened by the DEA continuing to use his death as a political tool.



Tuna sets record for distance
crossing all of Atlantic Ocean


An albacore tuna tagged off the European Basque Coast had managed to cover a record distance when recaptured in Venezuela

That is the vast distance, as the crow flies, which has been covered by an albacore tuna tagged and released into the sea off a Gipuzkoan locality, 20 kilometers to the north of Donostia-San Sebastian in October 2006.

The distance is 6,370 kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean as the crow flies. The fish had been tagged in October 2006 off Donostia-San Sebastian/

The specimen has recently been caught by Venezuelan fishermen just off the coast of that country. This is a record distance covered by an albacore tuna among those registered by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. When the specimen was tagged, it was a year old, 50 centimeters long and weighed 2.5 kilos. When it was recaptured six and a half years later it weighed 21.8 kilos and measured 100 centimeters. Tuna tagging is routine practice to find out, among other things, about migrations and how big the populations of these species are.

This record fish was tagged by the fisherman Fernando Zapirain aboard the vessel "Kutxi Kutxi," whose home port is in Hondarribia  in the course of a sports tagging championship. The albacore tuna has been recaptured by professional fishermen aboard the vessel "Black Marlin." They handed the specimen over to the Oceanographic Institute of Venezuela, which informed other  researchers about the find.

There are very few records of albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga) crossing the Atlantic ocean. The albacore tuna caught off Venezuela is the one that has covered the greatest distance and also the one that has been found at the southernmost point, in its reproduction area in the North Atlantic. It has also been one of the longest-lasting records, since the specimen was recaptured six and a half years after it had been tagged and released, a little less than the nearly eight years that the longest record took.

The conventional tag the albacore tuna was carrying was attached to its second dorsal fin and bore the contact details of AZTI-Tecnalia plus an identification code. The purpose of tagging tuna is to obtain information about their movements and migrations, stock structure, growth, population size and physiology. This information enables experts to analyze the repercussions that the various types of fishing are having on this species.

In 2007 there was a similar case when a sports fisherman from the U.S. state of Massachusetts caught a bluefin tuna that had been tagged and released into the sea off Hondarribia. The animal had covered a distance of 6,170 km, as the crow flies. In the current case the tuna had covered a greater distance than the one found in the USA; and the record albacore tuna turned up in a latitude much further south than the one found in the USA, which was located in a latitude similar to that of the Bay of Biscay. The specimen released in Hondarribia had remained at sea two years and two months until it was recaptured, as opposed to the six and a half years that it took to recapture the current tagged specimen.