The story of Kiki Camarena has taken many forms.
The case has been a point of contention between Americans and Mexicans since 1985, when Camarena was slain. Local Mexican police were said to be part of the abduction, and there appeared to be an official coverup.
Now the story takes the form of a TV miniseries, "Drug Wars: The Camarena Story," an NBC offering airing six hours over three nights (Sunday to Tuesday) at 9. The series itself became a bit of a pawn in the diplomatic cat-and-mouse game between the United States and Mexico, but more on that later.
The series airs at a time when American sensitivity to the illicit drug trade has probably never been higher. It also comes at a time when the United States' relations with drug-producing nations south of our border have been tense -- tensions that led to invasion of Panama last month.
The series opens with a narrator describing the role of DEA agents: They operate, in this case, in a foreign country, with no power of arrest, no assurances of support. It's a tightrope act without a net. It's the forward line in the war on drugs at a key source and transfer point.
The series introduces a cast of knights without armor: Steven Bauer has the lead in the early going as Camarena. Craig T. Nelson, television's "Coach," plays Camarena's boss and best friend, Harley Steinmetz, who puts his own career on the line to expose the corruption that surrounded Camarena's death. Treat Williams plays Ray Carson, who heads the investigation into Camarena's killing.
Elizabeth Pena, who will be featured as the secretary in the upcoming series "Shannon's Deal," portrays Camarena's widow, Mika, left with three sons, who pleads with his fellow agents not to let her husband become just another number, an anonymous casualty in the war on drugs.
The series production staff is well credentialed. Executive producer Michael Mann seems to have come this way before as executive producer of "Miami Vice." The production was assisted by technical advice from John M. Marcello, who has been with the DEA since 1973.
And the series was based on "Desperados," written by Shannon, a correspondent in Time magazine's Washington bureau.
At a Los Angeles press conference to discuss the miniseries, Shannon said that the Camarena abduction and killing has not been completely solved.
"The case hasn't been solved at all," she said, "neither in the legal process, nor does anybody know exactly what happened to Camarena, who ordered his death, how high up did it go, when the coverup occurred -- and there was a large one -- and who exactly was responsible for that?"
Since that press conference, two Mexican drug lords were given 40-year prison terms for their roles in the murder of Camarena. Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Rafael Fonseca Carrillo were sentenced early last month.
Relations between the United States and Mexico were strained when Mexico refused to extradite Caro Quintero to the United States and he was found to be living in luxury in a Mexican prison.
Amid Mexican-American tension over the handling of the case, The Washington Post reported that Mexican authorities were concerned about the possible impact of the TV miniseries, fearing it might portray Mexico unfavorably, revive the considerable American anger over the killing and overshadow Mexican efforts to cut down drug trafficking.
The series has a look, feel and sound that is highly reminiscent of "Miami Vice." Shady characters come and go, and the soundtrack is thick with accents and pulsating music. Something sinister is going on -- at the outset you're not sure just what -- and you half expect Crockett and Tubbs to step from the shadows and sort things out.
Mann downplayed his interest in "Drug Wars" as being an extension of his work in "Miami Vice." It was, he said, the scale of the drug operation in Guadalajara that caught his interest.
"It's important to understand why Guadalajara is so important," he said. "It's a transitional stopping-off point in the movement of drugs from Colombia to the United States. You can't fly the whole route. Some of the people who are in business there had 200-room motels right in the center of Guadalajara that are still there with radio masts coming out of the motels. And this was like their own drug-trafficker FAA for their planes coming in and reloading and moving into the southern United States. So Guadalajara is like Chicago in the sense it is a transportation hub."
Bauer, who was born in Cuba, broke into television with "Que Pasa, U.S.A.?" for public television and began his feature film career in Brian De Palma's "Scarface." He said he had followed the Camarena story in the newspapers, but didn't have a good idea of the DEA's work until he read the "Drug Wars" script.
One element that made the Camarena case so galling was the apparent involvement of local officials in his abduction, and the corruption of the local police force is asserted in the miniseries right from the start. Marcello praised Camarena's work and noted the special dangers that he faced.
"He was so effective that they decided to de-brief him and tape record it so they could save the information," he said, referring to Camarena's killers. "So that's the first time a situation like this happened.
"Now, we've lost agents -- we lost two last year in Los Angeles. We lost an agent undercover this year in New York. This is part of the turf. We expect this. We don't expect to go into a country in a liaison situation and have our agents targeted and fingered by the police that they're supposed to be working with."
The series depicts the work of a few men in desperate straits working against long, if not impossible, odds. Is there the suggestion of a solution here?
"Not the way we're going," said Shannon. "I don't know what the federal government can do. This is a story to me about the work of an individual, of what difference an individual can make."
Shannon said she felt the series was not a plea for any specific approach to the drug problem. "I didn't get into this story ... because I wanted to be part of the propaganda arm of any particular viewpoint ...
"It's a good story. It's the most compelling story I've ever seen. And it's real. It's about the way the world is now. It's not about the way the the world might be or the way it should be. It's not ideological in that sense. It's just reality."
The Camarena case has come to represent the deep tangle of corruption that has grown up around the drug industry. "I'm reminded," said Shannon, "of what a secret policeman told a DEA agent who served in Mexico when Camarena was first killed. He said, 'You don't understand. For you, this is an investigation of the traffickers. For us, this is a national security matter.'
"What he meant was that it went so high and so deep into the government fabric that they couldn't unravel it without wrecking their governmental process."
