Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was one of the founders of the Guadalajara cartel, the trafficking organization that dominated Mexico's drug trade in the 1980s. In August 2017 a federal criminal court in Jalisco convicted him of "homicidio calificado, con premeditación y ventaja," aggravated homicide with premeditation and advantage, in the deaths of two men in Guadalajara in February 1985: an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and a Mexican pilot. The court sentenced him to 37 years and ordered reparation of 20,810,000 pesos.
The judgment came 28 years after his arrest. Federal agents took him into custody in Guadalajara in April 1989, and by 2017 he was already serving a separate 40-year sentence for drug offenses, bribery and a further federal offense. That sentence became final in March 2022. The murder conviction remained open to challenge: in May 2025 a federal appeals court asked Mexico's Supreme Court to decide for itself whether he was guilty, and he was then serving both sentences.
Félix Gallardo was born on January 8, 1946, in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. He has said that as a boy he worked the land. As a young man he joined the judicial police of Sinaloa, at 17 by one account, and he was later assigned as a bodyguard to the governor of the state.
At the end of the 1970s he founded the Guadalajara cartel with Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero. The organization moved drugs into the United States, and it was among the first Mexican groups to work with Colombian traffickers to carry their product north.
Enrique Camarena Salazar was born in Mexicali, in Baja California, on July 26, 1947. As a child he moved with his family across the border to Calexico, California, and he later became a United States citizen. He joined the DEA in 1975, and in 1980 the agency posted him to its office in Guadalajara.
Alfredo Zavala Avelar was a Mexican pilot. He was taken in Guadalajara in the same days as the agent.
The agent was seized in Guadalajara on February 7, 1985, and the pilot was taken as well. Both men died about two days later; the agent's death is dated February 9, 1985, in Guadalajara.
Félix Gallardo and Caro Quintero were alleged to have directed the men who carried out the abduction. The case set off the DEA's Operación Leyenda in Mexico and a diplomatic conflict between the United States and Mexico.
Mexican authorities arrested 13 men in the case, and a federal court in Los Angeles charged 22 defendants in the two deaths. A court in Mexico City convicted Fonseca Carrillo and sentenced him to 40 years, and Caro Quintero also received 40 years.
Félix Gallardo remained at liberty for four years after the deaths. On the night of Saturday, April 8, 1989, agents of the Federal Judicial Police arrested him in Guadalajara. He was 43. Several other people were detained with him, and he was taken to Mexico City for questioning. He was held first in the Reclusorio Sur in Mexico City, and later for more than 20 years in the maximum-security federal prison of El Altiplano, in Almoloya de Juárez, State of Mexico. On January 31, 2015, he was moved to another federal prison, and at the end of May 2017 he was transferred to the state prison at Puente Grande, Jalisco. He was also held at different times in Cefereso No. 2 and at the federal psychosocial rehabilitation center in Morelos.
Two cases followed. The first charged him with drug offenses ("delitos contra la salud"), bribery ("cohecho") and a further federal offense, and it ended in a sentence of 40 years.
The second concerned the deaths of February 1985. It stayed before the federal criminal court in Jalisco, as causa penal 82/85, for nearly three decades while he served the first sentence.
The Juzgado Cuarto de Distrito de Procesos Penales Federales en Jalisco gave judgment in the homicide case in August 2017, and the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal, the council that administers the federal courts, announced it on Wednesday, August 23. The court convicted him of "homicidio calificado, con premeditación y ventaja" and imposed 37 years.
The judgment covered both men. The court ordered reparation of 20,810,000 pesos to their families, a debt it imposed jointly on Félix Gallardo, Caro Quintero and Fonseca Carrillo. In the same case it acquitted him of a drug charge in the form of possession for the purpose of sale ("posesión con fines de comercio"). In February 2018 an appellate magistrate confirmed the sentence.
Félix Gallardo has denied any part in the deaths. In a television interview from custody in 2021, he said he had never committed any crime, that he had never met the agent, and that he and the others in the case had never talked about it.
He challenged the 40-year sentence before the federal courts. In February 2022 the Segundo Tribunal Colegiado en Materia Penal in Mexico City ruled against him. The tribunal held that the drug offenses and the further offense had been proven from the first-instance judgment, and that the penalty for the drug offense, eleven years of the total, was already "cosa juzgada," a matter decided and closed.
The tribunal did not examine his complaint of ill-treatment after his arrest in the 1980s. It sent that complaint to the Fiscalía General de la República, the federal prosecutor's office, for whatever action it found appropriate.
He then filed a petition for review, asking the Supreme Court to annul the tribunal's decision. On March 31, 2022, the Supreme Court declined to review it, and the 40-year sentence became final.
In a separate proceeding, amparo 198/2019, he sought to have the two sentences served together within 37 years. In May 2022 the Juzgado Segundo de Distrito Especializado en Ejecución de Penas, a judge responsible for the enforcement of sentences, ruled against him. The 40-year sentence had to be completed first, and the 37-year sentence would follow it. On that reckoning the first term runs until 2029 and the second until 2066. The two sentences total 77 years.
The same ruling left open one route. He could still ask a judge for domiciliary detention on humanitarian grounds because of his age and illnesses, and only a judge could grant it.
For years his lawyers asked the courts to let him serve the rest of his time at a private residence. A federal district judge, the Juez Octavo de Distrito de Procesos Penales Federales, refused his request to serve the sentence at a residence in Zapopan, Jalisco. The Primer Tribunal Unitario en Materia Penal then granted him an amparo against that refusal. The federal prosecutor's office of the time, the PGR, sought review, and in June 2018 the Segundo Tribunal Colegiado en Materia Penal confirmed the amparo.
That ruling did not free him. It ordered the trial judge to weigh his medical examinations, to correct formal defects, and to decide whether the request met article 55 of the Código Nacional de Procedimientos Penales. The courts refused again. In February 2019 a federal court denied him an amparo to serve the rest of a sentence at a residence, and in 2021 a further request was denied despite his age and health. By the end of December 2021 the Juzgado Noveno de Distrito de Procesos Penales Federales in Mexico City declined to admit his amparo seeking domiciliary detention, finding among other things that he had not set out clearly which act he was challenging. That October a federal district court in Jalisco had denied him an amparo against paying the reparation ordered in 2017.
By 2022 he was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, and he used a wheelchair.
On September 7, 2022, a federal district judge in Mexico City, of the Juzgado Séptimo de Distrito de Procesos Penales Federales, granted domiciliary detention in place of the 40-year sentence, the only sentence the ruling covered, because of his advanced age and the state of his health. He was 76. The ruling required an electronic geolocation device to confirm that he did not leave the address he had given the court. The National Human Rights Commission had intervened in the case because of his declining health.
The ruling became public on September 12, 2022, and the Fiscalía General de la República challenged it. A contract for the monitoring device was signed that day, but the company that held it later ended it, citing force majeure, and in October 2022 the judge set aside the proceedings for fitting the bracelet. In late November 2022 he was still held in the Puente Grande prison complex in Jalisco, unable to begin the measure. The 37-year sentence for the two deaths was not part of the ruling; under the May 2022 order it was due to begin when the first sentence ended.
He also challenged the 37-year sentence, seeking to overturn it, in an amparo directo, his last available challenge to that conviction. In May 2025 the Primer Tribunal Colegiado en Materia Penal del Tercer Circuito, the appeals court hearing that challenge, asked the Supreme Court to take up the case and decide definitively whether he was guilty of the two deaths. The Court's presidency admitted the request as number 339/2025 and referred it to a justice of the First Chamber, who was to propose whether the Court would hear the matter. If the chamber found that the case lacked the relevance and significance the Court requires, the collegiate tribunal would decide it.
In that proceeding he maintained that he did not order the crimes. He also argued that the judge who sentenced him had no authority to rule on how the sentence was to be served, a question that he said belonged to a sentence-enforcement judge. The reparation remained in dispute as well; he had contested paying it for years.
In April 2025, and again on May 28, 2025, he was serving his two sentences: 40 years for the drug offenses and the further federal offenses, and 37 years for the two deaths of 1985. As of May 28, 2025, the Supreme Court had not announced whether it would take up his challenge to the murder conviction.
Félix Gallardo has always denied that he ordered the deaths of the two men or knew of them. The 2017 judgment convicted him of aggravated homicide, and that judgment was still under challenge in May 2025, when the appeals court asked the Supreme Court to rule definitively on his guilt.
Reports differ on two dates. The 2017 judgment is dated August 23, 2017, in the federal judiciary's announcement and August 27, 2017, in one later account. The domiciliary-detention ruling of 2022 is dated September 7 in one report and September 1 in another, with the court's notice dated September 9. Accounts of his 2017 custody also differ: one report has him moved to the state prison at Puente Grande at the end of May, another in August still describes him as held in the federal prison there.
His complaint of ill-treatment after his arrest has not been decided by a court. In 2022 the tribunal that reviewed the 40-year sentence passed the complaint to the federal prosecutor's office without examining it.
The allegation that he and Caro Quintero directed the abduction of February 1985 goes beyond the offense of the 2017 judgment, which was the homicide; in the same case he was acquitted of a drug charge.
January 8, 1946: Born in Culiacán, Sinaloa.
Late 1970s: Founds the Guadalajara cartel with Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero.
February 7, 1985: A DEA agent and a Mexican pilot are seized in Guadalajara.
February 9, 1985: The agent dies in Guadalajara; the pilot dies in the same days.
April 8, 1989: Félix Gallardo is arrested in Guadalajara by the Federal Judicial Police.
January 31, 2015: Moved from El Altiplano to another federal prison.
Late May 2017: Transferred to the state prison at Puente Grande, Jalisco.
August 23, 2017: The federal judiciary announces his conviction in Jalisco for "homicidio calificado, con premeditación y ventaja" and a sentence of 37 years.
February 2018: An appellate magistrate confirms the 37-year sentence.
June 2018: The Segundo Tribunal Colegiado en Materia Penal confirms an amparo ordering his medical examinations to be weighed.
February 2019: A federal court denies him an amparo to serve a sentence at a residence.
October 2021: A federal district court in Jalisco denies him an amparo against paying the reparation.
By late December 2021: A federal court in Mexico City declines to admit his amparo seeking domiciliary detention.
February 2022: The Segundo Tribunal Colegiado en Materia Penal rules against him on the 40-year sentence.
March 31, 2022: The Supreme Court declines to review; the 40-year sentence becomes final.
May 2022: An enforcement judge orders the 40-year term served first and the 37-year term after it.
September 7, 2022: A federal judge grants domiciliary detention on the 40-year sentence; the federal prosecutor's office challenges it.
October 2022: The judge sets aside the bracelet proceedings after the monitoring contractor ends its contract.
November 2022: Still held in the Puente Grande complex, Jalisco.
May 2025: The appeals court asks the Supreme Court to decide his challenge to the murder conviction (request 339/2025).
May 28, 2025: Serving both sentences; the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the request.