On a sunny winter morning in 1984, two young American couples dressed in their Sunday best walked door to door in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, trying to spread their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses. A few hours later they disappeared.
The next month an American journalist went out with a friend at the end of a yearlong sabbatical writing a mystery novel. The two men also vanished.
Within 10 days, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was kidnapped too, then tortured and killed by Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, setting off one of the worst episodes of US-Mexico tension in recent decades.
As DEA agents hunted for Camarena's killers, some witnesses told them that the cartel had mistaken the other six Americans for undercover agents and killed them just like Camarena.
Cartel leader Rafael Caro Quintero walked free this month, 12 years early, after a local appeals court overturned his sentence for three of the murders. For the US and Mexico, Caro Quintero's secretive, pre-dawn release has set off a frantic effort to get the drug lord back behind bars. For the families of the six Americans slain before Camarena, the decision has awakened bitter memories of the brutality that ushered in the modern era of Mexican drug trafficking.
"I just never imagined that this would happen, that Caro Quintero would be walking around free at the age of 60," said journalist John Clay Walker's widow, Eve, who lives in Atlanta.
"There's probably not been a day in the last 30 years that I haven't missed my husband and wished that he was here to see the girls grow up.
"It was tough to do it alone but I kind of had the consolation of knowing that the responsible people were in prison and that they would stay there."
The systematic killing of seven Americans in three months stands out even in the long and bloody history of the US-backed effort to quash Mexican drug trafficking. Tens of thousands of Mexicans have died, and dozens of Americans have been killed in cartel-related violence, often because of ties to people involved in drug trafficking. But assassinating US law-enforcement agents remains a taboo for most Mexican organized crime, as does the deliberate targeting of Americans with no ties to the drug war.
