MEXICO CITY — His death shrouded in as much mystery as his life, Mexican drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes was laid to rest Friday in the village of his birth, leaving behind a multibillion-dollar drug-smuggling network that has confounded and corrupted counter-narcotics authorities for nearly a decade.
As soldiers and police staked out Carrillo's family ranch in Guamuchilito in the northern state of Sinaloa and villagers mourned the passing of their local philanthropist, authorities in the capital were still investigating how the 41-year-old drug lord died here a week ago after nine hours of plastic surgery, including liposuction.
It took Mexican prosecutors a week of DNA tests, fingerprint analyses and other comparisons to confirm that the body was that of Carrillo, who was rarely photographed and hardly ever seen in public during the years he dominated cocaine trafficking from South America through Mexico to the United States. All the tests were positive, prosecutors said after turning the body over to Carrillo's family late Thursday.
Still, Mexican authorities acknowledged that they have yet to determine an official cause of death for the man known as the "Lord of the Skies," a nickname earned through his pioneering use of jets to run hundreds of tons of cocaine into Mexico for transport to the United States.
"The attorney general is continuing the investigation . . . to determine the cause of death," said a 14-page document detailing the exhaustive federal investigation that led to the conclusive identification of Carrillo--a determination the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration made Sunday.
Late Thursday, authorities opened the door to the possibility that Carrillo was killed. Deputy Atty. Gen. Mariano Herran Salvatti said detectives were trying to determine whether the cause of death was "professional incompetence" by Carrillo's doctors "or deliberate homicide."
Investigators said Carrillo checked into Santa Monica Hospital in Mexico City about 7:30 p.m. July 3 under the name Antonio Flores Montes. The following day, accompanied by three personal physicians and two armed bodyguards, Carrillo was in the operating room from 9:30 a.m. until 6 p.m.--"an aggressive and high-risk surgery . . . to radically change his physical appearance."
"The last clinical report was made between 10:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. in Room 407, and no anomalies were reported," investigators say. By 4 the next morning, July 5, Carrillo was dead.
