Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo died on 15 November in a private hospital in Guadalajara, two days after being transferred there from prison. He was 80 years old. Prison had held him since 1989, but his final days ended outside it, under treatment for high blood pressure and diabetes.
For years, Gallardo was one of the names most closely tied to the rise of Mexico’s modern drug trade. He was one of the founders of the Guadalajara cartel in the late 1970s, and the group was later described as Mexico’s first major criminal organisation, a model for the gangs that followed.
That history is also why his name still carries weight. The cartel was responsible for the abduction, torture and murder of Enrique Camarena Salazar in February 1985, a killing that brought strong pressure from the United States and helped fix Gallardo’s place in criminal history. He was arrested in 1989 and sentenced to 37 years in prison for the police officer’s murder, then received a further 40-year sentence for drug trafficking.
His death closes a long chapter that never really disappeared from public memory. Gallardo was often described as “the boss of bosses,” and his story was later dramatized by Diego Luna in TV’s Narcos: Mexico. What remains unanswered is the detail behind his last transfer: the medical episode that took him from prison to a private hospital two days before he died.
