Mexican soldiers arrested 13 alleged drug cartel members, including one man who had just arrived on a private plane to take over trafficking operations in the northern city of Monterrey, the Defense Department said.
Acting on a tip, soldiers arrested Rodolfo Lopez and several others on Monday after they landed at Monterrey’s international airport, the department said in a statement. Several armed men were arrested in the parking lot, where they were waiting to pick up Lopez, it added.
The department said Lopez had been chosen to take over trafficking operations for the cartel in the industrial city from Hector Huerta, who was captured on March 24, one day after the government listed him among its 37 most-wanted smugglers. Lopez had not been on the list.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The department said Lopez told soldiers he had arrived from the Pacific resort town of Acapulco, where he received instructions about his new duties from cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva.
Four of the 13 suspects were arrested at a Monterrey residence.
Soldiers seized 14 guns, a grenade, ammunition, drugs and cash during the operation.
They also found a banner with a message for the Mexican president, reading: “Felipe Calderon, please don’t mess with the family because it is very sacred. Show respect or face the consequences of our people. They are tired of atrocities.”
Police in southern Mexico, meanwhile, said they arrested a gang of at least six Gulf cartel assassins, including two women, who were allegedly commanded by top police officers.
The police chief, two commanders and a former public safety director in the city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, were also detained on suspicion of leading the hit gang.
The suspects allegedly worked for the Zetas, a gang of enforcers linked to the Gulf cartel. Police and soldiers seized dozens of grenades and assault rifles during the weekend raid in which the alleged assassins were captured, state prosecutors said.
Drug corruption scandals have blossomed across Mexico recently — in states far from the US border region, where the drug battles have long been concentrated.
In Morelos, just outside Mexico City, prosecutors announced that the top state security official and the police chief in the state capital, Cuernavaca, were ordered held for 40 days on suspicion of aiding the Beltran Leyva cartel. Two other people were also ordered held in the case.
Meanwhile a prominent senator from Zacatecas state called a news conference to deny any knowledge of a large load of marijuana found earlier this year at a warehouse belonging to his brother.
On Jan. 22, army troops acting on a tip raided the brother’s chili-drying warehouse and found people loading marijuana onto trucks. More than 11.4 tonnes of the drug were seized at the plant, near the city of Fresnillo.
“My brother said the [locks] had been broken and he reported it to police,” Senator Ricardo Monreal told reporters on Monday in Mexico City.
The brother, Candido Monreal, has not been charged in the case.
The senator accused the Zacatecas government of being completely infiltrated by traffickers and said he has resigned from the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, which governs the state, to protest what he called a smear campaign against him.
Zacatecas is the same state where armed men staged a bold raid on a prison over the weekend that freed 53 suspects, dozens of them linked to the Gulf cartel.
Governor Amalia Garcia said on Saturday that prison guards were likely complicit. On Monday, she asked the state director of prisons to resign and cooperate with the investigation, a statement from her office said.
Meanwhile, police on Monday found three decapitated bodies in an abandoned taxi in southern Mexico and their heads in an ice cooler on a road nearby.
Mexico’s relentless drug violence has left more than 7,300 people dead since the start of last year amid a crackdown on feuding traffickers involving some 36,000 troops.
Local police in Guerrero state, home to the beach resort of Acapulco, found three bodies in a taxi carrying signs of torture and with their hands tied, the state security ministry said in a statement.
“They found three human heads wrapped in tape in an ice cooler” several kilometers away, it added.
In related news, a 15-year-old US citizen was killed in crossfire during a shootout at a party in the volatile border city of Ciudad Juarez, the local prosecutor’s office said.
Tania Lozoya Uyua, of Mexican origin, was hit by at least two bullets in the dawn shootout, an official said.
Three others died on Sunday in gangland-style killings in the border city across from El Paso, Texas, and 10 others died in the same Chihuahua state, authorities said.
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