"Traffic checkpoint nets alleged Juarez Cartel boss" by Peter Orsi | Associated Press October 11, 2014
MEXICO CITY — Federal police used a seemingly routine traffic checkpoint to nab Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the alleged drug cartel boss accused by Mexico’s government of turning the border city of Juarez into one of the deadliest places on the planet.
During an 11-month investigation, agents identified two homes in the northern city of Torreon that Carrillo Fuentes was thought to have visited discreetly as well as a vehicle he used.
They used that information to narrow down his movements, and on Thursday set up the checkpoint. The purported Juarez cartel boss presented a false driver’s license at first but later acknowledged his real identity, said Monte Alejandro Rubid, national security commissioner. No shots were fired in the brief operation.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam called the arrest ‘‘a capture of great importance.’’
Authorities said Carrillo Fuentes, 51, heads the cartel founded by his late brother, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and both the United States and Mexico offered multimillion-dollar rewards for his arrest.
Known as ‘‘the viceroy’’ or ‘‘the general,’’ he took over the Juarez gang after Amado, known as ‘‘the lord of the skies,’’ died in 1997 in a botched cosmetic surgery. Amado got his nickname by flying planeloads of drugs into the United States.
It was the second capture of a major cartel figure in as many weeks. Mexican authorities arrested Hector Beltran Leyva as he ate fish tacos in a seafood restaurant in central Mexico on Oct. 1. He headed a cartel named for his family.
In another development Friday, the country’s attorney general said Mexican soldiers used alleged criminals’ own guns to kill those who initially survived a confrontation at a warehouse southwest of Mexico City.
In an interview with MVS Radio, Jesus Murillo Karam said three soldiers were charged with murder and a lieutenant with a cover up of the events June 30 in San Pedro Limon, in the municipality of Tlatlaya in the state of Mexico.
Murillo said the majority of the 22 alleged criminals killed that day had already died in the shootout, but that at least eight were still alive before the three soldiers finished them off.
Kind of ruins the crowing of victory, as well as exposing the state as no better than the criminals.
President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration has captured a string of high-profile cartel bosses since taking office nearly two years ago, the biggest of them being the arrest last February of Joaquin ‘‘El Chapo’’ Guzman, the boss of the powerful Sinaloa cartel.
Since Pena Nieto took office nearly two years ago, almost all the old-style narco-mafia chiefs have been arrested or killed.
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Good thing they are winning the war on drugs, huh?
Also see: Missing Girls Found in Mexico
No sign of them yet.
