Mexico captures leader of Sinaloa Cartel

Houston Chronicle:

Mexican army troops captured a leader of the country's most important drug trafficking organization Monday as the government's offensive against organized crime continued.

Alfredo Beltran Leyva, a member of a family allied with the so-called Sinaloa Cartel drug smuggling organization, was captured during an army sweep in Culiacan, the capital of the violent Pacific Coast state for which the organization is named.

Beltran Leyva had responsibilities for smuggling cocaine and other narcotics through a wide swath of western Mexico, officials said in announcing the arrest.

The Sinaloa Cartel, under at least the nominal control of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, is widely considered the most important organized crime syndicate in Mexico.

The organization's rivalry with the Gulf Cartel, another gangster confederation from cities bordering Texas, has been responsible for much of the underworld violence now claiming more than 2,000 lives a year in Mexico. Much of the violence in recent years in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, has been blamed on the Beltran Leyva family's battle with Gulf Cartel gunmen.

Members of the Gulf Cartel, whose purported leader Osiel Cardenas is jailed in Houston awaiting federal trial on drug charges, have long claimed that the government favors the Sinaloa gangsters. But authorities have gone after the Sinaloa group, seizing 23 tons of cocaine last fall from a ship docked in Manzanillo and arresting a number of its members.

Monday's arrest follows a large-scale operation last week in the border city of Tijuana, home of yet another "cartel" that resulted in a number of arrests and deaths, including those of six kidnap victims being held in a gangster safehouse.

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AP story on the arrest says "Alfredo Beltran Leyva was arrested in the northwestern city of Culiacan in Sinaloa state, home to the cartel, with two suitcases containing $900,000, an assault rifle, a luxury SUV and 11 expensive watches, the army said." Eleven watches and still he did not know it was time to get away? He apparently commanded to teams of hit men for the cartel. His four brothers are also "leaders in Guzman's criminal organization."

Mexico has been trying to put a ring around these guys for some time and they deserve credit for their crackdown. Perhaps his capture will lead to that of others.