Mexican security forces captured a top drug trafficker “EL TEO”
Mexican security forces captured a top drug trafficker behind much of a surge in violence in the northern border city of Tijuana on Tuesday in a fresh victory for the country’s drug war, government and police sources said.
Teodoro Garcia Simental, known as “El Teo” or “Tres Letras” for the three letters in his nickname, was caught in the beach town of La Paz in southern Baja California, a police officer who participated in the operation told Reuters. A government official also confirmed the arrest. Garcia Simental is thought to have split off from the Tijuana-based Arellano Feliz cartel to help efforts by Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman — head of the rival Sinaloa cartel and Mexico’s most wanted man — to wrest control of key smuggling corridors in northern Mexico from the Arellano Felix cartel.
He and his hitmen are known to use gruesome killing methods including torture and then dissolving the bodies of his enemies in corrosive acid.
January 12, 2010 at 5:36 pm
* At its height in the 1990s, the Arellano Felix clan shipped tons of Colombian cocaine into California. U.S. and Mexican law enforcement slowly weakened the Tijuana cartel, killing leading drug lord Ramon Arellano Felix and arresting his brother Benjamin.
* The cartel has regrouped under the leadership of 35-year-old Fernando Sanchez Arellano, known as “The Engineer” because he studied engineering at a private university. Sanchez Arellano has the support of his accountant aunt, Enedina Arellano Felix, who helps run the cartel’s financial operations.
* Garcia Simental, who ran the armed wing of the cartel, disputed Sanchez Arellano’s leadership and tried to use shocking violence to win control of the cartel. Unsuccessful, he later set up a rival gang and allied with Guzman while diversifying into kidnapping and extorting local businesses.
* The three-way war between Guzman, Garcia Simental and Arellano Sanchez has turned Tijuana into one of Mexico’s most violent cities with some 1,400 drug killings in the past two years. That has scared off U.S. tourists who used to come in droves for cheap sex, medicines and tequila.
* Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent thousands of soldiers to Tijuana in January 2007 and has since deployed more troops and elite naval forces, but the military presence has failed to stop the killings.
* Guzman is still at large, believed to live in Mexico’s “Golden Triangle” of remote mountains in Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua state. He has a $5 million bounty on his head in the United States, while the Mexican government has offered a $2.3 million reward for information leading to Arellano Sanchez’s capture.