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Mexico nabs reputed head of Juarez cartel
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-22 10:42
Mexican agents arrested a former medical student who seized control of the
remnants of the Juarez cartel, the country's attorney general said Monday,
shedding light on a split within what was once Mexico's most powerful cocaine
smuggling gang.
Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, captured in a shopping mall in Mexico City on Nov.
11, is accused of overseeing an organization that moved up to 5 tons of
Colombian cocaine a month into Mexico and on to the United States.
Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said that since late 2004, Garcia
Urquiza was responsible for as much as 20 percent of the narcotics that reached
America's streets from Mexico.
"This was a mega-cartel, perhaps not as violent, perhaps operating in a
different manner, but a mega-cartel," he said.
An attorney general's office handout photo
shows Ricardo Garcia Urquiza in police custody at an undisclosed location
in Mexico. [Reuters] | Garcia Urquiza, his brother
Jesus Omar, and Maria Nereida Garcia, a suspected cartel accountant who was
arrested leaving her home with nearly $3 million in cash, were among 11 people
captured as part of an investigation dubbed "New Generation."
Cabeza de Vaca said the name reflects the fact that the suspects fall into a
modern category of drug lords who live in relatively modest homes and drive
ordinary vehicles without small armies of attention-attracting body guards.
"They act more like businessmen," Cabeza de Vaca said.
The Juarez Cartel was considered the country's largest drug trafficking
organization under the leadership of Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
After Amado's death from botched plastic surgery in July 1997, control of the
cartel fell to his brother, Vicente.
The split between Vicente Carrillo Fuentes and a rival faction controlled by
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and other drug lords — known as the Sinaloa cartel —
came to a head in 2004, when Vicente's brother, Rodolfo Carrillo, was killed at
the orders of Guzman, Defense Secretary Gen. Gerardo Clemente Vega said.
Fearing for his life, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes fled, but continues to operate
with a few cells of drug smugglers, Vega said.
In his absence, control of the gang allegedly fell to Garcia Urquiza.
The faction of the Juarez cartel controlled by Garcia Urquiza had no link
with the Sinaloa cartel, but the two gangs have also not engaged in the kind of
bloody war for territory that ensnared other smugglers, Cabeza de Vaca said.
Guzman, who escaped from a western Mexican prison in 2001 and has overseen a
bloody war for control of the U.S.-Mexico border city of Nuevo Laredo, is often
referred to as the country's top drug lord. Garcia Urquiza's arrest brings
authorities no closer to catching Guzman, Cabeza de Vaca said.
A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington had no
comment on the case.
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