MEXICO
CITY — Vicente Carrillo Fuentes was the mediocre heir, the authorities
said. He never quite gained the fame or authority of his brother, Amado
Carrillo Fuentes — the Juarez cartel’s late founder and the kingpin
famous for both flying cocaine to the United States in jumbo jets and
dying during failed plastic surgery in 1997.
Instead,
Vicente was vicious. Mr. Carillo Fuentes, who was arrested Thursday by
Mexican authorities in the northern city of Torreon, ran the Juarez ring
with an eye for killing and a thirst for allies, according to American
and Mexican officials who have been pursuing him for 14 years.
His
was the era when the battle between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels made
Ciudad Juárez as bloody and violent as a war zone. And yet at this
point, with Juarez far more calm, experts said, his arrest was mostly
symbolic.
“By 2012, it was clear his forces had lost, and he went into exile,” said Steven S. Dudley, a director of InsightCrime.com, a website that tracks and analyzes Latin American crime trends. “Some thought he was even retired.”
Thus the timing of his arrest has raised suspicions among some in Mexico. President Enrique Peña Nieto
is in the midst of the largest security scandal of his term, with
Mexico and the world aghast at the recent discovery of a mass grave with
28 bodies near a town in the state of Guerrero, where 43 students were
reported missing after a confrontation with the police in late
September.
At
a news conference Thursday, Mexico’s attorney general announced that
more graves and bodies had been found in the area, and that four more
people had been arrested, in addition to the 22 police officers already
detained.
The Peña Nieto administration is also weathering criticism from human rights advocates over the way it has handled another case
from late June, in which 22 people were killed by Mexican soldiers in a
small mountain town near a common drug route. Mexican military
officials initially claimed the deaths had occurred in a firefight only
to later admit that at least some were killed after surrendering.
Security
analysts and former intelligence officers — along with American
officials — have been arguing for months that these and other episodes
clearly show that Mr. Peña Nieto needs to get serious about reforming
the criminal justice system and establishing more effective systems of
accountability for security forces, after spending the first two years
of his presidency emphasizing the improving economy.
The
president, though, has stopped far short of an overhaul. Responding to
the case of the missing students, Mr. Peña Nieto delivered a four-minute
speech on Monday, in which he kept the focus relatively narrow, saying,
“We need to find the truth and make sure the law is applied to those
responsible for these outrageous, painful and unacceptable acts.” At
least in part, some experts said, the theatrics around Thursday’s arrest
— with Mr. Carrillo Fuentes put on display upon arrival at the airport
here — seemed aimed at casting security forces in a better light.
“The
Mexican federal government is in desperate need of this kind of
success, in order to neutralize the effects of all the attention to what
happened in Guerrero,” said Raúl Benítez Manaut, a researcher at the
National Autonomous University in Mexico City who studies criminal
groups.
And
yet, he and others added, it was a legitimate success. Mr. Carrillo
Fuentes has been on the run for more than a decade. “These people should
not be allowed to walk free, unpunished, enjoying their drug-related
money,” Mr. Benítez said.
Alejandro
Hope, a former intelligence official under Mexico’s last president,
Felipe Calderón, added that the positive attention from an arrest
dissipates too quickly — and the arrests themselves are too hard to
obtain — to believe that this was simply a political ploy.
If
anything, he said, the arrest and its promotion “reinforces the sense
of continuity between Calderón and Peña, something the Peña people have
been trying to run from.”
Indeed,
Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, 51, was the second suspected kingpin captured
over the last two weeks. On Oct. 1, the Mexican Army arrested Héctor
Beltrán-Leyva, 49, who the authorities say is the head of the
Beltrán-Leyva cartel. He was caught in the colonial city of San Miguel
de Allende while eating dinner at a seafood restaurant.
Both
men were heirs to their family businesses, and in middle-age, dinosaurs
of the trade. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes often used disguises and moved from
city to city, authorities said. Mr. Beltrán-Leyva had been presenting
himself as a local businessman.
The
new generation of criminal leaders, experts note, tends to be less
polished, at least as brutal, and more diffuse in their organizational
structure — like the gangs that are believed to have colluded with the
police in the case of the missing students. That case, many argue, is
far too significant and too telling to be brushed aside by an unrelated
arrest.
“If
the capture had happened in any other given moment, it would have had a
much greater effect and impact, a much bigger political gain for Peña
Nieto,” said Jorge Chabat, a drug and security expert at CIDE, a Mexico
City research group. “But it’s happening at a moment where all eyes and
everyone’s attention is on the missing students.”
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