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Friday, October 10, 2014

Arrest of Suspected Drug Lord in Mexico Is Seen as Symbolic Amid Police Scandal

Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Credit FBI Website, via Associated Press
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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