Originally posted by JESSE
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
MEXICO CITY — 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 Card##as 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.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5472962.html |
