The head of the once-mighty Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug cartel was arrested while watching Mexico’s football team play in the World Cup, a top Mexican federal official has said.
Federal police chief Monte Alejandro Rubido
said Fernando Sanchez Arellano was arrested in the border city of
Tijuana on Monday and was expected to be brought to Mexico City sometime
on Tuesday.
Sanchez Arellano had $100,000 in cash when he was arrested, Rubido said at a news briefing.
Journalists were shown photographs of Sanchez
Arellano in a green football jersey and with his cheeks painted with
green, white and red, the colours of the Mexican flag.
Sanchez Arellano inherited leadership of the
Arellano Felix cartel from his uncle, Javier Arellano Felix, who was
arrested by the US Coast Guard in international waters off Mexico’s Baja
California in 2006. The uncle later was sentenced in San Diego to 40
years in federal prison.
Tijuana bloodbath
Within two years, a renegade lieutenant,
Teodoro Garcia Simenta, made a power play and set off a bloodbath that
turned Tijuana into one of Mexico’s most violent cities, plagued by
daytime shootouts, beheadings and mutilated corpses hanging from freeway
bridges.
Sanchez Arellano, known as “The Engineer,”
was badly weakened by the time his rival was arrested in January 2010,
which created an opening for the Sinaloa cartel to quietly gain control
of Tijuana’s underworld and its coveted smuggling corridor to San Diego.
The Sinaloa cartel has made its mark in the
area with cross-border drug tunnels, large-scale smuggling of
methamphetamine at San Diego border crossings and marijuana-laden boats
that motor up the Pacific coast to California.
In May 2013, the US Drug Enforcement
Administration included Sanchez Arellano on a poster of the six most
influential drug traffickers in that region but US authorities were more
concerned about rising Sinaloa cartel lieutenants.
Gary Hill, an assistant DEA special agent in
charge in San Diego, said in an interview at the time that Sanchez
Arellano was “almost like a ghost.”
“As we see it, the Sinaloa cartel has the upper hand,” Hill said.
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