However, Mexican officials believe Ocampo just happened to be caught in cross fire. The Cardinal arrived at the airport in a white Mercury Grand Marquis town car, known to be popular amongst drug barons, making it a target. Intelligence received by Logan Heights gang leader David "D" Barron was that Guzmán would be arriving in a white Mercury Grand Marquis town car. This explanation, however, is often countered due to Ocampo having been wearing a long black cassock and large pectoral cross, as well as him sharing no similarity in appearance with Guzmán and having been gunned down from only two feet away.
Edgar Valdéz Villarreal
Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal was a Sinaloa cartel lieutenant and the operator of its armed group known as Los Negros, formed by the Sinaloa Cartel to counter the operations of the rival Gulf Cartel's Los Zetas. Los Negros have been known to employ gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha to carry out murders and other illegal activities. The group is involved in fighting in the Nuevo Laredo region for control of the drug trafficking corridor. Following the 2003 arrest of Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas, it is believed the Sinaloa Cartel moved 200 men into the region to battle the Gulf Cartel for control. The Nuevo Laredo region is an important drug trafficking corridor into Laredo, Texas, where as much as 40% of all Mexican exports pass through into the U.S.
Following the 2002 assassination of journalist Roberto Javier Mora García from El Mañana newspaper, much of the local media has been cautious reporting the fighting. The cartels have pressured reporters to send messages and wage a media war. The drug war has spread to various regions of Mexico such as Guerrero, Mexico City, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas.
On 30 August 2010, Villarreal was captured by Mexican Federal Police.
El Chapo Timeline
•1960s - Begins planting marijuana with his cousins.
•1970s - Begins running drugs to major Mexican cities and the US border and working with major drug traffickers such as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, leader of the Guadalajara Cartel.
•1980s - Member of the Guadalajara Cartel. After the arrest of Felix Gallardo, the cartel splits into factions. Guzmán becomes leader of the Sinaloa Cartel Pacific coast faction.
•February 1992 - Police find the bodies of six of Guzmán's top lieutenants dumped along Tijuana highways; the six men had been tortured and shot.
•November 1992 - Six people are gunned down at a discotheque in Puerto Vallarta by gunmen working for Guzmán, whose targets are traffickers in the Tijuana Cartel.
•May 1993 - Gunmen with the Tijuana Cartel attempt to assassinate Guzmán in retribution, firing upon a vehicle at an airport. Guzmán escapes unharmed, but Cardinal Archbishop of Guadalajara Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampa is killed accidentally, along with six others.
•June 9, 1993 - Wanted on charges of drug trafficking, murder and kidnapping, he is arrested in Guatemala and extradited to Mexico. Guzmán is subsequently sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in a maximum-security prison.
•Early 2000s - Violence across Mexico escalates as El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel attempts to encroach upon Tijuana and Gulf Cartel territory.
•January 19, 2001 - Escapes the maximum-security Puente Grande prison in Jalisco, Mexico, in a laundry cart. The planned escape requires bribes and cooperation allegedly costing him $2.5 million, according to Malcolm Beith's book, "The Last Narco."
•2004 - The US government announces a $5 million reward for information leading to Guzmán's arrest and conviction.
•May 2008 - Guzmán's son, Edgar, is murdered in a parking lot shootout near Culican, Mexico.
•2009 - First appears on Forbes' billionaires list.
•2009 - Guzmán and other cartel leaders are indicted on charges of conspiring to import more than 264,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States between 1990 and 2005.
•August 2011 - Guzmán's wife, Emma, who has dual US-Mexican citizenship, gives birth to twin girls in a hospital outside of Los Angeles.
•2012 - The US Treasury Department uses the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to freeze the US assets of his relatives.
•February 22, 2014 - Guzmán is apprehended at a beach resort in Mazatlán, Mexico.
•July 11, 2015 - Escapes the maximum-security Altiplano Federal Prison near Toluca, Mexico, by crawling through an opening in the shower area of his cell block leading to a nearly mile-long tunnel.
•October 2015 - While on the run, he meets with movie star Sean Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo. Penn's interview with Guzmán subsequently runs in Rolling Stone magazine. "I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world," Guzmán is quoted in the interview. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats."
•January 8, 2016 - Guzmán is recaptured by Mexican authorities in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, after a raid leads to a shootout in which five people connected to Guzmán are killed.
•May 9, 2016 - A judge in Mexico approves the United States' request to extradite Guzmán, who faces charges in seven states. Once extradited, he will be sent to Brooklyn, New York, to stand trial on federal charges.
•January 19, 2017 - Mexico's Foreign Ministry turns Guzmán over to US authorities.
•January 20, 2017 - Enters a plea of not guilty at his arraignment in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
•November 13, 2018 - Guzmán's long-awaited criminal trial begins in a New York federal district court amid unprecedented security measures, including armed escorts for the anonymous and partly sequestered jurors, as well as heavily armed federal marshals and officers with bomb-sniffing dogs standing guard outside the courthouse.
•January 15, 2019 - Guzmán once paid a $100 million bribe to former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, according to testimony given by a former close personal aide to Guzman during his trial. Peña Nieto's former chief of staff denies the allegation.
•February 12, 2019 - Guzmán is convicted of 10 counts, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to launder narcotics proceeds, international distribution of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs, and use of firearms. He faces a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole for leading a continuing criminal enterprise, and a sentence of up to life imprisonment on the remaining drug counts. His attorneys say they plan to file an appeal on a number of issues.
Juárez Cartel
The Juárez Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Juárez), also known as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization, is a Mexican drug cartel based in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas. The Juárez Cartel controls one of the primary transportation routes for billions of dollars worth of illegal drug shipments annually entering the United States from Mexico.
Drug lords from contiguous Mexican states have forged alliances in recent years creating a cartel that sometimes is referred to as 'The Golden Triangle Alliance' or 'La Alianza Triángulo de Oro' because of its three-state area of influence: Chihuahua, south of the U.S. state of Texas, Durango and Sinaloa. The Juarez Cartel is a ruthless, dangerous drug trafficking organization that has been known to decapitate their rivals and mutilate their corpses and dump them in public to instill fear not only to the general public but to local law enforcement and their rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel.
History
The cartel was founded in the 1970s by Rafael Aguilar Guajardo and handed down to Amado Carrillo Fuentes in 1993 under the tutelage of his uncle.
Amado brought his brothers in and later his son into the business. After Amado died in 1997 following complications from plastic surgery, a brief turf war erupted over the control of the cartel, where Amado's brother —Vicente Carrillo Fuentes— emerged as leader after defeating the Muňoz Talavera brothers.
Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, who still remains in control of the cartel, then formed a partnership with Juan
José Esparragoza Moreno, his brother Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, his nephew Vicente Carrillo Leyva,
Ricardo Garci
a Urquiza, and formed an alliance with other drug lords such as Ismael "Mayo" Zambada in
Sinaloa and Baja California, the Beltrán Leyva brothers in Monterrey, and Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán in Nayarit, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas, according to sources in the FBI and the Mexican Attorney General's office. He also kept in service several lieutenants formally under his brother, such as "El Chacky" Hernandez.
When Vicente took control of the cartel, the organization was in flux. The death of Amado created a large power vacuum in the Mexican underworld. The Carrillo Fuentes brothers became the most powerful organization during the 1990s while Vicente was able to avoid direct conflict and increase the strength of the Juárez Cartel. The relationship between the Carrillo Fuentes clan and the other members of the organization grew unstable towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s.
In 2001 after Joaquín Guzmán Loera 'El Chapo' escaped from prison, many Juárez Cartel members defected to Guzmán Loera's Sinaloa Cartel. In 2004, Vicente's brother was killed allegedly by order of Guzmán Loera. Carrillo Fuentes responded by assassinating Guzmán Loera's brother in prison. This ignited a turf war between the two cartels, which was more or less put on hold from 2005-2006 because of the Sinaloa Cartel's war with the Gulf cartel.
As recently as November 2005, the Juárez Cartel was the dominant player in the center of the country, controlling a large percentage of the cocaine traffic from Mexico into the United States. The death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes in 1997, however, was the beginning of the decline of the Juárez cartel, as Carrillo relied on ties to Mexico's top-ranking drug interdiction officer, division general Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo.
After the organization collapsed, some elements of it were absorbed into the Sinaloa Cartel, a relatively young and aggressive organization that has gobbled up much of the Juárez Cartel's former territory. The cartel has been able to either corrupt or intimidate high ranking officials in order to obtain information on law enforcement operatives and acquire protection from the police and judicial systems.
The Juárez cartel has been found in 21 Mexican states and its principal bases are Culiacán, Monterrey, Ciudad Juárez, Ojinaga, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Cuernavaca and Cancún. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes remains the leader of the cartel.
Since 2007, the Juárez Cartel has been locked in a vicious battle with its former partner, the Sinaloa Cartel, for control of Juárez. The fighting between them has left thousands of dead in Chihuahua state. The Juárez Cartel relies on two enforcement gangs to exercise control over both sides of the border: La Linea, a group of current and former Chihuahua police officers, is prevalent on the Mexican side, while the large street gang Barrio Azteca operates in Mexico and the U.S. in Texas cities such as El Paso, Dallas and Austin. as well as in New Mexico and Arizona.
On April 9, 2010, the Associated Press reported that the Sinaloa Cartel had won the Juarez turf war. Nevertheless, the Juarez Cartel has continued open confrontations with the Sinaloa Cartel and Mexican police forces. On July 15, 2010, the Juarez Cartel raised their attacks to a new level by using a car bomb to target federal police officers.
Members of the cartel were implicated in the serial murder site in Ciudad Juárez that was discovered in 2004 and has been dubbed the House of Death. The Juárez Cartel was featured battling the rival Tijuana Cartel in the 2000 motion picture Traffic. The Australian ABC documentary La Frontera (2010) described social impact of the cartel in the region.
Alliances
Since February 2010, the major cartels have aligned in two factions, one integrated by the Juárez Cartel, Tijuana Cartel, Los Zetas and the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel; the other faction integrated by the Gulf Cartel, Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Cartel.
Tijuana Cartel
The Tijuana Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Tijuana or Arellano-Félix Organization) is a Mexican drug cartel based in Tijuana, Baja California. The cartel has been described as "one of the biggest and most violent criminal groups in Mexico". The Tijuana Cartel was featured battling the rival Juárez Cartel in the 2000 motion picture Traffic.
BackgroundMiguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the founder of the Guadalajara Cartel was arrested in 1989. While incarcerated, he remained one of Mexico's major traffickers, maintaining his organization via mobile phone until he was transferred to a new maximum security prison in the 1990s. At that point, his old organization broke up into two factions: the Tijuana Cartel led by his nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers, and the Sinaloa Cartel, run by former lieutenants Héctor Luis Palma Salazar and Joaquín Guzmán Loera El Chapo.
Currently, the majority of Mexico's smuggling routes are controlled by three key cartels: Gulf, Sinaloa and Tijuana —though Tijuana is the least powerful. The Tijuana cartel was further weakened in August
2006 when its chief, Javier Arellano Félix, was arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard on a boat off the coast of Baja California. Mexican army troops also were sent to Tijuana in January 2007 in an operation to restore order to the border city and root out corrupt police officers, who mostly were cooperating with the Tijuana cartel. As a result of these efforts, the Tijuana cartel is unable to project much power outside of its base in Tijuana.
Organization
The Arellano Félix family was initially composed of seven brothers and four sisters, who inherited the organization from Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo upon his incarceration in Mexico in 1989 for his complicity in the murder of DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena. Although the subsequent brothers' arrest in the 1990s and 2000s are blows to the Arellano Felix cartel, it did not dismantle the organization which currently is led by the Arellano's nephew, Luis Fernando Sánchez Arellano.
The Tijuana Cartel has infiltrated the Mexican law enforcement and judicial systems and is directly involved in street-level trafficking within the United States. This criminal organization is responsible for the transportation, importation, and distribution of multi-ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana, as well as large quantities of heroin and methamphetamine.
The organization has a reputation for extreme violence. Ramón Arellano Félix ordered a hit which resulted in the mass murder of 18 people in Ensenada, Baja California, on September 17, 1998. Ramón was eventually killed in a gun battle with police at Mazatlán Sinaloa, on February 10, 2002.
The Arellano Félix family has seven brothers:
Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix (born 24 October 1949) - Captured and released.
Benjamín Arellano Félix (born 3 December 1952) – Captured.
Carlos Arellano Félix (born 20 August 1955) - is not currently wanted.
Eduardo Arellano Félix (born 11 October 1956), - Captured on October 26, 2008.
Ramón Eduardo Arellano Félix (born 31 August 1964) - Deceased, shot by police in 2002.
Luis Fernando Arellano Félix (believed to be born 26 January 1966) is not currently wanted.
Francisco Javier Arellano Félix (born 11 December 1969) - Captured
They also have four sisters, where Alicia and Enedina are most active in the cartel's affairs. The family inherited the organization from Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo upon his incarceration. Eduardo Arellano Félix was captured by the Mexican Army after a shootout in Tijuana, Baja California, on October 26, 2008; he had been the last of the Arellano Félix brothers at large. According to a Mexican official, Enedina's son, Luis Fernando Sánchez Arellano, has taken over the cartel's operations. His two top lieutenants are Armando Villareal Heredia and Edgardo Leyva Escandon.
Activities
The Tijuana cartel is present in at least 15 Mexican states with important areas of operation in Tijuana,
Mexicali, Tecate, and Ensenada in Baja California, in parts of Sinaloa and Zacatecas. After the death in 1997 of the Juárez Cartel's Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Tijuana Cartel attempted to gain a foothold in Sonora. The Oaxaca Cartel reportedly joined forces with the Tijuana Cartel in 2003.
Fourteen Mexican drug gang members were killed and eight others were injured in a gun battle in Tijuana near the U.S. border on Satu
rday, April 26, 2008 that was one of the bloodiest shootouts in the narco-war between the Tijuana Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Captures and trial
In October 1997, a retired U.S. Air Force C-130A that was sold to the airline Aeropostal Cargo de México was seized by Mexican federal officials, who alleged that the aircraft had been used to haul drugs for the cartel up from Central and South America, as well as around the Mexican interior. Investigators had linked the airline's owner, Jesús Villegas Covallos, to Ramón Arellano Félix.
On August 14, 2006, Francisco Javier Arellano Félix was apprehended by the United States Coast Guard off the coast of Baja California Sur.
Alliances
Since February 2010, the major cartels have aligned in two factions, one integrated by the Juárez Cartel, Tijuana Cartel, Los Zetas and the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel; the other faction integrated by the Gulf Cartel, Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Cartel.
Los Zetas Cartel
Los Zetas Cartel is a criminal organization in Mexico dedicated mostly to international illegal drug trade, assassinations, and other organized crime activities. This drug cartel was founded by a small group of Mexican Army Special Forces deserters and now includes corrupt former federal, state, and local police officers, as well as ex-Kaibiles from Guatemala.
This group of highly trained gunmen was first hired as a private mercenary army for Mexico's Gulf Cartel. After the arrest of the Gulf Cartel's leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillen, as well as other events, the two entities became a combined trafficking force, with the Zetas taking a more active leadership role in drug trafficking. Since February 2010 Los Zetas have gone independent and became enemies of its former employer/partner, the Gulf Cartel.
Los Zetas are led by Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano and are considered by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as probably being the most violent paramilitary enforcement group in Mexico. Los Zetas have expanded their operations to Italy with the 'Ndrangheta.
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