On 16 August, Armando Valencia (el Juanito) became the third major Mexican drug kingpin to be captured in a year-and-a-half. His downfall appears to have been the result of a chain of events triggered by the arrest of Osiel Cárdenas, reputed head of the Gulf cartel, in March this year. According to the man overseeing the joint military-police counternarcotics operations, defence minister Clemente Vega, the removal of Cárdenas from the scene created `a vacuum' which the rival cartels are now trying to fill. `They are fighting for the market,' he says; `to dominate certain areas that have become headless [...] We can't stop that. I'd like more investigation to determine exactly which groups are operating where.'
Still, the turf wars appear to have flushed out drug gangs that had been keeping a low profile. Vega says the arrest of Valencia and seven of his lieutenants was `linked' with a major gunfight between military-police units and traffickers in the border city of Nuevo Laredo earlier this month (an episode that claimed five lives and left six injured) and the subsequent suspension of 198 of the city's 700 policemen to investigate their connections with organised crime. The implication was that that trail led to the restaurant in Tlajomulco, near Guadalajara, where Valencia was captured.
[Chief prosecutor Rafael Macedo tells a slightly different story: he says the trail began earlier, with the capture last year of some of Valencia's men.]
The Millennium cartel
Luis and Armando Valencia, brothers, set up an export firm in Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco state, in the 1980s, selling avocados to the US. US sources say that el Juanito started working for the notorious Amado Carrillo Fuentes (the `Lord of the Skies') and stayed with him until he died in 1997 as the result of a plastic surgery operation.
He then set up his own organisation, known as the Millennium cartel, establishing very close links with Colombian cocaine producers. This organisation is said to be responsible for about a third of all the cocaine entering the US (a figure which must be treated with caution, if only because nobody knows how much cocaine enters the US). The Millennium cartel earned itself a reputation for extreme violence, and spread out from its base to the states of Michoacán and Colima. In 1999 drug-trafficking charges were filed against Valencia in the US.
Turf control has never been absolute. At present Mexican police say that in Jalisco, apart from the Millennium cartel, they have detected the presence of elements of the Tijuana, Sinaloa and Gulf cartels, as well as the outfit of the Amezcua Contreras brothers, reputedly specialists in amphetamines. The recent turf wars have involved almost all of these groups in the states of Jalisco and Michoacán.
Before Valencia, the Mexican authorities captured Benjamín Arellano, reputed head of the Tijuana cartel, in March last year; Osiel Cárdenas of the Gulf cartel in March this year; and Manuel Medina Campos, reputedly the operations chief of the Sinaloa cartel, in July. Defence minister Vega warns, `People think that you arrest four or five and that's it - but no, it isn't.'
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