MEXICO CITY — A notorious drug gang leader has been captured and has confessed to ordering most of the killings in the battle-scarred border city of Juárez since August 2009, including the drive-by shootings of a U.S. consular employee and her husband, federal police said Sunday.
Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, 32, leader of the gang Los Aztecas, was arrested along with two other gang leaders in a Juárez neighborhood Saturday, said Luis Cardenas Palomino, chief of the regional security division of the federal police.
Cardenas said Gallegos claimed to have ordered 80 percent of the killings in the past 15 months.
"He is in charge of the whole organization of Los Aztecas in Ciudad Juárez," Cardenas told reporters at a news conference in Juárez. "All the instructions for the murders committed in Ciudad Juárez pass through him."
The arrest was a public relations victory for the Mexican government as it takes aim at the top leaders of brutal drug cartels, but it offered no guarantee to weary Juárez residents that the violence that has claimed more than 2,000 lives in the city this year would diminish.
Los Aztecas are a cross-border gang that carries out enforcement activities for the Juárez drug cartel, which has been fighting the Sinaloa cartel for control of the city, according to Mexican officials.
Gallegos claimed responsibility for several of the most notorious killings in Juárez this year, including the shooting death of Lesley Enriquez, a worker at the U.S. Consulate in Juárez who was pregnant, and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, an officer at the El Paso County Jail.
The couple were leaving a children's birthday party in Juárez on March 14 to return home to El Paso when gunmen fired on their SUV.
source: http://www.statesman.com
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