Mexico, “El Teo” in handcuffs, among the most sought-after US bosses

MEXICO CITY – Teodoro ‘El Teo’ Garcia Simental, one of the 24 most sought-after drug traffickers in the country and the United States and one of the main leaders of the cartel led by the Arellano Felix family, ended up in handcuffs. The Mexican police arrested him. Garcia Simental, also known as ‘K-1’ or ‘The three letters’, was captured in a neighborhood where entrepreneurs and state officials live in the city of La Paz, in Baja California, thanks to an operation in which participated fifty men and two helicopters.

Felipe Calderon’s government had offered $ 2.1 million for any information on ‘El Teo’, held responsible for much of the recent killings in Tijuana. Garcia Simental was in fact one of the main killers of the Arellano Felix family cartel but, following a breakup, he broke away to form his own gang and take control of the eastern part of Tijuana. To do this he had formed an alliance with another important drug dealer, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

The rupture occurred in April 2008 after the arrest of chief Benjamin Arellano Felix and the death of his brother Raul, and had caused one of the hardest waves of violence ever seen in Tijuana, where the cartel has its ‘seat’. The arrest of ‘El Teo’ is the second important one that happened during the presidency of Calderon. Exactly one year ago, Mexican security forces arrested Santiago Meza Lopez, one of the FBI’s most sought-after narcos. Lopez confessed to dissolving the bodies of about 300 people in acid.

In recent months, the declared war against drug trafficking by President Calderon has resulted in the death of Arturo Beltran Leyva, who was killed in a raid in a Cuernavaca apartment in Mexico City on December 16 and the arrest, on January 2, of the brother Carlos Beltran Leyva. More than 15,000 people have died in Mexico since 2006 in the fight against drugs.

(12 January 2010)