“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat
Mexican drug lords are experts at escapes: some fly away, others choreograph to distract and some flee in leaps and bounds through paths unknown to the authorities.
Mexican drug lords are experts in escapes.
Those responsible in the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) for designing the plan to arrest the founders of the Nueva Familia Michoacana believed they had everything ready for a successful operation. In the early hours of March 3, they made sure that all the streets in Petatlan, Guerrero, were covered.
It seemed that, at last, the elusive Johnny and Jose Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga, El Pez and El Fresa, would go down. There was only one problem: no one thought about a probable escape by air. Or rather: only two people thought about it, and that pair were the targets of that raid.
More than 500 soldiers and members of the National Guard went to Guerrero’s Costa Grande with confidential information: in the town of La Morena they would find the pair that had become the scourge of Tierra Caliente – Guerrero, Michoacan and the State of Mexico – and for whom the Mexican authorities offered, for each one, half a million pesos in reward money. The federal agents were carrying two arrest warrants against them for homicide.
The Secretary of the Navy considers the Hurtados to be the heirs of the criminal structure left by Servando Gomez, La Tuta. In their turf war against the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, they have become leaders of the third criminal enterprise with the most recruits, according to a study by specialists Rafael Prieto-Curiel, Gian Maria Campedelli and the recently deceased Alejandro Hope.
El Pez and El Fresa are the current heads of a ruthless cartel that makes use of extortion, kidnapping and drug sales, with a presence in more than 80 municipalities, such as Texcaltitlan, where on December 8 a group of peasants, fed up with living under their yoke, killed their boss and accomplices, which has put the cartel, once again, in the public eye.
But that March 3, the Army did not want eyes on them, it launched a covert operation that, as it advanced overland, became hopelessly comprised. Criminal spies damaged eight vehicles with tire caltrops and soldiers lost speed as women were forced to block streets with vehicles and their own bodies. And yet, there was confidence in the federal forces that they would arrive in time to surround that luxury cabin.
However, less than three kilometers from the property, the military saw a red dot rise in the air. They knew what it meant: Johnny and Jose Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga were escaping by helicopter. The hope of an arrest turned into a tedious seizure of drugs and weapons in an empty house.
As happened in 2014, 2016 and 2019, El Pez and El Fresa fled in the spring.
La Kena’, Tamaulipas’ Top Dog
There are two ways to refer to Jose Alberto Garcia Vilano, the top commander of the armed wing Los Escorpiones, which spawned the Gulf Cartel: his followers call him La Kena, while his pursuers in the Navy Secretariat call him “the real governor of Tamaulipas.
His alias could only be heard in northeastern Mexico… until March 3, when hitmen under his command kidnapped four Americans in Matamoros, less than 10 kilometers from the border. The crime was recorded by an anonymous neighbor and quickly went viral, arousing the fury of the White House. The abduction of Latavia, Shaeed, Eric James and Zindell, all African-Americans, threatened to become a diplomatic mess.
Republicans demanded that U.S. troops enter Mexican soil to extract the victims; Democrats argued that President Joe Biden’s iron fist would achieve liberation across the Rio Grande. And on the Mexican side there was an urgency to rescue them alive, although five days after the kidnapping that hope vanished: in a house in the Tecolote community they found the bodies of two of them, and Latavia and Eric James alive, but wounded.
From then on, the 32-year-old La Kena rose to the rank of the most wanted men in the country. Stories about his sadism began to circulate freely, as well as a poster with his name, his other nickname – Cyclone 19 – and the reward for his arrest: 2.5 million pesos, one of the highest in this six-year presidential term.
September 4 was to be La Kena’s last day as a free man. Before dawn, marines surrounded the Valle de los Reyes subdivision in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, hoping to arrest him while he slept, but his armed guard detected unusual movements and set in motion a plan to keep him away from the authorities.
It was a pre-rehearsed choreography: two caravans left the house marked by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to confuse the pursuers. In one was La Kena, who every so often switched to another vehicle to confuse the marines. Then, the emptied vehicle served as a barricade. The escape plan had been designed by military deserters, the marines thought.
The result of the operation was four suspected Gulf Cartel members killed, one consular alert and no arrests, although the Navy flew unsuccessfully over the city with a UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter to find the target.
Night fell and “the parallel governor” remains at large. He is still armed and very dangerous.
The elusive Mencho
If all went well, the Mexican government would have marked January 28 on the calendar as the day it arrested the most wanted criminal of the last seven years.
With Joaquin El Chapo Guzman arrested in 2016, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes El Mencho, head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, had become public enemy number one and since then his downfall has been perceived as the crown jewel for any administration. It is an arrest that, according to the White House, is worth $10 million, second only to the $20 million offered for El Mayo Zambada and matched by Ivan Archivaldo Guzman, the eldest Chapito.
Since January 16, the Mexican Army and the National Guard have been preparing for a surprise strike. The most elusive of Mexican capos was in the sights of 200 elements, who moved to Autlan, Jalisco, where the intelligence apparatus of the federal government had located this man whose troops are present in 29 states and who manages various dirty businesses, from drug trafficking to illegal mineral extraction.
The mission, the executors knew, was complicated. The town is within the Sierra de Amula, a region of rugged terrain that is only dominated by the locals. Every dirt road and precipice was unknown to the military, a situation not fully exploited by Mencho’s gunmen who had grown up in the region.
The surprise factor was the federal government’s greatest advantage, which is why the operation was kept as a closely guarded secret. Not even the governor of Jalisco knew about it. But the plan disintegrated when a group of hitmen in pick-up trucks saw a group of federal guards having breakfast in a small inn. The element of surprise had changed sides.
The hitmen of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel attacked the federal elements with gunfire. One died instantly, two more were wounded. When the federal government wanted to respond by accelerating the start of the operation, the cartel responded with rapid movements of stolen and burned trucks on the Autlán-Unión de Tula and Grullo-Unión de Tula highways, as well as on the Corcovado and Puerta de Barro bridges. If the operation had turned into a chess game, El Mencho would have shouted check!
By the time the authorities shook off the blockades, there was nothing left to do. The valuable information from the intelligence apparatus had turned to dust: El Mencho fled through hidden paths under leafy trees and his new location was once again unknown.
The hunt for him had to begin again from scratch. For the ninth time since 2013, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes had vanished.