⁍ Mexican security forces on Sunday captured Jose Antonio Yepez, a notorious drug gang leader and fuel thief.
⁍ Known as ‘El Marro’ (The Mallet), Yepez was arrested in the early hours of Sunday by soldiers and state officials during a raid on a house in Guanajuato.
⁍ Yepez, 40, is the highest profile narco arrested so far under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
– Mexican authorities say they’ve captured one of the country’s most notorious drug lords. The Defense Ministry says Jose Antonio Yepez, head of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, was arrested early Sunday in the central state of Guanajuato, the AP reports. Yepez is accused of involvement in the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of fuel from state-run oil company Pemex. Authorities say Yepez was captured with five other gang members during a raid in a village just north of where the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel was born. “This a tremendously successful blow for the government,” security expert Raul Benitez at the National Autonomous University of Mexico tells Reuters. Guanajuato has become the main flashpoint of record gang violence, and Yepez had been engaged in a bloody struggle for supremacy with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful and violent gangs. Security Minister Alfonso Durazo said Yepez would be taken to the Altiplano maximum security prison where “El Chapo” Guzman was housed before he escaped through a tunnel in 2015.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-drugs/mexico-nabs-el-marro-fuel-theft-king-blamed-for-surge-in-drug-violence-idUSKBN24Y0EX