Mexican Trafficker Dies in Gunfight

TORREÓN, Mexico--During an hour-long firefight with marines on the night of Dec. 16, alleged drug-trafficker Arturo Beltrán Leyva was shot to death in the mid-sized southern Mexican city of Cuernavaca. Along with Beltrán Leyva -- whose nicknames included Boss of Bosses, White Boots, Death, and the Beard -- six bodyguards as well as a marine were also killed. Another man, heavily beaten about the face, and two women were brought into custody following the gunfight.

The marines had been closely following Beltrán Leyva's steps for close to a week, narrowly missing him when they interrupted a party in Cuernavaca the previous weekend. When he was discovered in the luxury condo complex where he was eventually killed, some 200 troops stormed the building amid machine-gun fire and grenade attacks, according to the Mexican government.

Beltrán Leyva, who was indicted in the US in August, is the first of the kingpin-level drug traffickers, often referred to as "capos", to be captured or killed in Mexico since 2003. Despite President Felipe Calderón's aggressive stance toward organized crime, a big fish like Beltrán Leyva had eluded him since he arrived in office in 2006. Calderón's team has pulled off some spectacular seizures and has disrupted gangs with regular arrests of lieutenants, but the steady drumbeat of mid-level arrestees doesn't move public opinion the way an event like Beltrán Leyva's death does.

And the news comes at an ideal moment for Calderón, just as his approval rating is beginning to dip below 50 percent. "This death will favor the image of President Calderón", Mexican security analyst Jorge Luis Sierra said. "It happened in the moments in which the anti-drug strategy has been strongly questioned because of human rights abuse."

Beyond the political considerations, the death removes one of Mexico's more innovative criminals from the picture. "He will have been one of the capos with the greatest strategic vision in organized crime in Mexico," Sierra said.

The Beltrán Leyva organization was also one of the most audacious. When the so-called Operation Clean-up began to root out governmental corruption last year, the findings alarmed Mexican and American officials alike: Beltrán Leyva had managed to stick moles in the American embassy and up and down the Mexico branch of Interpol, and had Mexico's equivalent to the drug czar on his payroll. Beltrán Leyva was also suspected of ordering the murder in May 2008 of Édgar Millán, one of the highest ranking officials of the Federal Police.

While his public profile has grown a great deal in recent years, Beltrán Leyva has long been one of Mexico's most powerful underworld figures. For most of his career, Beltrán Leyva was closely linked to the nation's most notorious kingpin, Joaquín Guzmán. Both men hail from the mountainous Pacific state of Sinaloa, a notorious hotbed for drug traffickers. Their relationship soured in early 2008, after the arrest of Beltrán Leyva's brother Alfredo (officials say the dispute stems from Guzmán's failure to warn Alfredo of the government's pursuit, or, alternatively, that he nixed an elaborate plan to free Alfredo by force from government custody). It later deteriorated into open warfare, with the gangs communicating through crude threats tacked on the dead bodies of executed henchmen.

"Essentially you have a situation where two fairly powerful men in the Mexican organized crime world want to do everything they can to dismantle each other's network and take each other out," said Samuel Logan, the founder of the Southern Pulse, a security analysis firm that closely follows Latin America. "It had a very direct impact on the violence."

If history provides any indication, the aftermath of Beltrán Leyva's passing will be even bloodier than his death. "Unfortunately, every time a capo dies or is arrested, there is a period of vengeance and score-settling," Sierra said. According to Logan, there's no reason to expect Beltrán Leyva's death to be any different. "I think in the short term we may see a spike in violence once the dust settles," Logan said.

In addition, a giant market vacuum has opened up. The tons of cocaine that officials say Beltrán Leyva trafficked into the US each year are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, ample reason for his erstwhile subordinates and competitors to start fighting over the pieces of his empire.

Despite the looming prospect of more violence, Beltrán Leyva's death was good news for the DEA, which said that the ongoing cooperation between the two nations was "the basis for the arrest operation."

Sierra also said that operation shows the importance of a smarter approach to counter-narcotics operations. "The use of intelligence and counterintelligence systems against organized crime has been proven to be more effective than patrols and roadblocks in the cities suffering from drug traffic," Sierra said. "As these systems are being developed, more capos will go down."

The fall of more kingpins of Beltrán Leyva's stature would further increase the volatility in Mexico's drug-trafficking industry. In the short term, that would likely mean more violence, but it could also mean a long-term reduction in power of organized crime, relative to the government.

"One possible response [in such a scenario] from organized crime would be to restructure their chains of command and hierarchy," Sierra said. "The most visible capos will be increasingly vulnerable to detention or murder and the strategic commands of criminal organizations will be forced to adopt a lower profile with more decentralized and diffuse structures."

Colombia, where the large organizations that thrived in the ‘80s and ‘90s have fractured into a myriad of smaller groups, provides the closest model to the shift Sierra described. If Mexico follows its footsteps, the nation's traffickers will be no less adept at moving drugs northward, nor less violent, but it could prevent Beltrán Leyva's criminal heirs from adopting his bold, offensive operating style.

"Once a drug lord [in Colombia] becomes a national focus of attention, they become a ticking time bomb," Logan said. "They have a year or 18 months before they are dead or arrested. If we see that sort of process in Mexico, I think it's possible that the government, with the help of the DEA and others, will be able to hit these guys before they can recover. It's like fighting a five-headed hydra. You cut one head off and it grows back. It's a matter of cutting all five heads off at the same time."