Slideshow: Narco culture permeates Mexico, leaks across border

Yuri Cortez / AFP - Getty Images

Mario Cardenas Guillen, aka "El M-1" an alleged leader of the Gulf drug cartel, stands during his presentation to the press Tuesday in Mexico City.

Mexican marines have captured Mario Cardenas Guillen, "El Gordo," the leader of the country's Gulf Cartel, Mexico's attorney general told Telemundo.

Cardenas, along with Eduardo Costilla, "El Cos," controlled the criminal organization, Telemundo reported. Cardenas is the brother of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the Gulf Cartel leader arrested in 2003 and extradited to the United States in 2007.

Mario Cardenas will have his first court appearance Wednesday afternoon, Telemundo said.

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Cardenas' is one of the highest-profile arrests in months in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug gangs, a senior Mexican navy source told Reuters on Tuesday.

Wearing a blue flak jacket and flip-flops and flanked by two masked marines wielding semiautomatic rifles, the balding Cardenas, also called "Fatso," stood impassively, looking up occasionally, as officials in Mexico City read out details of the operation to capture him.

An official said he was caught with weapons, ammunition, around $10,000 worth of pesos in cash, and four small envelopes containing a white powder that appeared to be cocaine.

"The capture was carried out following an infantry operation yesterday in Altamira, Tamaulipas, as (Cardenas) brandished a large weapon in the entrance of a building," Navy spokesman Vice Admiral Jose Luis Vergarathe said.

Cardenas, who has run the cartel since his brother, former leader Antonio Cardenas or "Tony Tormenta," was killed in a 2010 gunfight with the Mexican government, was captured in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas on Monday, the source told Reuters.

The Gulf Cartel's power has waned in recent years in a feud with Mexico's most brutal gang, the Zetas, which began life providing protection to the Gulf Cartel's operations in northeastern Mexico.

Cardenas was arrested and convicted on organized crime charges in 1995. He was first incarcerated in a prison in the city of Matamoros, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Brownsville, Texas, where he was caught organizing large shipments of cocaine and marijuana from inside the prison walls.

In 2003, he was transferred to the Puente Grande prison in western Mexico, the same facility where Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel and Mexico's most wanted man, escaped in a laundry cart in 2001.

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Osiel Cardenas was sentenced in 2010 to 25 years in prison during a highly secretive hearing closed to the public to protect the lives of everyone involved, The New York Times reported at the time. The Gulf Cartel controlled much of the cocaine traffic across the border in South Texas, and Osiel Cardenas agreed to cooperate with the federal government, according to a hearing transcript.

During Calderon's six-year offensive against cartels, there have been more than 55,000 drug-related killings. More than 3,000 police and soldiers have died, although many were involved with the gangs.

This article includes reporting by Reuters.

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SAN DIEGO -- Alleged drug cartel member Eduardo Arellano-Felix, 55, was extradited from Mexico to the United States Friday to face charges of racketeering, money laundering and narcotics trafficking, U.S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy announced.

Arellano-Felix was arrested by Mexican authorities in Tijuana, Mexico, on Oct. 25, 2008, after a gun battle with a Mexican Special Tactical Team. An extradition order to the U.S. was granted in 2010, followed by two years of unsuccessful appeals.

Arellano-Felix – allegedly a top leader in the Arellano-Felix Organization (AFO) -- finally arrived in San Diego Friday afternoon. He’s scheduled to make his first appearance in court Tuesday.

The AFO is known as one of the most notorious multinational drug trafficking organizations, controlling the flow of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs through the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali into the United States. Its operations also extended into southern Mexico and Colombia.

The extradition of Arellano-Felix Friday marks a major development in the war on drugs along our border and signals the official end of the notorious AFO.

For the past 20 years, federal prosecutors have been working tirelessly to stop extreme violence across the border fueled by the AFO cartel, which has a long history of torture and murder.

“Everybody in this organization has had somebody killed,” said former federal prosecutor John Kirby.

Kirby helped draft the indictment against the Arellano-Felix cartel which has led to the capture of four of the Arellano brothers.

Handout / REUTERS

Eduardo Arellano-Felix is shown under arrest in Mexico City in October 2008.

Eduardo is the last one to face justice.

“I do have a level of personal satisfaction. Finally, Eduardo, the last one,” said Kirby.

Kirby said Eduardo’s extradition sends a powerful message to other cartels.

"If the Arellano brothers can be brought here, anybody can be,” warned Kirby.

He also believes other cartels have learned not to make the same mistakes made by the Arellano brothers.

"The violence and corruption was just too much, and was too out there, so I think other traffickers might want to think, we want to be much quieter."

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Daniel Becerrill / Reuters

Resident look on after six men were shot dead in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, on Monday. While four of the dead were suspected drug gang members, a fifth worked at a nearby car dealership and a sixth was offering to clean the windows of passing cars, according to local media. The graffiti on the wall reads "Cartels united."

A car bomb exploded outside the offices of a newspaper in the capital of Mexico's northern state of Tamaulipas on Monday night, according to the state government, the latest in a spate of violent incidents to rock the country.

Earlier on Monday, six men were shot dead in Monterrey, in the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon. Four were suspected drug gang members and two innocent bystanders, Reuters reported, quoting local media.

On Sunday, 12 police were killed in a mountain highway ambush hours after the severed heads of 10 people were dumped in a small town in a key illegal-drug-growing region in the southern state of Guerrero. Armed assailants opened fire on a police convoy, killing the dozen officers and wounding 11 more, said Arturo Martinez, spokesman for the state government, according to Reuters.

The ambush took place on a rural highway near the town of Teloloapan, located between the beach resort of Acapulco and Mexico City. Earlier Sunday, the severed heads of 10 people were lined along a street outside a slaughterhouse in the center of Teloloapan.

The La Familia cartel and its offshoot, Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar), are among the gangs fighting for territory in the region. The heads had been left with a message threatening the La Familia gang, local media reported.

Debate rages over Mexico 'spillover violence'

More than 50,000 people, including more than 2,500 police and soldiers, have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led crackdown on the cartels after taking office five years ago.

Car bomb
The car bomb in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, exploded at around 8:15 p.m. (9:15 p.m. ET) outside the offices of Expreso newspaper, according to a statement by state government (Link to statement in Spanish). Nobody was hurt in the explosion, which hit during the busiest time of day in the newsroom, but it did damage at least five cars and caused a fire, according to Blog del Narco, a site that documents the rising drug violence. (Link to website in Spanish)

Mexican journalist on drug lords: "If they're going to kill you, they're going to kill you'

According to Blog del Narco the newspaper posted a notice on its site shortly after the bombing but msnbc.com was unable to access the posting.

It would not be the first time that journalists were apparently targeted in Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in which to be a reporter or photographer. Many news organizations are wary of reporting on drug-related violence as a consequence.

Deadly gunbattle erupts near Mexico baseball game

Blog del Narco has become one of the few sources of information about the ongoing violence. Comments on posts indicated that it is followed by those involved in the drug trade.

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Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

Raymundo Ruiz / AP

Forensic experts work on the scene after gunmen opened fire on an ambulance, killing the driver, two patients and a relative of one of the patients in Ciudad Juarez on Wednesday. According to authorities and witnesses, gunmen riding on a pick-up crashed into the ambulance and opened fire. The patients in the ambulance were being transferred from one hospital to another for dialysis treatment.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Gunmen attacked an ambulance in this border city Wednesday, killing the driver, two patients and a fourth person in the vehicle, officials said.

The Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office said the ambulance driver was shot in the head and appeared to be the target of the attack. It did not provide theories about a motive.

Two of the victims were patients being taken to a Ciudad Juarez facility for kidney treatment, officials said. A woman accompanying the patients was also killed.

Rosendo Gaytan, a spokesman for the Mexican Social Security Institute in Ciudad Juarez said a pickup truck carrying the gunmen intentionally crashed into the ambulance, forcing it to stop. The attackers then got out of the truck and opened fire on the ambulance, Gaytan said.

Ciudad Juarez, which is across the border from El Paso, Texas, is in the midst of a war between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels and saw some 3,100 homicides last year. Killings have gradually decreased but violence remains high.

Authorities reported six other slayings Wednesday in addition to the ambulance attack.

Growing rivalry
Elsewhere, three members of a criminal gang allied with the Zetas drug cartel have been detained in connection with the slayings of 26 people last month in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Jalisco state Attorney General Tomas Coronado said the arrested men belonged to the Milenio gang and had told police that the slain men were members of a rival group that refused to join with Milenio.

Analysts have described the Guadalajara slayings as the result of a growing rivalry between the Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa cartel. The Sinaloa cartel is based in Sinaloa state, to the north of Jalisco.

Meanwhile, TIME magazine on Wednesday highlighted Mexico's "spreading drug war" as one of its 10 "underreported stories" of 2011.

A list compiled by Reuters of the country's worst atrocities of 2011 includes:

• In April, officials unearthed the first of what turned out to be more than 450 bodies buried in mass graves in the northern states of Durango and Tamaulipas.
• August 20: Five headless bodies were found in Acapulco, taking the number of people killed in the popular Pacific resort to at least 25 in that one week.
• August 25: Masked gunmen torch a casino in Monterrey, killing 52 people, most of them women. The attack takes less than three minutes.
• September 20: Thirty-five bodies are found abandoned in two trucks on an underpass in the eastern Gulf city of Veracruz, which had been largely untouched by the violence.
• October 6: Mexican security forces find 32 bodies at several locations around Veracruz, just two days after the government unveiled a plan to bolster security in Veracruz state.
• November 24: More than 20 bodies are found in cars in Mexico's second city, Guadalajara, a day after the burned bodies of 16 people are found in the home state of the country's powerful drug lord, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

The Associated Press, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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