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The capture of the notoriously brutal Zetas leader Miguel Angel Trevino Morales is a serious blow to Mexico’s most feared drug cartel but experts cautioned that taking down the group’s command structure is unlikely to diminish violence in the border states where it dominates through terror.

Trevino Morales, 40, was captured before dawn Monday by Mexican Marines who intercepted a pickup truck with $2 million in cash on a dirt road in the countryside outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo, which has long served as the Zetas’ base of operations. The truck was halted by a Marine helicopter and Trevino Morales was taken into custody along with a bodyguard and an accountant and eight guns, government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez told reporters.

It was the first major blow against an organized crime leader by a Mexican administration struggling to drive down persistently high levels of violence. Experts on the Zetas said that the arrest, at least the eighth capture or killing of a high-ranking Zeta since 2011, could leave behind a series of cells scattered across northern Mexico without a central command but with the same appetite for kidnapping, extortion and other crimes against innocent people.

“It’s another link in the destruction of the Zetas as a coherent, identifiable organization,” said Alejandro Hope, a former member of Mexico’s domestic intelligence service. “There will still be people who call themselves Zetas, bands of individuals who maintain the same modus operandi. There will be fights over illegal networks.”

The Zetas remain active in Nuevo Laredo, the nearby border state of Coahuila, the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, parts of north central Mexico and Central America, although Trevino Morales’ arrest means the gang has become “a franchise operation not a vertical organization,” said George Grayson, an expert on the Zetas and professor of government at the College of William & Mary.

The Zetas leader and his alleged accomplices were flown to Mexico City, where they are expected to eventually be tried in a closed system that usually takes years to prosecute cases, particularly high-profile ones.

Trevino Morales, known as “Z-40,” is uniformly described as one of the two most powerful cartel heads in Mexico, the leader of a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers, splintered off into their own cartel in 2010 and metastasized across Mexico, expanding from drug dealing into extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking.

Along the way, the Zetas authored some of the worst …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News

Mexico‘s new administration offered the first details on Tuesday of a long-touted shift in the country’s war on drugs, saying the government will spend $9.2 billion this year on social programs meant to keep young people from joining criminal organizations in the 251 most violent towns and neighborhoods across the country.

The government will flood those areas with spending on programs ranging from road-building to increasing school hours, President Enrique Pena Nieto and Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told an audience in the central state of Aguascalientes.

“It’s clear that we must put special emphasis on prevention, because we can’t only keep employing more sophisticated weapons, better equipment, more police, a higher presence of the armed forces in the country as the only form of combating organized crime,” Pena Nieto said.

The rhetoric of the announcement was a forceful rejection of Pena Nieto‘s predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who deployed thousands of troops to battle cartel gunmen and frequently boasted of the number of drug-gang leaders arrested and killed on his watch. But the speeches by Pena Nieto and Osorio Chong contained few specifics more than two months into a presidency marred by continuing violence in many states and a headline-grabbing series of horrifying crimes, including the kidnapping and slaying of an entire 17-member band near the northern city of Monterrey and the gang rape of six Spanish tourists in the resort city of Acapulco.

Analysts said the strategy, to be carried out by nine federal departments coordinated by a new Interagency Commission for the Prevention of Violence and Criminality, marked an important change in tone but not necessarily in the day-to-day reality of Mexico‘s battle against drug cartels.

“They’re going to throw a lot of money at a lot of programs. That is ground for skepticism,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former high-ranking official in Mexico‘s national intelligence agency. “The level of specificity is not there yet. I find this disconcerting.”

Officials released a partial list of the communities to be targeted by the program, which range from violent Acapulco to the relatively peaceful city of Oaxaca. It was unclear how much of the money was funding that had already been announced as part of other programs. Osorio Chong and Pena Nieto said the anti-crime program would overlap with a national anti-hunger initiative that was announced last month and is meant to aid more than 7 million hungry Mexicans in 400 of the country’s poorest municipalities.

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Capture of Zetas leader unlikely to quell violence

Mexico unveils details of new security strategy

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