Organized Crime and Coruption Project

Collapse may lead to power vacuum and fight to control the drug trade in its territory
By Valerie Hopkins

The former leader of Mexican drug cartel La Familia, the syndicate with control over the central Mexican state of Michoacan, told police that the network is “going to be dismantled.” According to analysts, this may bring more and not less violence as competing factions vie for control.

Jose de Jesus Mendez, known as “the Monkey,” told federal police that the organization he used to lead “has no future,” because the government has intelligence about its remaining operatives and will capture them “at any moment.”

In his statement to the police, Mendez urged people to “work honestly” instead of joining a cartel, reports FoxNews Latino. “It’s not true you can only get ahead (through crime); there are tons of ways to get ahead by working,” he told would-be gang members.

Mendez was arrested by in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes last Tuesday. Federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire says he committed a host of crimes, including “murders, kidnappings, extortion, corruption,” and grenade attacks on civilians previously attributed to Los Zetas, a cartel that controls almost all of Mexico’s east coast. Law enforcement authorities say that the arrest is a victory in Mexico’s five year ‘war on drugs.’

More than 700 La Familia operatives have been arrested by state police since President Felipe Calderon decided to make fighting drug-related crime a priority in 2006. Mendez was the last of the gang’s leaders who remained at large. In his blog, Calderon hailed the capture as a “great blow against organized crime.”

The cartel, who had a stronghold in Calderon’s home state Michoacan, was one of the first to produce and illegally export methamphetamines on a large scale. The former leader said he also oversaw the cartel’s shipment of tons of marijuana and cocaine into U.S. markets.

Mendez assumed leadership of the cartel in December, when Mexican authorities killed the organization’s founder Nazario Moreno, nicknamed “the Craziest One.”

Mendez was considered dangerous in Michoacan because of his control over local authorities. A report issued last weekend by Mexico’s federal police agency reveals the extent of cooperation and coordination between La Familia and law enforcement bodies.

Investigators determined that police allowed members of the gang to use “radio frequencies and uniforms,” and that operatives used “patrol cars to block streets so that hit men could get away.”

Analysts say Mendez’s death means the gang, which currently has approximately 4,000 members, will splinter.

“The capture of Chango has severely weakened La Familia,” George Grayson, a professor at the College of William and Mary who has written extensively about Mexican drug gangs, told OCCRP.

He says that the turf war for control of Michoacan will generate more violence in the state, but expects that one cartel with a history of alliances with La Familia will eventually predominate.

“Assuming that a vacuum is created in Michoacan, I expect the Sinaloa Cartel to move in.”

The breakaway “Knights Templar,” led by former schoolteacher Servando “La Tuta” Gomez, has already attracted some members after Gomez defected from La Familia in violent clashes earlier this year after disputes with Mendez.

Gomez remains at large and his gang has been tied to over 25 recent murders in Michoacan.

Michoacan is the target of “Operation Michoacan,” a civilian-military operation initiated by Calderon in 2006 to combat trafficking and drug-related deaths. The government estimates that drug-related incidents have claimed 40,000 lives countrywide since 2006. The casualty rates went up sixty percent in 2010.