Mexico Nabs Suspected Cartel Gunmen

Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua - Federal police arrested six men suspected of working as hired guns for Juarez drug cartel boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, Mexico’s Public Safety Secretariat said Wednesday.

The sicarios arrested were identified as:: César Aldo Prospero 31, Mario Cano García 18, José Luis García 31 and Alejandro Terrazas Paz 26, all o fthese sicarios are originally from Ciudad Juárez. Also arrested were Alejandro Terrazas Paz 32 from Parral and Héctor García Lozano 37 from Torreón.

The men were detained Tuesday in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, the secretariat said in a statement.

Police tracked down the suspects in Juarez’s Revolucion Mexicana neighborhood after receiving “intelligence reports” about the presence of heavily armed men traveling in an SUV.

Confiscated from the gunmen were four AK-47 assault rifles, an Uzi, two handguns and more than 200 rounds of ammunition, as well as small quantities of marijuana and cocaine, four two-way radios and four cell phones, the government statement said.

A city of 1.5 million people just across the border from El Paso, Texas, Juarez is Mexico’s murder capital and, by some measures, the world’s most dangerous city.

Most of the more than 4,000 murders reported in Ciudad Juarez since January 2008 are blamed on a turf battle between the Carrillo Fuentes organization and the Sinaloa drug cartel, led by fugitive Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman.

After the deployment in Juarez of thousands of army troops and federal police did nothing to slow the pace of killings, President Felipe Calderon’s government recently announced a plan to address broader social problems in the city.

Categories: ciudad juarez, sicarios