The Cells of “El Cabo 20”

The following is the direct text of an article written by Zeta Tijuana

David López Jiménez is classified as the most violent criminal operator, with presence in four of six municipalities; 32 of his criminal underlings are identified but have not been arrested. 

As an active part of the territorial battle in Baja California's Coastal Zone, he traffics and murders for the CAF and "Los Chapitos," but "El Lobo" is the one in control of the streets. With murders, dismemberments and narcomantas, he is trying to eradicate the CJNG from Tijuana. Authorities consider "Cabo 20" responsible for the homicides in Tijuana, Tecate, Ensenada and San Quintin... but he has not been charged with any of them.

"I am a 'bataca' of the CAF, my job is to take care of the drug dealer there at the 7 de Copas, 'El Güero' told me that we work for 'El Cabo 20', but that they were all very tense, because 'El 20' is managing two lines: that of the CAF and Sinaloa," said Armado Israel Flores Cisneros when he was arrested on December 6, 2021.

The 7 de Copas bar, located on Bulevar Díaz Ordaz, in the Urías colony of the La Mesa de Tijuana delegation, is a known drug selling point where murders are committed: on September 21, 2017 one man was killed, another was murdered and one injured on July 4, 2018; on July 30, 2019 there were four wounded and one dead body; in 2021, an armed attack took place on August 29 and one dead on November 28.

"He is the one who brings all the trouble, he is working - committing crimes - for everyone, and in the entire Coastal Zone. He kills people and blames it on the opposing cell. He is making this mess so that the groups will fight against each other," said a police chief about David López Jiménez, alias "El Cabo 20" and/or "El Lobo.

Eduardo Garcia Simental "El Teo" was a hitman leader who split off from the Arellano Felix Cartel (CAF). He started an internal struggle that resulted in hundreds of homicides starting in 2007, which culminated in his capture in January 2010. Of the dozens of relevant criminals arrested in that period, only Garcia and two of his brothers remain in prison.

"Every day, Jiménez pulls people from the Jalisco Cartel into his team," said the investigator regarding "El Cabo 20."

"It seems that right now his main mission is to take away the Jalisco Cartel's criminal dominance of the Sánchez Taboada delegation, which is where this criminal group has its headquarters, and where he started. Not only is he recruiting people from Jalisco, he is also integrating criminals from the Arellano Cartel, from the group that he is allied with, 'Los Chapitos' - the Guzmán brothers - and even in the Eastern Zone, he has recruited criminal operators from the Los Uriarte cell of Sinaloa".

In addition, "in some streets, in certain areas of Tijuana and Ensenada, he has more power than the leaders of the cells with whom he is operating; under these conditions it is difficult to keep up with them, the criminal leaders of the cells are constantly changing groups".

There are some police reports that assure that David López Jiménez has recently been renting out his killers, and has even committed crimes with his rivals, the brothers Alfonso and René Arzate. Is this true?, ZETA asked the investigator.

"We don't have concrete indications to that effect, but we do have evidence to the contrary. According to the messages and threats that are put out through narcomantas, the main enemies of López are Rodolfo López Arellano 'Cabo 30' and Israel Alejandro Vázquez 'Cabo 50', who are also currently serving the Arzate brothers, but this alliance is still under investigation".

With criminal activity detected in four of the six municipalities, authorities consider Lopez Jimenez to be the perpetrator of a high percentage of the 2,537 homicides committed in the Coastal Zone during 2021. As of December 21, 1,917 in Tijuana, 333 in Ensenada, 230 in Tecate and 38 in San Quintín.

THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGN OF "CABO 20"

With the intention of taking away their main area of power in the Sánchez Taboada delegation, López Jiménez is waging a public campaign against his former fellow criminals of the New Generation Jalisco Cartel (Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, CJNG), which consists of:

1. Distributing dismembered bodies with narcomantas and messages on poster boards to generate terror and blame them on the Jalisco killers.

2. Using some internet pages created by people allied to the cartels to make these crimes public, and distributing them on social networks.

The authorities have been following this way of operating through intelligence reports in the last quarter. But this December, they began to include it in the investigation files:

They started with the investigation of the murder of Tijuana Municipal Police officer Víctor Manuel Ahumada Cabrera, who on the night of December 4, along with his partner Julio César Corona Altamirano, were attacked before 10:00 PM by two men, in the parking lot of Farmacia Roma in Paseo Reforma of the neighborhood of Delegación Sánchez Taboada.

Hours later, a poster appeared and was publicized on social networks, in which CJNG leaders claimed responsibility for the attack on the uniformed men.

As part of the search operations, two alleged perpetrators, who were traveling in a gray compact car similar to the one used by the killers, were arrested on Avenida 34 in the Villafloresta neighborhood. The capture of Miguel Ángel Ramírez Mendoza and José Carlos Ramírez Ríos was declared legal and they were both charged and sent to trial.

Two days later, on December 6, on Alba Roja Street and Lázaro Cárdenas Avenue in the Sonora neighborhood, criminals hung a banner, blaming "El Lobo" for the murder of the policeman and calling him a coward:

"DAVID LÓPEZ JIMENEZ ALIAS CABO 20. IN YOUR DESPERATION THAT YOU ARE LOSING EVERYTHING...YOU ORDERED THE KILLING OF INNOCENT POLICEMEN, APART FROM EVERYTHING YOU ARE A COWARD FOR NOT PUTTING YOUR NAME ON IT AND BLAMING US AND SIGNING THE POSTER WITH OUR NAMES. THE PEOPLE OF TIJUANA DON'T LIKE YOU BECAUSE OF THOSE DIRTY THINGS AND THE DISMEMBERED OF PEOPLE, YOU ARE ON YOUR WAY OUT, YOU PIG. SINCERELY EL 30 AND EL 50, HERE ONLY PEOPLE WITH BALLS, PEOPLE FROM EL AKILES".

Another identical banner was hung the following day - December 7 - on the bridge of a shopping center on Calle Terrazas and Díaz Ordaz Boulevard

According to authorities, Rodolfo López Arellano, alias "Cabo 30" and/or "El Solecito", and Israel Alejandro Vázquez "Cabo 50" and/or "El Goofy", are leaders of the CJNG, but they do not discount that there is an alliance with Los Aquiles of Sinaloa, an issue that has not yet been officially corroborated.

According to the analysis of the information, since June 2021, a possible alliance between CAF leaders and the criminal bosses of "El Cabo 20" and those of the Sinaloa Cartel - "Los Chapitos" - was made public, but there are no reports or statements from detainees indicating that Los Aquiles - listed as servants of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada" - are confronting the Guzmán brothers in Baja California.

TWO CELLS IDENTIFIED IN THE SERVICE OF "EL CABO 20"

The coordinated work of the Mesas por la Paz and Baja California Security has identified two criminal cells at the criminal service of David Jiménez, in both of which his right-hand man is José Cristian Gómez Rosales "Pitey".

His identity was made public in January 2020, when criminals arrested after the murder of GESI agent Marco Antonio Reyes Nahon revealed that this man was guiding them through the city via telephone to follow and try to kill the group of police officers.

On a third level, as operators in the Tijuana-Tecate area, criminal leaders of groups, authorities locate:

* Leonardo Fabián Robles “Cabo 45”

* Rodolfo Sánchez Sánchez López “Foer 53”

* Emilia Belén Gil Rivera “Naine” y/o “42”.

On a fourth level, as chiefs or leaders of small cells in neighborhoods, drug dealers, and killers are identified as:

* Jesús Alberto López Barraza “Clofer”

* Rubén Duarte Roque “Roque”

* Manuel Tamayo Hernández “Primo”

* Samir Isaí Almonte Salinas “Sucro”

* Sergio Fernando Araujo Torres

* Antonio Alejandro Jaramillo Cruz “Cabello”

* José Manuel Delgado Esquerra “Tieso”

* Yoshua Hernández Basa “Moreno”

* José Luis Alatorre Rivera “Negro”

* Abraham Elías Vicenteño Molla “Loner”.

In the port of Ensenada, Jiménez is also represented by "Pitey", below him, so far they only have identified:

* Daniel Lara Lozano “Dany”, as criminal leader of operation groups in the streets.

* Samir Isaí Almonte Salinas “Salinas”, as principal head of sicarios:

Categorized as drug dealers and sicarios:

* José Raúl Lara Guardado

* Jeanette Guadalupe Lara

* Elsa Arce Loy.

* Lino Lara Lozano

* Osvaldo Lara Lozano

* Ismael Antuna Ramos “Pájaro”

* Diego Rodríguez Arteaga

* Filiberto Meza Becerra

* Francisco Javier Sallard Escobar

* Juan Miguel García

* José Adrián Lucero Ramírez “Sicario”

* Obed Gustavo Hinojosa Madero “Tavo”

* Pedro Hinojosa Madero “Pototo”

* Jonathan Raúl León Limón

* Manuel de Jesús Meléndrez Rodríguez “Mole”

* José Alfredo Álvarez “Pipo”.

 

THE UNPUNISHED BACKGROUND OF "EL LOBO".

"El Cabo 20" is only 32 years old, has a one inch scar on his left cheekbone, is 5'8" tall and has claimed to have "incomplete high school". He lives in a common-law marriage, has two children, two sisters and a cousin named Federico -with whom he is close-. His father is Julio López and his mother is Guadalupe Jiménez. In 2010 he was imprisoned for assault and battery during a robbery and the Eighth Court decided to release him with substitution of sentence.

He was also arrested for vehicle theft in Tijuana in 2014, and captured again in March 2017, as part of the investigation of a drug laboratory in Sánchez Taboada neighborhood of Tijuana. Jiménez and another man were arrested in possession of ice and heroin and were released pending prosecution.

Now, he is in his fourth year on the list of priority targets, during which time he has been captured twice, the same number of times he has been released, only to return to the streets with more criminal power, as the number of his hitmen cells has grown.

When the authorities integrated into the Mesas de Coordinación por la Paz y Seguridad de Baja California, they publicly placed David López Jiménez in the criminal organization chart on the first week of February 2019, when he was practically on his way out of the CJNG, which he was a part of since 2015, when this mafia decided to settle in the Baja California territory.

"El Cabo 20" had an arrest warrant "for crimes against health, in the sale and production of methamphetamine", and was arrested on February 10, 2019 by elements of the then State Preventive Police (PEP) and the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) in the Vistahermosa neighborhood, in the Zona Dorada of Mexicali. That day, "El Lobo" claimed that his profession was "cook".

The intelligence areas of the PEP were able to find him in Mexicali, because he left his comfort zone in Tijuana, trying to flee death threats from his former colleagues in Jalisco.

In 2019, he was blamed for the disappearance, kidnapping and homicide - some were found alive - of sea workers on a trip between Bahía Tortugas, Baja California Sur and Isla de Cedros, Baja California, which occurred on September 27, all fishermen related to the illegal transfer of the plant known as Generosa.

By the end of that year, authorities involved in the Mesas de Coordinación had already identified López Jiménez and his criminal cells as part of the territorial struggle in Tecate, Ensenada and Tijuana.

On Sunday, March 29, 2020, he was recaptured -- again in a high-income neighborhood -- in Querétaro. The operation was carried out by personnel from the Marina, SIEDO and the police of that state. They searched for him with information provided by Baja California Guard of Security and Investigation (GESI), which promoted his capture after holding him responsible for the armed attack against six state guards, in which agent Marco Antonio Reyes Nahon and a civilian, Héctor Cabrera, were killed on January 22 of the same year.

In the end, he was only charged with possession of a .38 Super caliber weapon and 300 grams of white powder, with characteristics of cocaine. He was released pending trial, however, it was never reported what the authorities found in the three cell phones and the laptop that were seized.