MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities on Tuesday said they arrested a regional boss of the La Familia drug gang that dominates the western state of Michoacan with violence and a cultlike authority.
The trafficking group recently hung banners suggesting a truce with Mexican government forces, but authorities dismissed the move as a ploy and said they wouldn’t negotiate anyway.
Federal police said the man arrested, Jose Alfredo Landa Torres, was recently named to head La Familia’s operations in the state capital of Morelia. His alleged duties included managing finances, bribing police and overseeing street-level drug sales.
Landa, 37, known as “Skinny,” worked his way up the ranks of La Familia since joining in 2007 as a street-level lookout, or halcon, in the city of Maravatio, federal police said in a statement. Drug gangs frequently employ taxi drivers, street vendors and others as watch for patrols of police or military units.
Authorities said Landa was put in charge of the Morelia zone after both immediate predecessors were arrested, in 2009 and in August.
A second suspect was arrested with Landa. Police confiscated an AK-47 assault rifle and two handguns.
La Familia, a relative newcomer to Mexico’s criminal underworld, has in a few years become a major trafficker and big producer of methamphetamines. Its members, sometimes recruited in drug-treatment centers, adhere to a quasi-religious dogma. The group pays off Michoacan officials, beheads rivals and paints itself as a protector of the state’s residents.
In other developments, authorities in the northern state of Chihuahua said Tuesday that they had unearthed the bodies of 19 men and a woman from a dozen clandestine graves in a rural area near the U.S. border. The Mexican army found the series of graves on Saturday and began digging.
