MEXICO CITY — The arrest of the suspected kingpin of the Gulf Cartel is likely to send a further jolt of instability across Mexico’s violent northeastern border with Texas, even as it gives a boost to the nation’s navy over the scandal-ridden army.
A navy spokesman said Thursday that a 30-member team had captured Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez, known as “El Coss,” a 41-year-old former police officer who leads the Gulf Cartel, a once-formidable crime group.
The arrest occurred in Tampico, capital of Tamaulipas state, which abuts Texas, said Adm. Jose Luis Vergara. Costilla and five other men surrendered without any shots being fired, he said.
Costilla, sporting a thick black moustache and long sideburns and wearing a blue plaid shirt under a bulletproof vest, looked grim as guards hauled him before television cameras. He shook his head to questions.
Vergara said the arrest decapitated the Gulf Cartel, one of Mexico’s oldest drug-trafficking groups but one that has been battered in recent years by warfare with Los Zetas, onetime Gulf Cartel enforcers that split off in 2010 to form their own gang.
Further disarray is likely to engulf Costilla’s crime group as underlings seek to rise up and factions of Los Zetas try to control the vital smuggling corridors that snake north of Monterrey, an industrial hub, toward the Texas border, analysts said. The area is perhaps Mexico’s most violent.
Mexico’s navy has scored a one-two blow against Gulf Cartel mobsters this month. Its forces captured another cartel leader, Mario Cardenas Guillen, on Sept. 3.
“The really big winners are the marines,” said George W. Grayson, an expert on Mexican crime groups at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, speaking of the navy’s amphibious infantry forces. “They’ve had half a dozen major takedowns since 2009.”
Despite being larger and better funded, Mexico’s army has failed to notch up the successes of the navy against gangsters, and it faces a tide of corruption charges.
The U.S. State Department had a $5 million reward out for the arrest of Costilla. Prosecutors in southern Texas indicted him in 2002 on a series of drug and money laundering charges as well as for pointing AK-47 assault rifles at U.S. agents and threatening to kill them in an incident in November 1999.
