MEXICO CITY, (Reuters) – Mexico paraded one of its most violent drug lords yesterday after a police raid that President Felipe Calderon’s government hopes will mark a breakthrough in its campaign against powerful cartels.
But the capture of Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez, a Texas-born 37-year-old, may do little to halt the flow of drugs into the United States or staunch bloodshed in Mexico’s most violent areas, most of them along the U.S. border.
In a sign of the widening violence, eight people were killed in the Caribbean resort of Cancun early yesterday when suspected drug hitmen threw Molotov cocktails into a bar on the city’s outskirts, the local attorney general’s office said.
In Mexico City, masked police paraded a handcuffed Valdez before reporters.
Wearing a green polo shirt, jeans and sneakers, Valdez, nicknamed “La Barbie” for his fair complexion, grinned openly as authorities discussed his capture near Mexico City on Monday afternoon.
“He has been detained, and this operation closes a chapter in drug trafficking in Mexico,” senior federal police official Facundo Rosas told local broadcaster Televisa.
But the arrest is unlikely to have a direct impact on some of the worst violence hurting Mexico’s image as it struggles out of recession and seeks to hold on to tourist revenues.
Over 28,000 people have died since Calderon launched his crackdown in late 2006, and the bloodshed shows no sign of stopping as rival gangs battle for control of smuggling routes.
Officials say Valdez was a leader of the Beltran Leyva cartel based in central Mexico, trafficked a tonne of cocaine each month and was responsible for “several dozen” murders.
He was known for the merciless beheadings of rivals, torturing and mutilating victims, and for ordering the slaughter of the family of a marine who took part in the killing of his former boss Arturo Beltran Leyva in December.
But Valdez’s operations were small compared to Mexico’s top gangs — the Sinaloa, Gulf and Juarez cartels — who smuggle the majority of the 140 tonnes of cocaine the United Nations estimates that Mexico exports to the United States every year. Neither is the arrest likely to end violence in border areas like Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, or in Mexico’s wealthy northern city of Monterrey, which is being sucked into the drug war with spiraling violence this year.
“Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey were not La Barbie’s area of influence, his capture won’t affect violence there,” said a senior federal police official who declined to be named, echoing another security official interviewed by Reuters.
Violence has begun to bleed beyond traffickers and security forces as cartels target mayors and migrants traveling north.
Valdez’s arrest follows an operation in July that killed Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, No. 3 in the Sinaloa cartel.