Federal police have arrested a drug cartel suspect they believe was behind a plot to kill Mexican President Felipe Calderon in retaliation for his crackdown on organized crime, the head of the anti-drug unit said on Monday.
Government intelligence had learned that Dimas Diaz — the alleged financial operator of the Pacific cartel — was behind a threat on Calderon’s life, Ramon Pequeno said.
The investigation into Diaz was opened last year after a series of arrests and seizures from the gang, also known as the Sinaloa cartel, police said. But they did not say when Calderon was threatened or how they uncovered the assassination plot.
PHOTO: AP
Diaz was arrested with four other alleged drug suspects on Sunday in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, where the gang is based.
The threat was likely a response to a 2007 cocaine bust, one of Mexico’s largest, in which 26 tonnes of drugs coming from Colombia to the cartel were seized in the port of Manzanillo, Pequeno said.
Calderon brushed off the alleged plot as one of many against him because of his tenacity in fighting the country’s powerful cartels.
“It would not be the first nor the last time that there is talk about some assassination attempt on my life,” Calderon said, speaking to reporters at the end of a swift North American Leaders’ Summit, an annual gathering launched under former US president George W. Bush.
Thugs are reacting that way, he said, because “they know we’re winning day by day.”
Also on Monday, soldiers arrested Juan Daniel Carranco Salazar, the alleged leader of the Gulf cartel’s operations in the Caribbean resort of Cancun, the army said.
Carranco Salazar was arrested along with two associates in Cancun on Monday, and soldiers seized six pistols and 1kg of cocaine from the suspects. He was ordered held pending investigation.
General Luis Arturo Oliver Cen said Carranco Salazar was believed to have participated in the killings of soldiers and in a nighttime attack on the US consulate in October in which a grenade was thrown at the building but failed to explode. The consulate was closed at the time and nobody was injured.
Since taking office in 2006, Calderon has made the drug war a centerpiece of his administration, sending more than 45,000 troops to hotspots to take on the deeply entrenched gangs.
Cartels have responded with a vengeance, unleashing unprecedented bloodshed. Drug violence has killed more than 11,000 people in the last two-and-a-half years. Federal officials say most of the deaths are smugglers killed by rivals fighting over lucrative drug routes into the US.
Also on Monday, state prosecutors in Baja California announced their arrest of a state detective in the border city of Mexicali with 8kg of cocaine.
The detective, identified as Sergio Alvarado Chong, was allegedly preparing to cross into the US when he was detained on Monday.
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