MEXICO CITY - A man believed to be the leader of the Gulf drug cartel, which controls some of the most valuable and violently contested smuggling routes along the U.S. border, was arrested by Mexican marines and presented to the public Thursday morning.
The capture of Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez, 41, is a major victory in the military battle against drug trafficking, but it could open a power vacuum and intensify a struggle south of the Texas border in northeast Mexico, a region that has seen some of the most horrific violence in the country's six-year war among law-enforcement and rival gangs.
Adm. Jose Luis Vergara, a navy spokesman, said the burly, mustachioed man detained Wednesday evening in the Gulf port of Tampico was the capo known as "El Coss." One of Mexico's most-wanted men, he is charged in the U.S. with drug-trafficking and threatening U.S. law enforcement officials. U.S. authorities offered $5 million for information leading to his arrest.
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"This is a very, very important arrest," said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, chair of the department of government at the University of Texas at Brownsville, and an expert on politics and crime in the Gulf Cartel's territory.
She said the cartel was a vertically structured organization dependent on its top leaders, several of whom have been arrested in recent months.
Now, she said, she expects a surge in violence between the two remaining dominant cartels in Mexico - the Pacific Coast-based Sinaloa Cartel run by Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, and the brutal paramilitary Zetas.
