Pubdate: Fri, 29 Mar 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Section: International
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Tim Weiner

MEXICO ARRESTS A KEY FIGURE IN DRUG CARTEL

MEXICO CITY, March 28 -- Adding to an extraordinary string of antidrug 
successes, Mexican authorities announced the arrest of a top lieutenant 
today in the cocaine trafficking organization known as the Gulf cartel.

The suspect, Adan Medrano Rodriguez, 32, was wanted in the United States 
and Mexico on charges of drug conspiracy. He was last seen by the 
authorities in November 1999, when he confronted and nearly killed two 
agents, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement 
Administration, during an armed standoff in the Mexican border town of 
Matamoros, south of Brownsville, Tex.

The United States had offered a $2 million reward for his arrest. He was 
captured Wednesday night in Matamoros, and informants working in secret 
with Mexican authorities would receive some of the reward, said a federal 
prosecutor, Estuardo Bermudez Molina.

In the last year, the government of President Vicente Fox, working 
increasingly closely with American officials, has arrested major drug 
suspects from each of four large cocaine cartels, dealing traffickers a 
string of defeats that American officials say are unlike any they have seen 
in Mexico's drug war.

The last major figure to fall was Benjamin Arellano Felix, chief of the 
Tijuana cartel, arrested March 9. He confirmed that his brother, Ramon 
Arellano Felix, had been killed a month earlier in a shootout.

Others now in prison include Miguel Caro Quintero, identified as the head 
of the Sonora cartel, one of Mexico's oldest drug syndicates, who was 
arrested last December. Mario Villanueva, the former governor of the state 
of Quintana Roo on Mexico's Caribbean coast was arrested in May 2001. He is 
charged in New York with helping to smuggle 200 tons of cocaine into the 
United States on behalf of the Juarez cartel.

Officials said that Mr. Medrano was second-in-command to Osiel Cardenas 
Guillen, the leader of the Gulf cartel, which operates out of Mexico's 
northeast. Mr. Cardenas Guillen, still at large, is accused of shipping 
tons of Colombian cocaine from Mexico's Gulf coast into the United States 
since 1997.
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