Mexico: Police Capture Gulf Cartel Leader During Hospital Visit

Tamaulipas state police arrested the leader of the region’s most violent cartel, Silvestre Haro Rodriguez aka El Chive, inside a private hospital in Tampico on Friday.

The leader of the Gulf cartel was at the hospital visiting a relative who lost his hand in an accident with explosives when armed men guarding the entrance of the hospital drew the attention of police officers. A police communique explains they proceeded to arrest Haro Rodriguez along with eight other accomplices and relatives, including his nephew and right-hand man, Carlos Alberto Alvarez Diaz, known as R5.

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The drug trafficker tried to bribe the police officers with three vehicles in a bid to avoid his arrest, the investigative journal Proceso reported, but he was transferred to Mexico City. The policemen also seized various weapons and four vehicles, with the help of the Marines, the military police, the federal police and the national army.

The urban community of Reynosa, where the cartel operated along the U.S. border with Texas, has some 610,000 inhabitants and has been heavily affected by street confrontations between the cartel and other rival criminal groups or security forces.

In 2010 and 2011, a group known as the Zeta mafia massacred almost 300 migrants and asylum-seekers in the area. Most of them were from Central America.