Mexico City---The arrest of Zetas drug cartel leader Omar Trevino on Wednesday hands the Mexican government another win against the country's gangs.
The following is a list of drug lords who have been taken down since 2008:
-- January 21, 2008: The army arrests Alfredo Beltran Leyva, alias "El Mochomo," in Culiacan, capital of the northwestern state of Sinaloa. He is a former ally of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the captured chief of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.
-- March 19, 2009: Vicente Zambada Niebla, "El Vicentillo," is detained in a residential area of Mexico City. He is the son of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, one of the main leaders of the Sinaloa cartel.
-- December 16, 2009: Arturo Beltran Leyva, or "The Chief of Chiefs" and leader of the Beltran Leyva crime family, is killed in a shootout with soldiers in Cuernavaca, a picturesque central Mexico town known as a weekend getaway for Mexico City residents.
-- August 30, 2010: Federal police capture US-born Edgar Valdez, alias "La Barbie," in central Mexico. He was fighting for control of the Beltran Leyva gang.
-- November 5, 2010: Gulf cartel leader Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, alias "Tony Tormenta," dies during a military operation in Matamoros, a city bordering Texas.
-- October 7, 2012: Marines kill Zetas boss Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano, whose gang was founded by military deserters. His body is snatched from a funeral home by gunmen hours after he is killed in a shootout in a baseball field in northern Mexico.
-- July 15, 2013: Marines arrest Lazcano's successor, Miguel Angel Trevino, alias "Z-40," in a pre-dawn operation as he traveled in a pick-up truck on a dirt road near the border city of Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas state.
-- August 17, 2013: The new leader of the Gulf cartel, Mario Armando Ramirez, is captured by the army in the town of Rio Bravo, Tamaulipas state.
-- February 22, 2014: After a 13-year manhunt, Marines capture Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in a pre-dawn raid in a condo in Mazatlan, a Pacific resort in Sinaloa state. Guzman was considered the world's most wanted drug lord, whose Sinaloa cartel shipped narcotics across the globe.
-- March 9, 2014: Soldiers kill Knights Templar cartel founder Nazario "El Chayo" Moreno in the agricultural and mining state of Michoacan in the west. He had been wrongly declared dead in a clash with police in December 2010.
-- October 1, 2014: Soldiers arrest Hector Beltran Leyva, who had taken over the cartel founded by his brothers, in a fish taco restaurant in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town popular with US tourists and retirees.
-- October 9, 2014: Police detain Juarez cartel chief Vicente Carrillo Fuentes as he drove in the northern city of Torreon. He is the brother of late leader Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as "The Lord of the Skies." His group's bloody turf war with the Sinaloa cartel had turned Ciudad Juarez into Mexico's murder capital.
-- February 27, 2015: Federal police capture Servando "La Tuta" Gomez in Morelia, capital of western Michoacan state. He was one of Mexico's most wanted men and the last known leader of the Knights Templar gang.
-- March 4, 2015: Soldiers and federal police arrest the brother of Miguel Angel Trevino, Zetas heir Omar Trevino, "Z-42," in an upper-class suburb of the northern industrial city of Monterrey, dealing a blow to the criminal group.
AFP
