Mexico Nets Another 'Kingpin'

An intercepted phone call on 23 August initiated the final stages of an extended intelligence operation that culminated in the 30 August arrest of Edgar Valdez Villareal, known as La Barbie.

Since the day he illegally entered Mexico to begin climbing the criminal corporate ladder in the late 1990s, La Barbie distinguished himself for his loyalty, intelligence and brutality, eventually becoming one of two known US citizens to take over a piece of Mexico's multi-national drug trafficking market.

Amid horror stories of car bombs, massacred immigrants and the death of politicians, Mexican authorities have arrested or killed three of Mexico's most-wanted criminals in the past nine months. Some observers are now willing to consider that the politically bruised Calderon administration has finally gathered traction in its bloody confrontation against Mexico's massive organized criminal underworld.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has pursued a so-called kingpin strategy for decades - one whereby intelligence operations are primarily focused on the man at the top of the organizational pyramid, the ‘kingpin.’ Information gathered on mid-level operators builds to a point where these integral parts of the drug trafficking organization (DTO) lead authorities, if they are patient enough, to the top.

When Mexican police listened to a conversation between La Barbie and his principal accountant on 23 August, they were able to pinpoint with reasonable certainty the location of the safe house where he was arrested, located approximately 20 miles west of Mexico City.

Colombian authorities and the DEA applied a similar strategy in the Andean source country, where they were able to target, arrest and extradite to the US, or simply kill, a long line of kingpins. Over time, the arrests or murders began to gain traction and reach a pace whereby the average life span of a Colombian kingpin had reduced from over 10 years, as was the case of Pablo Escobar, to fewer than 18 months, as is the reality in Colombia's organized criminal circles, according to DEA officials there.

La Barbie's arrest could represent the beginning of a cascading moment when Mexican authorities finally find the traction necessary to push through a string of arrests that hit criminal organizations faster than they are able to reconstitute themselves.

If a shot was not fired, then La Barbie was caught unprepared. He didn't know they were coming because he did not have the time to set up his intelligence networks before the arrest. La Barbie declared himself a kingpin only hours after his former boss, Arturo Beltran-Leyva, died at the hands of Mexican Marines on 16 December 2009. Since then, he has been fighting to keep control of his section of the Beltran-Leyva organization's turf, arguably without the time to focus on setting up intelligence networks of his own within Mexico's federal police organization.

Arturo became a kingpin, as the head of the Beltran-Leyva Organization (BLO), when Mexican authorities arrested his older brother in late January 2008. Arturo's kingpin lifespan lasted for approximately two years. La Barbie's kingpin lifespan lasted less than a year. With two such quick, successive hits against the BLO, it will be very difficult for Hector Beltran-Leyva, the leader of what remains of the BLO, to gather his strength and remain a major player in Mexico's criminal underworld.

By the end of 2010, he could either fall prey to a planned raid from the government or be torn apart by his criminal rivals. It would be the end of the BLO, and another kingpin downed with less than a year on the throne. But that's just one criminal organization.

The former head of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, ruled as a kingpin from approximately 1995 until 2007. If the head of Los Zetas, Heriberto Lazcano, didn't become a kingpin until his former boss, Cardenas Guillen, left Mexico in 2007, then he has nearly four years at the top of the Los Zetas pyramid. Bullish analysts argue that Lazcano will fall before the end of the year.

Legendary Mexican kingpin El Chapo represents the old school of Mexican drug trafficking, and has been at the top of a major DTO organization longer than any of his rivals. El Chapo reached kingpin status soon after his prison escape in 2001 - a nine-year run thus far.
Calderon's strategy to take Mexico's criminal underworld head-on has experienced significant failure from a public security perspective, exposing his administration to a constant barrage of political attack.

Yet the realists in Calderon's administration and the Machiavellian DEA agents who support them are focused on the goal - one that sees Mexican kingpins, such as La Barbie, falling quicker than their syndicate can organize itself. If we see more so-called kingpins fall before the end of the year, many of Calderon's current and past detractors will look back to this week, and perhaps even 2010, as the moment in time when Calderon turned a corner.