Mexican Cartel Leader 'La Tuta' Captured

Early in the morning on Friday February 27, 2015 Mexican Federal Police captured cartel leader Servando Gómez Martínez, aka "La Tuta," in the city of Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, a state in southwestern Mexico. Gomez was one of the main leaders of the cultish drug trafficking group known as the Caballeros Templarios, a brutal organization that engaged in meth production as well as kidnapping and extortion. The group has been decimated though targeted arrests and attacks by citizen defense groups, federal police, and army patrols over the course of 2014. Unlike other Templario leaders such as Nazario Moreno, a man who went by the alias El Chayo, who was killed in early 2014, Gomez remained on the run for over a year, and had been rumored to be hiding in caves in isolated parts of the state. In a radio interview, Alberto Gutiérrez, a man who goes by the alias Comandante Cinco, who first fought alongside the vigilante citizen "autodefensa" forces in 2014 and later joined the uniformed Fuerza Rural police force, explained "with his arrest this criminal organization has been broken apart." Last year, I rode along with 150 gunmen from Michoacan's autodefensa militia as they took over the town of Santa Clara. Estanislao Beltran, a short man with a giant white beard, who is affectionately called "Papa Smurf" by his brothers-in-arms told me, "We have a cause. We fight with courage. We all have experience hunting. We’ve got practice shooting. fight like cowards, they shout and run." He also promised not to cut his beard until Gomez was captured and led patrols up into the mountains to look for the Templario leader in isolated caverns. Comandante Cinco, said that he's not surprised that Gomez was captured in a city rather than hiding in the sierra. "We looked for him in the mountains, in the hills, in the gullies, and the whole time I said, if he knows theres an operation after him, he's going to go to a city, a big city," he explained.