Mexican troops capture gang leader

MEXICO CITY — Mexican marines acting on U.S. intelligence seized the leader of a breakaway faction of the hyper-violent Zetas cartel, officials said Thursday, proclaiming the third such arrest in a month as a victory for a binational strategy focused on removing the leadership of Mexico’s powerful organized crime groups.

Ivan Velazquez Caballero, known as El Taliban, was seized by a team of marines in the northern city of San Luis Potosi, the Mexican navy said.

He becomes the 24th of Mexico’s 37 most-wanted alleged cartel leaders to be killed or captured under President Felipe Calderon, who escalated Mexico’s war on drug gangs days after taking office and who ends his term in two months.

Calderon has been praised by the U.S. for his assault on the cartels, but heatedly criticized inside and outside Mexico for an excessive focus on using armed force and arresting gang leaders.

“Calderon is in his phase where he’s establishing legacy, and he wants people to say, ‘His strategy was bloody but it worked,”’ said Samuel Logan, managing director of the security analysis firm Southern Pulse and co-author of a recent book on the Zetas. “They’re pushing forward on as many fronts as they can before he leaves office.”

Critics say Calderon’s approach splintered cartels into dozens of smaller factions, increasing the competition among them and fueling a brutal war for control of smuggling routes before Mexico had an adequate lawenforcement and justice system in place.

“You lose the leadership and the group starts fighting for power. We’ve seen that with every group that’s been beheaded,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an expert on the Zetas’ home state of Tamaulipas, and chairwoman of the government department at the University of Texas at Brownsville.