MEXICO CITY -- Mexican police and military forces Sunday arrested the leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima gang who spread violence through north-central Mexico and fought a yearslong bloody turf battle with the Jalisco cartel.
The armed forces and officials in the state of Guanajuato said they had captured Jose Antonio Yepez Ortiz, better known by his nickname "El Marro," which means "The Sledgehammer."
Yepez Ortiz was unusual among gang leaders because he posted videos with emotional calls to his followers, including one in June showing him appearing to cry after several of his supporters and relatives were arrested. In another video around the same time, he threatened to join forces with the Sinaloa cartel to defeat Jalisco, Mexico's fastest-rising drug cartel.
The turf battle with Jalisco turned the industrial hub of Guanajuato, with its foreign auto plants and parts suppliers, into the most violent state in Mexico, with 2,293 murders in the first six months of this year. The Santa Rosa gang has been blamed by some observers for the July attack on a drug rehabilitation center in the city of Irapuato in which 27 men were killed.
But Mexico's top civilian security official, Alfonso Durazo, said Yepez Ortiz would be charged with organized crime and fuel theft, not murder.
Yepez Ortiz had been the subject of manhunts for years, and was caught along with five other suspects allegedly holding a kidnapped businesswoman. He was among Mexico's most-wanted suspects, trailing Jalisco cartel leader Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera and Sinaloa cartel leader Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.
His Santa Rosa gang was not a drug cartel, but rather a powerful, violent gang that grew up in a farming hamlet of the same name in north-central Guanajuato state by stealing fuel from government pipelines and refineries and robbing freight from trains.
The Santa Rosa gang was also unusual in that it tried to build a support network among local residents by allowing them to take a minor share in the spoils of the robberies. But when authorities stepped up security around the trains and pipelines over the past two years, the gang turned to widespread extortion and kidnapping. Members would move sector to sector, systematically demanding extortion payments from businesses like tortilla shops or car dealerships.
However, the gang's reign never affected the major companies that have built dozens of plants in Guanajuato, attracted by investor-friendly policies and excellent rail and highway links.
True to his humbler circumstances, Yepez Ortiz was shown wearing a gray hoodie, ripped jeans and construction boots in official photographs distributed by the Guanajuato state government.
A lot of mythology had grown up around "El Marro," including the belief that he and a close band of supporters had been able to escape police for years by encouraging townspeople to throw up impromptu roadblocks to give him enough time to escape over dirt roads on ATVs.
Guanajuato state Security Commissioner Sofia Huett said earlier this year the gang may have called itself a cartel, but it operated mostly in Guanajuato, jumping from one illegal activity to another.
Santa Rosa de Lima was precisely the kind of local gang that the Jalisco cartel has deftly taken over in the past in its relentless expansion across Mexico, co-opting local gang members in a sort of franchise scheme.
There are reports that Oseguera sent a nephew to Guanajuato in 2017 to negotiate a deal with the Santa Rosa gang that would have allowed Jalisco to traffic drugs in the state while the local gang kept the fuel theft business.
But the pugnacious Yepez Ortiz -- his videos are punctuated by cursing -- vowed never to let in the cartel from neighboring Jalisco state. A deadly feud ensued.
It was unclear if the arrest of Yepez Ortiz would mean that Jalisco may now be poised to roll into Guanajuato as it has in so many other states.