The authorities of Mexico City have given details this Tuesday of the arrest of the umpteenth leader of the Chilango crime. This is Eduardo Ramírez, alias El Chori, captured on Monday on the Picacho-Ajusco highway, a congested avenue in the south of the capital, which connects with its mountainous region. Judging by the five million pesos – around $300,000 – that the authorities offered for information that would help in his capture, El Chori, part of La Unión Tepito, was one of the main objectives of the security forces of the city.
His capture raises a number of questions about the local crime situation, a concern for the city government six years ago, and now a source of pride for the former head of government, Claudia Sheinbaum, who highlights her achievements in security, mainly the reduction of the homicide rate. The arrest of El Chori, alleged leader of the Union, also shows the apparent decline of the large local criminal group, after the fall these years of El Betito and then El Lunares. The question is whether the structure it leaves behind will be able to function and at what level.
Pablo Vázquez, police chief of the capital, explained that agents from the corporation had been following El Chori for at least a month. “In February, we started tracking a white van in which he and a woman were traveling,” he detailed. The stalking occurred in several municipalities in Mexico City and in the municipality of Naucalpan, in the State of Mexico, part of the capital's metropolitan area. The agents detected that El Choris frequented two homes, one in Iztacalco, in the eastern part of the city, and another in Naucalpan.
Vázquez explained that El Choris moved in other areas of Morelos and the State of Mexico. Ulises Lara, acting prosecutor of Mexico City, added that the now detained man was one of the “main generators of violence in the city.” The Prosecutor's Office, he has pointed out, had orders to arrest him for a case of murder and another of attempted murder. Vázquez added that El Choris is involved in cases of “injuries, collection of fees, kidnapping and extortion.”
The future of Unión Tepito, one of the longest-running criminal groups in the capital, based in the downtown neighborhoods, Tepito, of course, but also the Morelos or Guerrero neighborhoods, and interests in half the city, is thus placed in the center of the story. La Unión and its main rival, which has called itself La Unión Insurgentes or, more recently, Fuerza Anti Unión, have been involved in a number of confrontations and violent events in the city, such as the kidnapping of 13 young people in the Heaven bar, in the pink zone, in May 2013, and his subsequent murder.
El Chori was part of the group that had taken power in the Union, after the departure from the scene of Juan Juárez, alias El Abuelo, arrested in 2012 in Panama. Ramírez was part of the group's network of leaders, under the orders of Alberto Maldonado López, alias El Betito, arrested in 2018. El Betito was supposedly succeeded by Óscar Flores, alias El Lunares, famous for the altar he managed in Tepito, where In 2019, authorities found dozens of skulls and other human bones. Lunares fell into prison in January 2020.
El Chori was one of the few leaders left free from the last media administration of La Unión, headed by El Betito. Neither the police chief nor the interim prosecutor have reported which homicide he is accused of. In the book The Chilango Cartelpublished in 2020, Mexican journalist Antonio Nieto says that El Chori could be behind the disappearance of his ex-partner, Antzín Molina, in 2019.
Without saying it openly, Vázquez has suggested that, today, La Unión Tepito does not exist as such. “In the last five years, the organization has become atomized and now we have suborganizations of what was once the Union,” he said. The doubt actually points to whether the capture of ringleaders limits the scope of organized crime. During his appearance and that of the prosecutor, some reporters asked him about extortion, the trademark of La Unión and rival groups, a crime that, historically, has a “very high black figure,” as Vázquez himself has explained.
“In 2020, a specialized unit for the crime of extortion was created, one of the most specialized in the country,” said the police chief. “An arrest like this falls precisely into one of the axes of attention to extortion. What we are doing is stopping one of the main generators and articulators of the extortion processes. We hope that it has an impact on this type of behavior, but that does not mean that we will not continue to address the problem,” he added.
Of the nine priority targets of the capital's authorities, seven are now free. The capture of El Chori follows that of José Francisco Martínez, alias Paco, in October of last year. Paco was part of a criminal group different from El Chori. Of the other seven, the Head of Government, Martí Batres, regretted today that one of them, Fabián Solís, alias El Cachorro, detained a few weeks ago, will leave prison because a judge allowed him to “leave through the back door.” Among the rest is El Chori's own nephew, Víctor Hugo Ávila Fuentes, alias Huguito, and Alberto Fuentes Castro, El Elvis, one of the leaders of La Unión.
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