Mexican authorities mentioned Thursday that they arrested an alleged organized crime determine within the western state of Michoacan in reference to final October’s killing of an outspoken chief of the state’s lime growers.
Safety Secretary Omar García Harfuch mentioned on social media that authorities arrested the person often known as “El Botox,” allegedly answerable for extorting lime growers and for numerous homicides, together with the killing of agricultural chief Bernardo Bravo.
A Michoacan state official, who spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t licensed to talk publicly, confirmed the suspect’s full identify was César Alejandro Sepúlveda Arellano, chief of a bunch often known as the White Trojans, or Blancos de Troya. The group is thought to work with Los Viagras, a prison group allied with the Jalisco New Technology Cartel.
García Harfuch mentioned there have been 11 arrest orders for him for extortion and murder. He has additionally been accused of attacking authorities with explosives.
Garcia Harfuch, who posted a picture of “El Botox” in handcuffs, known as him “a precedence goal and generator of violence in Michoacan.”
Safety Secretary Omar García Harfuch 
Michoacan Gov. Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla mentioned in a press release that his arrest Thursday represented “an amazing blow in opposition to extortion” within the state, which is Mexico’s largest producer of limes and avocados.
In October, the physique of Bravo, president of the Apatzingan Valley Citrus Producers Affiliation, was present in his car on a highway within the space.
Bravo had denounced “organized crime’s everlasting industrial hijacking of any industrial exercise.”
Two weeks after his killing, a gunman killed in style Uruapan Mayor Carlos Alberto Manzo, one other outspoken critic of the cartels’ management of Michoacan. A suspect linked to the Jalisco cartel was later arrested.
The 2 homicides and the favored outcry that adopted spurred the administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to ship extra troops to Michoacan.
Final August, greater than half of lime packing warehouses within the lowlands of Michoacan closed quickly after growers and distributors mentioned that they had acquired calls for from the Los Viagras and different cartels for a lower of their revenue.
Of the assorted prison teams working in Michoacan, a number of had been declared international terrorist organizations by the Trump administration, together with United Cartels, the New Michoacan Household and the Jalisco New Technology Cartel.
Cartels in lots of elements of Mexico have expanded into kidnapping and extortion to extend their revenue, demanding cash from residents and enterprise house owners and threatening to kidnap or kill them in the event that they refuse.
In July 2024, a fisheries business chief who complained of drug cartel extortion and unlawful fishing was shot to loss of life within the northern border state of Baja California. Minerva Pérez was killed simply hours after she complained of widespread competitors from unlawful fishing.
