Mexico nabs Zetas gang's No. 3 leader, but will it stop the cartel?

As AFP reports, Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar was traveling in the company of a police officer escorting him to the southeastern state of Campeche when Federal Police detained him in Atizapan de Zaragoza, a Mexico City suburb of several hundred thousand people.

Authorities did not offer many details of the operation in which Mr. Rejon was arrested, but they said that no shots were fired.

Rejon defected from the elite army unite known as the GAFEs in the late 1990s to form the Zetas, a group of gunmen and bodyguards then at the service of Gulf Cartel boss Osiel Cardenas. Following Mr. Cardenas’s arrest in 2003 and extradition in 2007, the Zetas began to operate independently from their erstwhile bosses in the Gulf structure, and since 2010, the two groups have been locked into open warfare across much of Mexico.

Rejon is also sought by the United States government, and officials believe he may have had a role in the shooting death of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata in February.

Alejandro Poire, the federal government’s security spokesman, said that Rejon was the third ranking member of Los Zetas, behind only Heriberto Lazcano and Miguel Angel Treviño.

The Rejon arrest follows a series of smaller triumphs by the government against the gang in recent weeks. Authorities in Hidalgo arrested a man they called the Zetas’ leader in Pachuca, the state’s biggest city, along with 12 other alleged subordinates in late June. On June 25, Federal Police announced the arrest of Albert Gonzalez Peña, the group’s boss in the key Gulf state of Veracruz.

Days later, an alleged Zetas operative accused of participating in a series of recent massacres in San Fernando, Tamaulipas was arrested in Veracruz as well.

Tough to beat

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