Tweet
Folk songs immortalize him as smart, ruthless, powerful and rich. From the Rio Grande to Mexico's Valley of the Beheaded, there is no shortage of stories about "La Barbie," the top-level drug trafficker born in Laredo, Tx and arrested Monday in Mexico.
Edgar Valdez Villarreal, aka "La Barbie," heir to the Beltran Leyva cartel, was arrested by Federal Police in the state of Mexico. Mexico captured major drug trafficker Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez on Monday in a second big coup for President Felipe Calderon in his battle against murderous trafficking cartels.
Federal police caught Valdez, a leader of the Beltran Leyva gang based in central Mexico, in a house in a residential area on the edge of the state of Morelos, near Mexico City, a police spokesman told Reuters. He said Valdez put up little resistance.
But Valdez's capture may be seen as an even bigger win for Calderon as Valdez could be extradited to the United States, where he has a $2 million bounty on his head. "It's a key success. What is very good is that they didn't kill him. That makes a big difference," independent security analyst Alberto Islas said of Valdez's arrest.
The Rise of a Texas Capo
Was Edgar Valdez Villarreal really a star high school football player or just an average guy whose coach nicknamed him La Barbie for his light eyes and fair-haired complexion that set him apart in the Texas border town?
And how did an American who got his start selling dime bags of marijuana have the connections to go on to lead a team of assassins, let alone climb to the summit of Mexico's criminal underworld?
"There is a lot of speculation as to what relationships he had and what relationships led up to where he is now," said Laredo police spokesman Jose Baeza. "He was able to do enough to gain the trust. There is something to be said, that he is an American-born person who reached that rank."
Ramon Eduardo Pequeno, a commissioner with Mexico's federal police, offered a resume of Valdez's criminal life.
He contends Valdez was first arrested on marijuana charges in Missouri nearly 20 years ago. While he was briefly in custody in Mexico City years later, he met Arturo Beltran Leyva, who became his narco godfather.
Valdez was later tasked with going to war with the Gulf Cartel along the border in Nuevo Laredo for control of lucrative smuggling routes into Texas. He led a team known as The Blacks, a squad that enforced the orders of cartel boss Beltran Leyva.
The fighting tore apart the every region where Valdez grew up, and the city of Nuevo Laredo has yet to recover.
He later became the chief of security for Beltran Leyva, and was among the inner circle in 2007 during a peace meeting of the leadership of each of Mexico's major cartels, according to Pequeno.
Valdez-Villarreal ranked senior enough to take part in a meeting in the weekend getaway of Cuernavaca in which bosses of the Sinaloa, Juarez and Gulf cartels - along with the Gulf Cartel's armed wing, Los Zetas - gathered to hash out an end to conflict between the rival groups, Pequeno said.
Valdez-Villarreal had many enemies, but one of his bitterest feuds dated to his stint in Nuevo Laredo, where he battled the Gulf Cartel and its henchmen, Los Zetas, for smuggling routes, Pequeno said. His hatred of the No. 2 Zetas leader, Miguel Trevino Morales, alias "El L-40," was so severe it nearly caused a falling out with his own boss, Pequeno said.
The world apparently began to come apart for Valdez last December when Arturo Beltran was killed in a gun battle with the Mexican military. Some suspect Valdez Villareal betrayed his boss to the authorities. Valdez ended up not only fighting Beltran's surviving brother, but also Mexican federal agents as well as his long-time crime rivals.
“La Barbie,” however, launched his own bid for control of the gang, sparking another round of bloodletting in Guerrero and Morelos.
“What’s left of the Beltran Leyva cartel is being destroyed,” journalist and drug-war chronicler Jose Reveles said after the arrest of Valdez Villareal.
Even so, Reveles said, “a capo like ‘La Barbie’ is not necessarily the only one, there could be lieutenants waiting for an opportunity.”
Valdez is nearly a celebrity of sorts in parts of Laredo as well as Mexico. Some Boderland Beat readers have even praised him during comments about his capture and e-mails to our reporters. People tell stories about running into him in a bar. Or dating his sister.
Comment