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Mexico nabs senior figure in Zetas drug cartel

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Mexico’s Federal Police announced Friday the arrest of a reputed founder of the notorious Zetas drug cartel in a wealthy suburb of the northern city of Monterrey.

Without firing a shot, police and marines captured Luis Reyes Enriquez, alias “El Rex” and “Z12,” in the municipality of San Pedro Garza Garcia, narcotics division chief Juan Carlos Silva told the media.

Reyes Enriquez was apprehended in 2007 and sentenced to nearly 48 years in prison for drug trafficking and racketeering.

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But in April 2015, a court overturned his conviction and ordered him released. The federal Attorney General’s Office successfully appealed the decision.

Authorities took a year to track down Reyes Enriquez, a former soldier who in 1999 joined army veterans and deserters many of them from an elite U.S.trained special forces unit to form what became known as Los Zetas.

The organization functioned as enforcers for the Gulf drug cartel until 2010, when the Zetas decided to go into the drug trade on their own account, initiated a bloody struggle for supremacy.

The Zetas earned a reputation for extreme violence, resorting to beheadings and mass killings of civilians.