Mexico's government says this time it really killed 'craziest' kingpin

GlobalPost

MEXICO CITY — The first time Mexican officials said they’d killed crime lord Nazario Moreno, few locals in the towns he terrorized believed it.

The locals had it right.

Now, officials say marines on Sunday shot and killed the leader of the Knights Templar gang — for real this time.

That means the dangerous kingpin, known by several nicknames like "El Chayo" and "El Mas Loco" (The Craziest), had been exploiting the cover of his fabled death in 2010 to continue commanding a vicious criminal syndicate from the shadows.

The capo's death — presumably his final one — underscores the confusing and sometimes duplicitous nature of Mexico's narco gang wars of the past seven years, which have left more than 100,000 dead or missing.

It also might crack a window on the corrupt political and police networks protecting the country's top gangsters.

That Moreno was alive and leading the Templars in the western state of Michoacan "was always an open secret," Alfredo Castillo, Michoacan's federal security commissioner, told Milenio television on Monday. "People, civil society, repeatedly told you about this person, recognizing him as the head, the indisputable leader of this criminal organization." 

Marines guided by local civilian militiamen cornered Moreno in his mountain lair. They gunned him down in a firefight as he was leaving a party celebrating his 44th birthday, officials said.

Officials said Sunday evening that this time they’ve positively identified Moreno's remains. The attorney general's head of forensics said the fingerprints from the corpse matched Moreno's, so the kingpin's death was “100 percent” confirmed.

"Everyone believes it this time," said Aroldo Mendoza, a shopkeeper in Moreno's hometown of Apatzingan. "People are sure it's him."

But Moreno's death won’t end Michoacan’s turmoil any time soon. It’s unclear how involved the gang boss had been in the Knights Templar’s daily affairs in recent years. And two violent lieutenants, Servando “La Tuta” Gomez and Enrique “Kike” Plancarte, remain at large.

Meanwhile, internal fighting erupted Monday between two major factions of the self-defense forces that have been fighting the Templars for the past year. The groups accuse one another of betraying the movement. No casualties were immediately reported Monday night.

Playing dead

Federal police had mistakenly reported Moreno killed by machine-gun fire from a Black Hawk helicopter during a pitched Michoacan battle in December 2010. Top aides of then-President Felipe Calderon said Moreno's body had been carried away by the kingpin’s underlings.

Even the crime lord’s allies backed up the official line.

"Our maximum leader is no longer here," Servando Gomez, who in the past three years has been the Templars' most visible leader, said in a radio broadcast the day Moreno was falsely reported killed. "We have to continue on, we have to do it for our family and our people."

Already, the family had been convulsing.

Moreno had been a founder and leading member of the gruesome La Familia Michoacana. (Remember the five severed heads rolling onto a Mexican dance floor in 2006? That was their doing.)

When Moreno disappeared, his faction of La Familia splintered off and changed its name to the Knights Templar. They promoted the supposedly slain boss as a folk saint. Followers built shrines to Moreno across Michoacan, many with statues of the gang boss clad as a medieval Christian crusader. These quirky images have become a constant topic of online social media chatter.

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