In what authorities are calling the largest single operation in the United States against a Mexican drug cartel, the Justice Department announced Thursday it has struck a major blow against a violent gang with quasi-religious and Robin Hood overtones.
La Familia is best known perhaps for practices that resemble a religious sect and a readiness to behead its enemies, but authorities say that the group is also responsible for the vast majority of methamphetamine that pours across the southwest border of the U.S.
In the past two days, authorities said they have arrested 303 people during an operation known as “Project Coronado,” after the Spanish conquistador who explored what is now part of the U.S. Southwest.
“The sheer level and depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we unfortunately have become accustomed to from other cartels,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said during a news conference announcing the most recent arrests. “Indeed, while this cartel may operate from Mexico, the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly every state within our own country.”
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, La Familia, based in the state of Michoacan in southwestern Mexico, is the third most powerful cartel behind the mammoth Sinaloa and Gulf cartels.
The group has a strong religious background and proclaims it is doing God’s work, passing out money and Bibles to poor people.
A DEA agent who gave reporters a background briefing on the condition of anonymity said cartel leader Nazario Moreno Gonzalez sees his drug dealing as serving the best interests of the people of Michoacan.
The agent said Mr. Moreno doesn’t want meth users among his people and will take users off the street and pay for their rehabilitation, although with the disconnect that Mr. Moreno doesn’t hesitate to decapitate anyone he sees as a rival or opponent and display the head in public.
Neither Mr. Moreno nor any of the cartel’s top leaders were arrested as part of Operation Coronado, authorities said. The highest-level operatives they arrested are best described as “managers” of a particular region of the U.S., they said.
Since the emergence of the group in 2006, authorities have arrested 1,186 cartel members and associates in cities across the country from Boston to Seattle and have seized more than a ton of methamphetamine.
Acting DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart said the cartel refers to its violence as “divine justice.”
“La Familia’s narco-banner declared that they don’t kill for money and they don’t kill innocent people,” she said. “However, their delivery of that message was accompanied by five severed heads rolled onto a dance floor in Uruapan, Mexico.”
She said the cartel also recently kidnapped and killed 12 Mexican federal police officers.
But despite the violence, La Familia has won the loyalty of the people of Michoacan. According to the DEA, the group originally formed to protect locals from other drug cartels, and now gives some of the proceeds of its drug trafficking to schools and local officials.
All of this has made it very difficult for authorities to go to Michoacan to arrest members of La Familia. “The places these military and police have to go in to get these guys, it’s a full-blown military operation,” the DEA agent said.
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