Charles Arturo Quintana: La Línea drug cartel chief ‘El Ochenta’ to be tried in New Mexico on drug trafficking prices | Worldwide

Carlos Arturo Quintana isn’t certainly one of Mexico’s most well-known drug traffickers, however he’s one of many United States’ most wished males. He has an extended prison document and has terrorized Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua for over a decade. Identified by his alias “El Ochent” a (Eighty), Quintana is without doubt one of the leaders of the La Linea (The Line) cartel, the prison group that solid an alliance with Rafael Caro Quintero (often known as the “jefe de jefes,” or boss of bosses), within the latter’s most up-to-date try and reclaim his prison realm. Quintana belongs to the prison group linked to the LeBaron household bloodbath, during which six kids and three girls from a Mormon group have been ambushed and murdered. His nickname emerged after journalist Miroslava Breach was killed. Initially, Quintana was recognized because the mastermind behind the homicide, and he’s additionally been accused of intimidation campaigns in opposition to different journalists in addition to Chihuahua’s former governor Javier Corral. After a number of years, Quintana was lastly extradited to New Mexico final weekend, simply days after Washington requested Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s authorities to enhance safety in Mexico. Nevertheless, El Ochenta gained’t be dropped at justice for any of the aforementioned crimes; as an alternative, he’ll be tried for constructing his empire by trafficking marijuana from the Chihuahua highlands.

With Quintana’s extradition, the US justice system has struck one other blow in opposition to the Juarez Cartel, certainly one of Mexico’s oldest prison organizations, and its offshoots. La Linea first appeared because the armed wing of the Juarez Cartel; Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the so-called “Lord of the Skies,” based La Linea within the Nineteen Eighties. The family tree of all of the factions related to the Juarez Cartel is so complicated that individuals in the US generally consult with it as Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’s group. That moniker refers to Amado’s brother, who inherited management of the cartel when the Lord of the Skies died within the Nineties. In July of this yr, for instance, a North Dakota court docket dominated in favor of 4 LeBaron clan households and ordered the Juarez Cartel to pay $4.6 billion in damages ensuing from La Linea’s November 2019 bloodbath. The court docket’s ruling got here just some days after the authorities captured Caro Quintero.

The US has had its sights set on El Ochenta for a very long time. He was extradited on an indictment from early 2011 that known as Quintana probably the most prolific traffickers of marijuana throughout the porous New Mexico-Chihuahua border. Though his identify is barely talked about within the US indictment, he faces federal drug trafficking prices, based on an announcement from the Legal professional Common’s Workplace. Quintana was not arrested in Mexico till Could 2018, when he was apprehended in Namiquipa, a Chihuahua group with fewer than 25,000 inhabitants. By then, the federal authorities had already singled El Ochenta out as “the principle driver of violence in Chihuahua” as Nationwide Safety Commissioner Renato Gross sales and Secretary of the Inside Alfonso Navarrete described Quintana towards the top of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency.

A yr earlier than El Ochenta’s arrest, he threatened Corral. “In the event you proceed to ship me your cronies, I’m going to kill them,” a banner that appeared in March 2017 mentioned. “You wished battle, now you’ve bought it,” the message added. The feud between the drug lord and the politician went again a number of years. In March 2016, Miroslava Breach had printed an article during which she accused Quintana of bribing a number of native police departments so that they’d function at his pleasure and of getting an settlement with the Institutional Revolutionary Celebration (PRI) to run his mother-in-law as a mayoral candidate in Bachiniva, Chihuahua.

In 2016, as he was campaigning, Corral mentioned that a number of PRI narco-candidates have been working for workplace. Then, as Chihuahua’s governor-elect, he informed Quintana to go away Bachiniva inside 72 hours or danger being captured. By August 2016, the US Drug Enforcement Company already thought of Quintana to be a Juarez Cartel boss. In March 2017, Breach was shot to loss of life. After the homicide, three messages have been recognized and attributed to Quintana. Nevertheless, it emerged later that the threats had been planted by a rival group, Los Salazar (the Salazars), allies of the Sinaloa Cartel; they have been finally discovered responsible of the journalist’s homicide.

This month, totally different drug-trafficking teams terrorized the Mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Baja California and Chihuahua, notably in Ciudad Juarez, the place at the very least 9 individuals have been killed in numerous episodes of violence. In accordance with the Ministry of Protection, two of the lifeless have been inmates who died in a dispute over jail management between the Juarez Cartel and the Pacific cartel. The wave of assaults prompted the US to interrupt its silence and name on Mexico to resume its bilateral dedication to preventing organized crime. “It’s time for safety outcomes,” Ambassador Ken Salazar mentioned at a press convention final Thursday.

Hours earlier than the violence occurred in Jalisco and Guanajuato, the US ambassador informed Mexican authorities that extraditing criminals is a “very efficient method to make an influence on this [type of] crime, as a result of these criminals are there in jail [still] doing what they’ve all the time achieved.” This week, Salazar thanked Mexico “for extraditing to the US one of many FBI’s most wished transnational prison group leaders, ‘Ochenta’ of the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Group.”

A US Division of Justice assertion mentioned that the 40-year-old drug lord appeared in a New Mexico court docket for the primary time final week. He’ll stay in custody as his case strikes ahead. Though Quintana was suspected of bribing the police, intimidating journalists and infiltrating Chihuahua politics, when he was captured for extradition 4 years in the past, he was solely charged with crimes that he had dedicated lengthy earlier than he rose by means of the cartel’s ranks to turn out to be certainly one of northern Mexico’s most feared criminals.