"El Tony Montana" — the brother of Mexico's most wanted cartel boss "El Mencho" — is arrested by the army
The Mexican army on Tuesday arrested the brother of the country's most wanted drug cartel boss, Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera, the Mexico Defense Department said.
The army said it captured Antonio Oseguera in possession of weapons in a suburb of Guadalajara, the capital of the western state of Jalisco. It said he oversaw violent actions and logistics, and bought weapons and laundered money for the hyperviolent Jalisco New Generation Cartel, often known simply as the Jalisco cartel.
The U.S. Treasury Department lists Antonio Oseguera's alias as "El Tony Montana," an apparent reference to the fictional protagonist of the 1983 gangster film "Scarface." According to the Treasury Department, he served a prison sentence in the U.S. following a 1996 arrest on heroin charges "before being deported to Mexico and reengaging in drug trafficking activity."
Antonio Oseguera is on a Treasury Department sanctions list for his ties to the cartel. However, it was not immediately clear if there is a U.S. warrant of extradition request for him.
The state of Jalisco was immediately put on high alert after Antonio Oseguera's arrest. In a statement, the army called the arrest a "powerful blow" to the Jalisco cartel.
Authorities previously arrested El Mencho's wife, alleging she was involved in the cartel's illegal activities. In 2020, El Mencho's daughter was arrested in Washington D.C. on drug trafficking charges,
The United States has offered a $10 million reward for El Mencho's capture, but the cartel has violently fought past attempts to arrest him.
"He is the number one priority for DEA and frankly for federal law enforcement in the United States," DEA agent Matthew Donahue told CBS News in 2019.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said Mexico no longer has a policy of detaining drug lords, but authorities have gone after top lieutenants of some cartels, including the Jalisco.
The Jalisco cartel is arguably Mexico's most powerful and violent. It made its reputation with brazen attacks on Mexico's security forces, including a 2020 assassination attempt on Mexico City's police chief that wounded him and killed three other people.
In 2015, cartel gunmen shot down a Mexican military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Just last week, the Mexican army said the Jalisco cartel kidnapped a colonel who commanded a detachment in the gang-dominated northern border city of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas.
The cartel has ruthlessly expanded its territory beyond Jalisco, spurring bloodshed in states including Guanajuato and Michoacan, as well as reaching its tentacles into Mexico's Caribbean beach resorts in Quintana Roo.
The cartel's main business is trafficking drugs to the United States, especially methamphetamine and fentanyl.
The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration told CBS News that the Jalisco cartel is a driving force behind the influx of fentanyl in the U.S. that's killing tens of thousands of Americans.
"What we see happening at DEA is essentially that there are two cartels in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, that are killing Americans with fentanyl at catastrophic and record rates like we have never seen before," DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told "CBS Mornings" in August. "Those cartels are acting with calculated, deliberate treachery to get fentanyl to the United States and to get people to buy it through fake pills, by hiding it in other drugs, any means that they can take in order to drive addiction and to make money."