Mexico government 100% sure that cartel’s drug capo was killed

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY

Mexico’s government confirmed late Sunday that the leader of the Knights Templar Cartel was killed in an early-morning shoot-out with marines despite being declared dead by authorities in 2010.

Tomas Zeron, head of the criminal investigation unit for the federal Attorney General’s Office, said the identity of Nazario Moreno Gonzalez had been confirmed 100 percent by fingerprints, but added that tests would continue.

Moreno’s death was one of the more-bizarre twists in Mexico’s assault on drug cartels, in which two others of the country’s most powerful capos have been captured in the last year without a shot fired.

The Mexican military had been tracking Moreno and marines confronted him in Timbuscatio, a town in the remote mountains of the western farming state of Michoacan, his cartel’s home base. Officials said the troops fired to respond to an “aggression” as they tried to make an arrest.

Security spokesman Alejandro Rubido said that despite the December 2010 announcement Moreno had been killed in a shootout with federal police, national government officials taking over Michoacan in January discovered reports that he was alive.

Moreno, nicknamed “The Craziest One,” would have turned 44 Saturday, according to a government birthdate. He led the La Familia cartel when he supposedly died in a two-day gunbattle with federal police in December 2010 in Michoacan, his home state.

No body was found then. The government of then-President Felipe Calderon officially declared him dead, saying it had proof, but some residents of Michoacan had reported seeing Moreno since then.

After the death report, his former cartel, La Familia Michoacana, became the more-powerful Knights Templar.

His killing comes on the heels of the Feb. 22 capture of Mexico’s most-powerful drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who surrendered peacefully after 13 years on the lam.