By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
MEXICO CITY — It seemed such a triumphant moment in the drug war:
the leader of the Zetas, one of the country’s biggest and most ruthless
gangs, killed by the celebrated Mexican Marines in a fierce battle with
guns and grenades.
Mexican Attorney General’s Office, via European Pressphoto Agency
Heriberto Lazcano, known as El Lazca and the main
leader of the Zetas, was one of Mexico’s most wanted criminals.
The New York Times
The Mexican navy said that it had killed Mr. Lazcano
in a battle between marines and men armed with guns and grenades on
Sunday afternoon in Coahuila State in northern Mexico.
Then armed men snatched his body, right under the government’s nose.
The twin developments — the killing of Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, one of the most wanted men in Mexico
and the United States, followed by the theft of his corpse before
authorities had even publicly identified it — left Mexican officials
struggling on Tuesday to explain how a major blow against the nation’s
criminal organizations could suddenly turn into an illustration of their
persistent strength.
“It started out like a Rambo movie and ended up like Woody Allen,” said
Diego Enrique Osorno, author of a new book on the Zetas.
It would not be the first time that Mexico’s powerful drug gangs have
struck back after an apparent victory by the authorities. Gunmen have
freed their allies from jail, rescued them from hospitals, taken away
their fallen colleagues from crime scenes and even killed family members
of a special forces sailor involved in a successful raid on a top drug
lord.
This instance was particularly embarrassing because the authorities had
to admit to losing the body at a time when they said they were making
major inroads in controlling the cartels, arresting several top leaders
of the Zetas and other groups.
On Tuesday morning, the Mexican Navy, of which the marines are a part,
said that fingerprint and facial analysis proved that Mr. Lazcano had
been killed in a battle on Sunday afternoon in Coahuila State, in a
small town about 120 miles south of Texas.
But very soon after the announcement, the state prosecutor acknowledged
that a group of heavily armed assailants, with their faces covered,
showed up at the funeral home where Mr. Lazcano’s body had been taken
and forced the funeral director to drive it away in a hearse.
“Instead of it being a big success, it is creating doubts about exactly
what happened and how this was handled,” said Alejandro Hope, a former
Mexican intelligence official and now a security consultant. “The corpse
was snatched at the end of the process. I don’t know what to make of
that.”
Perhaps neither did President Felipe Calderón, who is only two months
away from the end of a six-year term that will be remembered for his
aggressive pursuit of criminal gangs. Yet he did not rush to trumpet
what analysts said was perhaps the biggest takedown of a drug lord in
his tenure.
With questions swirling about the case and even some doubts raised over
whether the dead man was Mr. Lazcano, Mr. Calderón waited until
midafternoon Tuesday to comment, and only then at the dedication of a
new federal prison in central Mexico. There he saluted the marines in
the operation, and said Mr. Lazcano “was gunned down resisting
authority” and emphasized his administration’s successes in killing or
capturing 25 of the 37 organized crime figures federal prosecutors have
identified as the most wanted.
American officials, too, kept their distance, issuing no public
statement pending their own analysis of the case. A senior law
enforcement official said the Americans had not provided the
intelligence for the raid and wondered whether the marines initially
knew it was Mr. Lazcano who had been killed, given the apparent lack of
security.
Other security experts with ties to Mexican law enforcement also
suggested that the marines came upon him by accident or with sketchy
information on who exactly was in the town, an interpretation that
seemed to correspond with the navy’s version of events.
The navy said in a statement on Monday night that, after receiving
citizen complaints, it confirmed that armed members of an organized
crime group were in the town, Progreso, and when marines confronted a
vehicle, the assailants attacked with grenades. Two men were killed in
the clash and were turned over to state authorities, the navy said. When
the initial forensic examination was done, there were “strong signs”
that one of the men was Mr. Lazcano, the statement said.
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