Mexican navy shoots dead brutal drug cartel leader – but body goes missing

Funeral parlour says corpse of Zetas boss known as the Executioner was seized by heavily armed gang
Heriberto Lazcano, known as 'the Executioner', who has died in a shootout in Mexico. Photograph: Reuters

The Mexican authorities have claimed one of their biggest victories against the notoriously bloody Zetas drug cartel, but admit they have lost the body of Heriberto Lazcano, the gang's brutal leader, who they say was killed in a shootout with the navy.

Most of the original members of the Zetas cartel, which was formed in the 1990s, have been captured or killed, but Lazcano, who went by the nicknames "el Lazca" and "the Executioner", had appeared untouchable. The United States had offered $5m and the Mexican authorities $2.3m in rewards for information leading to his arrest.

Authorities in the northern state of Coahuila were called out by the navy on Sunday at about 6pm to recover two bodies killed in a shootout near the town of Progreso, about 80 miles from the US border, the state's attorney general, Homero Ramos, told reporters on Tuesday.

Ramos said the bodies were handed over to a local funeral parlour after being fingerprinted and photographed. Reading from a statement and refusing to answer questions, he added that the owner of the parlour had informed the authorities at about 8am on Monday that a masked and heavily armed unit had snatched both bodies.

The Zetas are known for their strong esprit de corps, and often go to great lengths to recover the bodies of cartel members killed in clashes with other gangs and the authorities.

Ramos did not say when the authorities realised that fingerprints taken from one of the cadavers matched those of Lazcano on a national database, and that photographs of the corpse matched descriptions of the trafficker.

The navy released details of the prints along with two pictures of Lazcano's body, apparently taken on a morgue slab. This backed its earlier statement late on Monday that referred only to "strong indications" that it had killed Lazcano.

It was left to Ramos to give details of the shootout, which he said began when a navy patrol tried to stop a suspicious vehicle near a baseball field. He said that after the driver of the vehicle was killed, the passenger got out and ran, but was shot dead about 300 metres away. The authorities said weapons recovered in the vehicle included two rifles, grenades, and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

The Zetas cartel is one of the main combatants in Mexico's horrific drug wars, which have killed more than 55,000 people since President Felipe Calderón launched a military-led offensive against organised crime nearly six years ago.

Lazcano was one of the founders of the Zetas, which started out in the late 1990s as an enforcement unit within the Gulf cartel, formed from a core of deserters from an elite army unit. Born in 1975, Lazcano spent seven years in the army before deserting in 1998. He originally went by the codename Zeta 3.

The Zetas later developed into a major cartel in their own right, known for the discipline of the military-style training and tactics they employed in battles with rivals and the authorities, as well as for the wide range of criminal activities they pursued alongside drug trafficking, such as the mass kidnapping of Central American migrants passing through Mexico and extensive extortion rackets.

But the Zetas are probably most famous for the no-holds-barred brutality they employ to keep the territories they control docile, as well as during incursions into areas under the influence of rivals. While other cartels, most notably the Sinaloa cartel, headed by the infamous trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, regularly form alliances of convenience with other groups, the Zetas tend to go it alone.

From late 2011 Calderón made it clear that the Zetas were the most urgent target of his wider offensive against all the cartels, because of their extreme violence. The string of hits against the group has intensified in the past few weeks, with the pressure spiralling in Coahuila in particular after the murder of the son of a prominent politician was blamed on the group.

The most recent arrest of a major Zeta operative came on Saturday when the navy captured Salvador Martinez Escobedo in Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo in Texas. The navy said Martinez, nicknamed "the Squirrel", had ordered the massacre of 72 migrants in Tamaulipas state in August 2010, among many other atrocities.

Unofficial reports on Tuesday said Martinez had identified Lazcano from the photographs taken of one of the men killed in Sunday's shootout.

In recent years Lazcano had shared the Zetas' leadership with another founding member, Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, known as "Zeta 40", although there had been some reports that the pair had split. Treviño Morales has a reputation that is even more bloody than Lazcano's.