Zeta drug lord continued to control the cartel from within…

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A U.S. indictment unsealed Wednesday in the District of Columbia alleges that the leader of one of Mexico’s most violent gangs continued to run an offshoot group, the Northeast Cartel, from a Mexican prison.

Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, alias ‘Zeta 40’, was the founder and leader of the infamous Zetas cartel. He has been in a Mexican prison since his arrest in 2013.

Together with the assassination of the Zetas’ other top leader in 2012, the old cartel, which spread terror throughout Mexico in bloody massacres, effectively disintegrated.

According to the indictment, the new Northeast Cartel was founded and led by Treviño Morales and his brother Omar – who was arrested in 2015 – as a successor to the Zetas. The brothers would have their relatives handle the day-to-day work for the new gang.

The allegations are a stark commentary on the lack of security in Mexican prisons, where prisoners can often hold large numbers of relatively unsupervised meetings with lawyers and family members, allowing them to relay messages outside.

The defendants renamed the Zetas “Cartel Del Noreste,” or CDN, according to the indictment, which adds that they “continued to control the cartel and appointed several family members to control the CDN after their incarceration.”

The new indictment accuses the brothers of drugs, conspiracy, money laundering, criminal enterprises and other crimes that could land them in prison for life. The US has filed a request for the extradition of Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, but this has been held up by legal appeals for about a decade.

Drug lords in Mexico usually fight extradition tooth and nail, in part because they can continue running their gangs if they remain in Mexican prisons.

In 2022, one of the family members who allegedly ran the CDN cartel’s daily operations, Juan Gerardo Treviño – whose alias was “El Huevo” or “The Egg” – was captured and deported to the United States for apparently having American weapons . citizenship, thus avoiding the long route of extradition.

The CDN cartel dominates the border city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas.

Like the Zetas, the Northeast gang is ruthlessly violent. It regularly carries out violent shooting attacks on army patrols there, and last week a soldier was killed in a firefight there.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said earlier this week that “Nuevo Laredo is where criminal groups have carried out the most attacks on the military and National Guard.”

U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza of the Western District of Texas said the Treviño Morales brothers had committed “heinous atrocities.”

“These individuals have spent decades directing one of the most violent drug organizations in Mexico, committing and directing horrific atrocities against our neighbors, the people of Mexico and also in the United States,” Esparza said.

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