Mexico City deals blow to deep-rooted organized crime group with arrest of El Chori

Mexico City authorities on Tuesday gave details of the arrest of crime boss Eduardo Ramírez, alias El Chori, who was captured Monday on the Picacho-Ajusco highway, a congested avenue in the south of the capital. Authorities had offered five million pesos — around $300,000 — for information leading to his capture. El Chori, a member of the La Unión Tepito criminal organization, has long been one of the priority targets for the city’s security forces.

El Chori’s arrest opens a number of questions about the local crime situation, a concern for the city government six years ago but now a source of pride for former head of government and presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, who highlights her achievements in security, mainly the reduction in the homicide rate. The capture of El Chori, the alleged kingpin of the Unión Tepito, also underlines the apparent decline of the large criminal network, following the fall of other leaders including El Betito and El Lunares in recent years. The question now is whether the structure he leaves behind him will be able to function, and at what level.

Mexico City Chief of Police Pablo Vázquez explained that officers had been surveilling El Chori for at least a month. “In February, we began to follow a white van in which he and a woman were traveling,” he said. The stakeout took place in several Mexico City municipalities and in Naucalpan, in the State of Mexico, part of the metropolitan area of the capital. The agents discovered that El Chori frequented two addresses, one in Iztacalco, in the eastern part of the city, and another in Naucalpan.

Ulises Lara, Mexico City’s interim prosecutor, said that Ramírez was one of the “main generators of violence in the city.” The Prosecutor’s Office, he said, had warrants for his arrest for one case of homicide and another of attempted homicide. Vázquez added that El Chori is also implicated in cases of “assault, kidnapping, and extortion.”

The future of the La Unión Tepito, one of Mexico City’s longest-running criminal groups, which is based in the downtown neighborhood of Tepito and has interests in half the city, is at the center of the story. The organization and its main rival, known as La Unión Insurgentes or, more recently, Fuerza Anti-Unión, have been involved in several confrontations and violent incidents in the city such as the kidnapping and subsequent murder of 13 young people in May 2013.

El Chori was part of the faction that had taken over La Unión Tepito following the departure from the scene of Juan Juárez, alias El Abuelo, arrested in 2012 in Panama. Ramírez was part of the group’s network of capos, under the orders of Alberto Maldonado López, alias El Betito, until the latter’s arrest in 2018. El Betito was allegedly succeeded by Óscar Flores, alias El Lunares, famous for the altar he kept in Tepito where authorities found dozens of skulls and other human remains in 2019. El Lunares was jailed in January 2020.

El Chori was one of the few remaining leaders of La Unión at large. Neither the police chief nor the interim prosecutor has given details of the homicide he is accused of. In the book El Cartel Chilango (The Mexico City Cartel), published in 2020, journalist Antonio Nieto claims that El Chori could be behind the disappearance of his former partner, Antzín Molina, in 2019.

Without saying so openly, Police Chief Vázquez has suggested that, as of now, La Unión Tepito has effectively ceased to exist as an organized crime group. “In the last five years, the organization has imploded and now we have sub-organizations of what was once the Unión,” he said. The question is whether the capture of La Unión’s leaders limits the reach of organized crime in Mexico City, particularly in terms of extortion, a trademark of the group.

“In 2020, a specialized unit was created for the crime of extortion, one of the most specialized in the country,” Vázquez said. “An arrest like this falls precisely in one of the axes of extortion. What we are doing is arresting one of the main generators and articulators of extortion processes. We hope that it will have an impact on this type of behavior, but this does not mean that we will not continue to address the problem.”

Of the authorities’ nine priority targets in the capital, seven are at large. El Chori’s capture follows that of José Francisco Martínez, alias Paco, in October last year, a member of a rival criminal group. Of the remaining seven, Mexico City’s interim head of government Marti Batres lamented that one, Fabian Solis, alias El Cachorro, who was arrested a few weeks ago, will be released from prison after a judge allowed him “to leave through the back door.” The others include El Chori’s nephew, Víctor Hugo Ávila Fuentes, alias Huguito, and Alberto Fuentes Castro, alias El Elvis, another of La Unión Tepito’s main leaders.

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