From chickens to lemons: The criminal life of ‘El Bótox,’ Michoacán’s biggest extortionist

The helicopters over the Michoacán town of Cenobio Moreno, in the Apatzingán Valley, on Wednesday foreshadowed significant arrests by the Mexican government. Authorities were searching for César Sepúlveda, alias “El Bótox,” one of the most notorious figures in organized crime in the state, accused of more than a dozen extortions and murders, including that of Bernardo Bravo, leader of the local citrus growers’ association, at the end of last year. He was finally captured that night in the neighboring town of Santa Ana Amatlán. Two young men, nicknamed “Pánico” and “Greñas,” were with him. Cornered, El Bótox tried to escape through a window. Sepúlveda is now in prison, and the Claudia Sheinbaum administration has another victory to its name.

On Thursday morning, authorities in Michoacán, led by Governor Alfredo Ramírez of the ruling Morena party, provided details of the operation, which began on October 23, three days after Bravo’s murder. At that time, the brother of the citrus growers’ leader told authorities that, at the beginning of the month, El Bótox and his men, who had dubbed themselves the “Whites of Troy” 10 years prior, had kidnapped Bernardo. One of El Bótox’s henchmen had told him about this over the phone. The caller, nicknamed “Pilones,” said they were going to release him. They did, but Bravo never truly escaped. Weeks later, El Bótox summoned him to a meeting in Cenobio Moreno, between Apatzingán and Buenavista, after which he was murdered.

The surveillance of Pilones over the past few months and the raids on Bótox’s house, where Bravo was summoned, have now culminated in the arrest of both men and the virtual dismantling of the group, pending the capture of the leader’s stepbrother, alias “Jando,” with whom he has shared the business for years. In the press release distributed by Michoacán authorities, Pilones’ statements, made after his arrest on January 21, hours before his boss’s, are included. Pilones claims that Bravo met in early October with an operative of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Jalisco to request that they “get rid of Bótox.” According to this version, Bótox found out about the meeting, which is why he allegedly ordered Pilones’ assassination.

The arrest of the alleged criminal seemed imminent, as this newspaper reported last week, with El Bótox becoming a top priority for the current administration. The protagonist of a handful of videos released on social media earlier this year, his criminal exploits have now come to an end. In the videos, El Bótox maintained his innocence in the Bravo case and offered a full explanation of the constant injustice that, in his view, fuels the lemon industry in Michoacán. A citrus middleman, he criticized the prices paid by companies to producers and, therefore, to him, an obligatory toll for the growers’ guild. The federal government states that El Bótox “maintained control of the sale of yellow lemons in the towns of Cenobio Moreno, La Huina, Capiri, and El Razo, in the municipalities of Buenavista and Apatzingán.”

“They’re looking for me,” he said in one of the videos he released, a rare occurrence in the criminal world, where recordings of masked and armed men in parades and processions abound. His appearance with his face uncovered was unusual and reminiscent of that of José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, alias “Marro,” a fuel thief from Guanajuato, a little over five years ago. Both seemed to feel wronged, treated unfairly, misunderstood. It wasn’t that they denied the accusations against them — or at least not all of them — but they both suggested that the alleged behavior was, after all, part of a game, the rules of which are often lost on outsiders. “They’re looking for me,” El Bótox said, as if it were unjust, the teacher pointing to just one of the 25 boys shouting in the classroom.

Aged 43, El Bótox projected a rustic image in the videos. In two of them, he appeared dressed identically, somewhere in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán: jeans and hiking boots, a brown sheepskin-lined coat, several days’ growth of beard and a glass in his hands. “Check at the wholesale markets, see how much they’re selling for, and check down here, see how much they pay people, for the breakdown, the box, the hauling, and the packing,” he said, addressing Sheinbaum herself. “See what each person earns, so you can put a price on the value of the work, because here they pay them however they want, if there’s no one to defend them,” he added, a full-fledged political speech. Deceptive, perhaps, but illuminating the reality of agriculture in the country.

A figure of ambiguity — like anyone who walks the fine line between crime and economics in Mexico — El Bótox had been on the radar of authorities, both in his homeland and in the United States, for years. In a statement released in August announcing sanctions against him and others, the U.S. Treasury Department placed him as part of the Los Viagra criminal group’s structure, along with Heladio Cisneros, alias “La Sirena,” who is accused of orchestrating the assassination of former self-defense leader Hipólito Mora in La Ruana. According to the Treasury, the two men took orders from the founder of Los Viagra, heirs to the main branch of the Knights Templar cartel, Nicolás Sierra Santana, alias “El Gordo.”

While understanding the relationships and hierarchies of criminal groups operating under the same umbrella is generally difficult in Mexico, in Michoacán it’s utterly impossible. The implosion of La Familia Michoacana in the first decade of the century and the subsequent fall of its successors, the Knights Templar, gave rise to a myriad of groups, such as the Whites of Troy, whose loyalties were volatile and unstable. The Mexican army had been tracking Bótox for five years and observed him clashing with Sierra Santana, another former self-defense leader turned drug trafficker known as “El Abuelo,” who was also cozying up to a local CJNG franchise — one of his most recent moves.

In any case, El Bótox’s entrepreneurial voracity was fascinating, like the flames of napalm, despite the horror they cause. In a document prepared in mid-2022, the National Intelligence Fusion Center (CENFI), which was run by the army, indicated that El Bótox and his group, then alleged members of a now-defunct league of regional organizations, Cárteles Unidos, were “trying to generate conflicts” within this network for their personal gain. At that time, according to CENFI, El Bótox already controlled “the collection of garbage and recyclable materials, the sale of beer and gasoline, the buying and selling of lemons and avocados, as well as street-level drug dealing,” in addition to the sale of chickens and eggs. By December 2021, CENFI estimated that El Bótox, as an intermediary, was selling two tons of chicken a day.

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