Mexican city erupts in violence, residents ordered to stay indoors after drug cartel leader’s arrest

Mexican drug cartel leader Ovidio Guzman, the son of jailed kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, has been arrested, launching a violent attack by gang gunmen on Thursday that closed the airport in the city of Culiacan as authorities told residents to stay indoors.

Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval told a press conference that security forces arrested a 32-year-old senior member of the Sinaloa Cartel.

His arrest came three years after an attempt to detain him was an affront to the government. Ovidio is currently being held in the capital Mexico City, Sandoval said.

A video shared on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, appeared to show heavy fighting overnight in Culiacan, the main city of the northern state of Sinaloa, with the sky lit up by helicopter gunfire.

The city’s airport has been the target of violence, with Mexican airline Aeromexico saying one of its planes was hit by gunfire before a scheduled flight to Mexico City. No one was hurt, the airline said, but the airport was closed until Thursday night.

On Thursday evening, Aeromexico announced it also suspended operations in Obregón, a six-hour drive northwest of Culiacan.

Ovidio, who has been a key figure in the cartel since his father’s arrest, was briefly detained in 2019 but quickly released to stop the gang’s violent retribution in Culiacan.

The incident is an embarrassing setback for the government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Residents were told to stay indoors

Thursday morning, security forces tried to contain the violent reaction to the arrest in the Culiacan region by Guzman’s friends.

Burnt vehicles littered the streets and heavily armed law enforcement patrolled in pickup trucks.

“We continue to work to control the situation,” said Cristobal Castaneda, Sinaloa’s head of public security.

Local authorities urged people to stay indoors and said schools and administrative offices were closed due to the violence. Road blockades have also been created.

“We ask the people of Culiacan not to leave their homes because of the blockade that is happening in different areas of the city,” Culiacan Mayor Juan de Dios Gamez wrote on Twitter.

Arrested the day before Trudeau, Biden visited

Ovidio’s latest arrest comes ahead of a summit of North American leaders in Mexico City next week, which will be attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden, and security issues are high on the agenda.

One Mexican official said Guzman’s arrest would prove a welcome addition to US-Mexico cooperation on security ahead of Biden’s visit. The United States has offered a $5 million US reward for information leading to the arrest or indictment of Ovidio.

It is not yet clear whether Ovidio will be extradited to the United States like his father, who is serving a prison sentence in the Colorado Supermax, the maximum security US federal prison.

Joaquin Guzman, 65, was convicted in New York in 2019 of selling millions of dollars in drugs to the United States and conspiracy to kill his enemies.

Eduardo Guerrero, director of Lantia Consulting which analyzes Mexican organized crime, said recent pressure from the Biden administration to target the Sinaloa Cartel may have motivated Mexico to go after Guzman.

But he warned that while Ovidio’s arrest could damage the cartel, it could help its main rival, the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Crackdown on fentanyl

A surge in overdose deaths in the United States, fueled by the synthetic opioid fentanyl, has put pressure on Mexico to crack down on organizations — such as the Sinaloa Cartel — responsible for producing and delivering the drug.

The cartel is one of the most powerful narcotics trafficking organizations in the world.

For Tomas Guevara, a security expert at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, the arrest of Guzman helped save Mexican law enforcement after the humiliation of having to let El Chapo’s son go in 2019.

“The arrest of Ovidio is finally the culmination of what has been planned for the past three years,” he said.

It may offer a change in the government’s approach, Guevara added, following criticism from many security experts that Lopez Obrador is soft on the cartels, a charge he denies.

The president said the confrontational tactics of his predecessors had failed and only led to bloodshed, saying he would pursue a strategy of “hugs, not bullets.”