That February morning in 2002, a police mobilization after a shootout in the streets of the hotel zone left one person dead, which in time reshaped drug trafficking in Mexico.
Until that moment, the Sinaloa clan of the Arellano Félix, based since the 1980s in Tijuana, Baja California, was one of the main organizations that disputed the Pacific route with their former partners from Sinaloa.
Their rivals were led by Ismael Zambada García El Mayo and Joaquín Guzmán Loera El Chapo, who had promised to eliminate the Arellano Félix brothers from the geography of drug trafficking.
The Arellanos learned that El Mayo would spend a weekend in Mazatlán to witness the biggest party in the port.
Ramón Arellano Félix, the operational and bloodthirsty arm of the Tijuana Cartel, traveled to the Sinaloa port with a group of hitmen to kill his former partner. On the afternoon of Sunday, February 10, 2002, the first parade would be held on the boardwalk, an area that becomes impassable due to the hundreds of thousands of people who attend the event.
When Ramón and his gunmen were driving a “vocho” along Rodolfo T. Loaiza Street, today Playa Gaviotas, to scout the terrain and escape routes, they came across a police car from the State Ministerial Police, whose agents stopped them to search them, but the Tijuana police accelerated the vehicle and entered the hotel where they were staying.
Ramón Arellano Félix, the operational arm and the bloodiest of the Tijuana Cartel, traveled to the port of Sinaloa with a group of hitmen to kill his former partner: El Mayo Zambada
When they got out of the parking lot they went to the rooms where they had the weapons they would use to kill El Mayo, who was on one of the balconies of a hotel in Paseo Olas Altas with his family. The ministerial officers followed them inside the place where they subdued two of them, and in a confrontation they killed the man who was later identified as Efraín Quintero Carrizosa El Efra, member of a dynasty linked to the Tijuana Cartel.
What the hitmen actually did was establish a security diamond to allow Ramón to escape, but he was pursued by state agent Antonio Arias.
During the chase there was an exchange of gunfire, and according to the official version, both fell dead between the street and the sidewalk in that sector of the Golden Zone.
However, one version that was circulated in those years was that the .9 millimeter pistol that Ramón was carrying emptied from its magazine, leaving him without ammunition and he was subdued by the ministerial police, who presumably killed him at close range.
The same version, not recognized by the authorities, ends with the story that after the policeman fired his weapon at Ramón, a shooter with an assault rifle got out of a car on Camarón Sábalo Avenue and shot at the agent so as not to leave witnesses to the crime.
DEA agents operating in Mazatlán arrived in the area, and upon discovering who the victim was, they immediately called on their cell phones to report the incident to their superiors.
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With the death of Ramón, the structure of drug trafficking in Tijuana was shaken and the decline of the Arellano Félix in the criminal world in Mexico began.
During the investigations it was said that the person killed was an agent of the Attorney General’s Office named Jorge López Pérez, but the identity and the badge turned out to be false.
The true identity was revealed weeks later, but the body was collected before being transferred to the Forensic Medical Service of Mazatlán and its trail was lost.
A month after Ramón’s death, on March 9, Benjamín Arellano Félix was captured by the Army in Puebla along with one of his hitmen, and in the following years Francisco Javier and Eduardo Arellano Félix were arrested.
A month after Ramón’s death, on March 9, Benjamín Arellano Félix was captured by the Army in Puebla along with one of his hitmen, and in the following years Francisco Javier and Eduardo Arellano Félix were arrested in Los Cabos and Tijuana.
El Mayo did not have a single scratch on that Carnival Sunday in 2002 in Mazatlán.
Source: oem
