Morelia, Mexico, Feb 27 (EFE).- Mexican authorities early Friday captured the reputed top leader of the Caballeros Templarios drug cartel, Servando “La Tuta” Gomez Martinez, the National Security Commission told Efe.
Gomez Martinez was arrested in Morelia, capital of the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacan, where the gang is based, in a Federal Police operation. No shots were fired.

Mexico’s government had offered a 30-million-peso ($2-million) reward for information leading to the arrest of Gomez Martinez, who had become Mexico’s most-wanted drug kingpin.

Gomez Martinez was alone at a house in Morelia at the time of his capture and is being taken to the installations of Seido, the organized-crime division of Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, in the Mexican capital.

The Government Secretariat will give a press conference in a few hours to provide details on the operation that led to the kingpin’s capture, sources with that institution told Efe.

The arrest comes after federal forces killed or captured family members or associates of the reputed drug lord.

Gomez Martinez’s dossier at the Mexican Attorney General’s Office states that he was a teacher and then a farmer before getting into the illegal drug trade in the 1980s.

Authorities say he became the leader of the Templarios after its top leaders were captured or killed. Two of those leaders, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez and Enrique Plancarte Solis, were killed in February 2014 and March 2014, respectively, by federal forces.

Gomez Martinez gained further notoriety when dozens of videos leaked to the media, some of which were uploaded to YouTube, showed him having friendly meetings with officials and politicians in the western state of Michoacan.

The Templarios arose in December 2010 as an offshoot of the La Familia Michoacana cartel and is accused by authorities of producing synthetic and natural drugs and smuggling them to the United States.

The federal government intervened in Michoacan in January 2014 amid conflict between the Templarios and vigilante groups who had taken up arms to fight the gang.

The federal intervention in Michoacan met with some success initially, including the arrest of leading Templarios figures and the incorporation of many of the vigilantes into an army-controlled Rural Force.

But violence flared in the state late last year, when 11 people died in an incident involving rival factions of the Rural Force. EFE

 

The Caballeros Templarios in Costa Rica

 

As reported by The Costa Rica Star in2013:

A rising drug cartel from the state of Michoacan de Ocampo, located on the Southern Pacific coast of Mexico, is having a hard time establishing its operations in Costa Rica. Old-fashioned police work by members of Fuerza Publica, the Organization of Judicial Investigations (OIJ in Spanish) and the Drug Control Police (PCD in Spanish) is thwarting the nefarious work of the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar), a criminal organization that primarily focuses on international drug trafficking and money laundering.

These Knights Templar of Michoacan are not in any way affiliated with the religious military order founded in the 12^th century that used to guard the Holy Sepulchre and other interests in the Holy Land. This cartel is a reorganization of La Familia Michoacana, a fearsome and successful organization that was dismantled by Mexican law enforcement at the height of  the bloody Drug War.