Top leader of powerful Mexican cartel killed during raid

Mexico City, Jul 30 (EFE).- One of the senior leaders of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa cartel was killed in a clash with army troops in the western state of Jalisco, the Defense Secretariat confirmed.

Army Gen. Edgar Luis Villegas told a press conference that the soldiers carried out a "precision raid" Thursday to apprehend Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, who killed one soldier and wounded another while trying to evade arrest before being gunned down by military personnel.

A close associate of Coronel's, Iran Francisco Quiñones Gastelum, was arrested in the operation, Villegas said.

The military raid took place in the Colinas de San Javier neighborhood of Guadalajara, Mexico's second city, where Coronel had two residences that he used as operations bases.

The soldiers also confiscated arms, jewelry and vehicles at the two homes, Villegas said.

According to the general, Coronel was one of the senior leaders of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, which is led by Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.

Originally from the northwestern state of Durango, he was groomed in the narcotics trade by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a notorious capo who was known as "the lord of the skies" for the fleet of aircraft he employed to transport drugs and who died in 1997 from complications arising from plastic surgery to conceal his identity.

After Carrillo's death, according to the Defense Secretariat's records, Coronel joined the Sinaloa outfit and eventually rose to become one of its top leaders.

The Mexican government had offered a 30-million-peso ($2.3 million) reward for information leading to his capture, while the United States had offered $5 million.

The 56-year-old allegedly ran the Sinaloa mob's cocaine-trafficking operations in the Pacific coast states of Jalisco, Colima, Nayarit and Michoacan.

Mexican public safety expert Pablo Monsalvo told Efe that with Coronel's death Mexican authorities had dealt a blow to the hierarchy of the Sinaloa cartel and compared the strike to last December's killing of drug kingpin and Sinaloa cartel rival Arturo Beltran Leyva in the central city of Cuernavaca.

The deaths of these two capos in seven months represents "a milestone in this war, but it's just the result of a strategy and not the end of the war," Monsalvo said.

"They're battles and it's good to win them, but the war hasn't been won."

Monsalvo also warned of reprisals and recalled that the mother and three other relatives of a Mexican special forces operative who died in the shootout that resulted in Beltran Leyva's death were killed days later inside their home in the southeastern state of Tabasco.

The Mexican government has come under criticism for allegedly favoring the Sinaloa cartel, with a recent U.S. media report claiming it helped that mob take over the violent northern border city of Ciudad Juarez.

President Felipe Calderon's government, however, has consistently maintained that it combats all criminal organizations with equal intensity and Coronel's death will help strengthen that argument.

The Sinaloa and Beltran Leyva cartels, as well as the Gulf and Zetas mobs, are the main criminal organizations responsible for a wave of violence that has racked Mexico since Calderon took office and militarized the struggle against the cartels in December 2006.

The struggle has claimed the lives of 25,000 people since then.