MEXICO CITY — The Mexican police captured the leader of the Knights Templar drug gang on Friday, a victory against the brutal group but one that experts say will make little difference in the larger battle against criminal organizations that are rapidly splintering.
The gang leader, Servando Gómez — known as La Tuta, or the Teacher — was one of the most-wanted kingpins in the country. Officials had thought that he was hiding in a remote part of Michoacán, his home state. But he was captured in the early morning hours in the state capital, Morelia, without a shot.
His arrest is unlikely to bring peace to Michoacán, where the federal police and soldiers have weakened the Knights Templar only to have smaller groups arise, fight over territory and branch out to kidnapping and extortion. The pattern has been repeated across Mexico as the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto arrests and kills kingpins such as Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel. He was arrestedin February 2014.
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Mr. Benítez said that corruption allowed drug trafficking to flourish, but that the government had “not decided to fight corruption because that would mean fighting against itself, against the sick part of itself.”
Before his arrest, Mr. Gómez, 49, relished the limelight, taunting the government by conducting interviews from hiding and releasing videos in which he talked about his close relationships with Michoacán’s political bosses.
A former teacher who is also wanted in the United States for methamphetamine and cocaine trafficking, Mr. Gómez rose through the ranks of a gang known as La Familia. As its leaders were killed, the gang renamed itself the Knights Templar, and its violence prompted frustrated citizens to form vigilante groups.
The national government sent contingents of police officers and soldiers to Michoacán in January 2014 to try to restore calm. The effort succeeded in flushing out many of Mr. Gómez’s top lieutenants, but he remained at large and continued to release videos. He even granted an interview to Channel 4 of Britain, which filmed him handing out cash in one town.
In one video, Mr. Gómez was shown drinking beer and chatting with the son of the former governor of Michoacán, Fausto Vallejo. The governor stepped down after a photograph of his son Rodrigo Vallejo with Mr. Gómez appeared in newspapers. Rodrigo Vallejo said he had been kidnapped and forced to meet with Mr. Gómez.
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Mr. Murillo Karam was criticized for initially accepting the military’s explanation of an episode in the town of Tlatlaya in June in which soldiers killed 22 people suspected of being gang members. The military said they had all died in a gun battle with the soldiers, but news reports raised doubts about the account and prompted a federal investigation. Mexico’s human rights commission found that at least 12 of the suspects had been killed execution style. Eight soldiers have been charged in the case, three of them with murder.
In the highly visible case of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Guerrero State who disappeared in September, Mr. Murillo Karam first dismissed the matter as an ordinary crime to be dealt with by local prosecutors. After the federal government took over the investigation, Mr. Murillo Karam said the police had arrested the students on the mayor’s orders and turned them over to a drug gang, which killed them and burned their bodies. But critics say the inquiry has relied too heavily on confessions.
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