A leader and seven other members of the Los Aztecas gang, which is allied with the Juarez drug cartel, were arrested by Mexican army troops in Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Defense Secretariat sources said on condition of anonymity.
The suspects were detained Saturday by soldiers acting on a tip from citizens that armed men were at a house in the border city.
Nine rifles, three pistols, 7,000 rounds of ammunition and several vehicles were seized in the operation.
The suspects could face kidnapping, extortion and murder charges.
Cesar Lorenzo Roque Flores, the suspected leader of a Los Aztecas cell, was among those arrested in the operation, the Defense Secretariat said in a statement.
Los Aztecas works for La Linea, a gang that provides enforcers for the Juarez cartel in its war against the rival Sinaloa cartel for control of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital.
The arrests are a big blow to Los Aztecas’ operational capabilities, the secretariat said.
Julio Cesar Perez, a suspected La Linea boss in the northern state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juarez is located, was arrested on Dec. 29.
Ciudad Juarez, which topped the list of the world’s deadliest cities for three consecutive years, dropped to second last year with 148 homicides for every 100,000 residents.
Ciudad Juarez has been plagued by drug-related violence for years.
The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when 310 people were killed, then it more than tripled to 1,607 in 2008, according to Chihuahua Attorney General’s office figures, with the number of killings climbing to 2,754 in 2009.
More than 3,100 people were murdered in the border city in 2010, making it the worst year since the cartel turf war sent the homicide rate skyrocketing in 2008.
About 2,000 people were murdered in Juarez in 2011.
The government said Thursday that 12,903 people were killed in drug-related violence between January and September 2011 in Mexico, an increase of 11 percent from the same period in the prior year.
The drug war death toll stood at 47,515 from December 2006 to Sept. 30.
The murder total has grown every year of President Felipe Calderon’s military offensive against the well-funded, heavily armed drug cartels.
Unofficial tallies published last month by independent daily La Jornada put the death toll from Mexico’s drug war at more than 50,000.
