The Gulf Cartel: A Look at the Notorious Narco Organization, One of Mexico's Oldest Drug Organizations

It's time for another Mexican cartel profile. We've dug into the inner workings of the narco-traffickers Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel, but perhaps it's time for some fresh blood. Up next? The Gulf Cartel. It seems fitting, considering one of their highest ranking leaders was caught last week.

According to the El Universal newspaper, Gulf Cartel leader Eleno Salazar-Flores was captured in Reynosa on Thursday of last week. Salazar-Flores is charged with crimes related to drug trafficking, human smuggling, weapons trafficking and other a number of other illegal activities.

El Universal reports that a group of soldiers, marines, federal police and agents arrested Salazar-Flores, along with another man, after they received an anonymous tip about his whereabouts. Salazar-Flores was listed as one of the most wanted men in the State of Tamaulipas.

Let's look at the inside of his cartel, shall we?

Drug Cartel: Gulf Cartel

Location: Mainly located in Northeastern Mexico (as well Tamaulipas and Nuevo León) and the U.S., with a heavy presence in the state of Texas. The Gulf Cartel is currently based in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, which is located directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Their network is international, and are believed to have dealings with crime groups in Europe, West Africa, Asia, Central America, South America, and the United States.

Current Leaders: Unknown -- the most recent leader, Jesus Alejandro “Comandante Simple” or “Metro 24” Leal, was arrested in April 2014 in Reynosa while drunk.

History: The Gulf Cartel’s origins are traced back to 1984, when Juan Garcia Abrego assumed control of his uncle’s drug trafficking business, which was at that point a relatively small-time marijuana and heroin operation.

Garcia Abrego was a fast (and big) thinker, and managed to broker a deal with the Cali Cartel, a group of Colombian drug traffickers that were on the lookout for new routes in which to smuggle drugs into the United States, after their Caribbean routes were targeted by law enforcement.

Under the agreement, Garcia Abrego would handle cocaine shipments and get them across the Mexican border, a task in which he would take credit for all the risks. He also reaped most of the reward -- often about half the proceeds.

Although Garcia Abrego was effective at the smuggling efforts, he didn't stay untouchable forever. He was arrested and deported to the United States in 1996, after his newly minted group -- the Gulf Cartel -- was raking in billions of dollars a year.

But the cartel flourished, even in Garcia Abrego's absence, and the Gulf Cartel built a delivery network that reached across the United States, from Houston to New York and Los Angeles.

The successes of the Gulf Cartel set off other rival cartels to demand more payment for more risk -- and also set off the fight for more territory control in which to smuggle the drugs for their Colombian counterparts. Each group -- from the Juarez Cartel on down -- needed a route and territory to claim as their own.

As a result, the '90s saw an explosion of trafficking and sophistication, as Mexican traffickers carved out a series of cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin networks that rivaled Cali in size, sophistication and profit. They also focused on political corruption, gaining more power and less pressure from Mexican authorities.

However, it wasn't until Garcia Abrego’s heir stepped in -- a man named Osiel Cardenas Guillen -- that the Gulf Cartel began really stepping up the narco game. While other cartels had political corruption, the Gulf Cartel, under Cardenas Guillen's lead, had soldiers to prepare for war.

You see, Cardenas Guillen recruited at least 31 former soldiers, who were expert sharpshooters, were trained in weapons inaccessible to most of their drug-trafficking rivals, and were capable of surviving and attacking in nearly any environment. That group eventually became a rival faction known as Los Zetas, who are one of the biggest cartels in Mexico now.

Cardenas Guillen was eventually arrested and extradited to the US in '07, and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez, or "El Coss," was allegedly the new leader of the cartel -- until he was captured in 2012.

A number of other successors -- Tony Tormenta, El Metro 4, and X20 briefly took the reigns, but all were murdered after their brief tenures, and it remains unclear who the leader of the Gulf Cartel is at this point.

Power Structure: The Gulf Cartel is a criminal syndicate and drug trafficking organization in Mexico, and perhaps the oldest organized crime group in the country.

Alliances:
Sinaloa Cartel
Knights Templar

Rivalries:
Los Zetas
Juárez Cartel
Beltrán-Leyva Cartel
Tijuana Cartel
Los Negros

Crimes:  Drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking, robbery, murder, gun-running, bribery, fencing, pimping, counterfeiting, police impersonation

In recent years, the Gulf Cartel's infighting with Los Zetas, their former enforcers, has wreaked havoc on Reynosa, Mexico -- an area once bustling with active nightlife. In February 2014, the Gulf Cartel commander Samuel “Metro 3” Flores Borrego gunned down his Zeta counterpart, Sergio “El Concord 3” Peña, in response to an ambush, said a Tamaulipas law enforcement official who asked to not be named for security reasons, according to the Monitor.