MEXICAN DRUG GANG LEADER CONFESSES TO KILLINGS

MEXICO CITY -- A notorious drug gang leader has been captured and has
confessed to ordering most killings in the battle-scarred border city
of Ciudad Juarez since August 2009, including the drive-by shootings
of a United States consular employee and her husband, Mexico's
federal police said Sunday.

Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, 32, leader of the gang Los Aztecas, was
arrested along with two other gang leaders in a Juarez neighborhood
on Saturday, said Luis Cardenas Palomino, chief of the regional
security division of the federal police.

Mr. Cardenas said Mr. Gallegos claimed to have ordered 80 percent of
the killings in the last 15 months. "He is in charge of the whole
organization of Los Aztecas in Ciudad Juarez," Mr. Cardenas told
reporters at a news conference in Mexico City. "All the instructions
for the murders committed in Ciudad Juarez pass through him."

The arrest marked a public-relations victory for the Mexican
government as it takes aim at the top leaders of Mexico's brutal drug
cartels, but it offered no guarantee to weary Juarez residents that
the violence that has claimed more than 2,000 lives in the city this
year would diminish.

Los Aztecas are a cross-border gang that carries out enforcement
activities for the Juarez drug cartel, which has been fighting the
Sinaloa cartel for control over the city, according to Mexican officials.

Mr. Gallegos claimed responsibility for several of the most notorious
killings in Ciudad Juarez this year, including the shooting death of
Lesley A. Enriquez, a worker at the United States Consulate in Ciudad
Juarez who was pregnant, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, an
officer at the El Paso County Jail.

The couple was leaving a children's birthday party in Ciudad Juarez
on March 14 to return home to El Paso, when gunmen fired on their
white S.U.V. Their seven-month-old daughter, who was in the back
seat, was unharmed.

The husband of another consulate worker was also killed the same
afternoon, possibly in a case of mistaken identity, as he was driving
a similar vehicle returning from the same party.

The police did not say why Mr. Gallegos ordered the consulate killings.

In July, Mexican authorities announced that they had arrested another
gang leader, Jesus Ernesto Chavez Castillo, known as the Camel, who
they said had told them he had ordered the consulate killings because
the consulate had given United States visas to members of a rival gang.

But in a statement Sunday, the federal police said that after Mr.
Chavez was arrested, Mr. Gallegos ordered the killing of his wife
after she visited him in jail, apparently because he felt Mr. Chavez
had given the authorities too much information about Los Aztecas.

Mr. Gallegos also admitted to ordering the massacre last Jan. 31 at a
teenager's party in the neighborhood of Villas del Salvarcar because
he thought members of a rival gang were there, the police said.
Fifteen people were killed, and the episode shocked the city and
forced President Felipe Calderon to acknowledge that innocent people
were being caught up in the drug war's carnage.

Over the past year, the Mexican government has had several notable
successes against the drug cartels, arresting or killing top leaders
of the Beltran Leyva drug trafficking organization, and a
high-ranking leader of the Sinaloa cartel. Most recently, marines
surrounded and killed Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, a top leader
of the Gulf cartel in Matamoros on Nov. 5.

Since then, fighting between drug gangs along the border west of
Matamoros has sent hundreds of people fleeing from their homes.

A flurry of polls released this week show that, for the first time
since Mr. Calderon began his crackdown against drug cartels four
years ago, a majority of the public no longer has confidence in the
government's strategy.