Drug kingpin The Monkey caged without a squeak

His nickname turned out to be richly deserved.

When armed police presented Jose de Jesus Mendez at a press conference in Mexico City, the drug kingpin was revealed to be in possession of a fat neck and a simian scowl.

That's presumably why he was known as El Chango, or The Monkey.

Mendez was the leader of La Familia Michoacana, among half a dozen large criminal organisations which have fought for years over one of Mexico's most lucrative industries, the US$38 billion-a-year ($47 billion) business of shifting cocaine from South America to US consumers.

The circumstances of his arrest were rare, given the bloody nature of the Mexican Government's "war on drugs", which has resulted in almost 40,000 deaths in the past four years.

Federal police who swooped on El Chango's hideout in the central state of Aguascalientes arrested him without a shot fired.

Mendez is the second head of La Familia to be brought to book. In December, its founder, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, known as El Mas Loco (The Craziest), was killed by security forces during a two-day battle.

"With this capture, what was left of the command structure of this criminal organisation is destroyed," trumpeted a government spokesman, describing Mendez as "the last remaining head of a criminal group responsible for homicides, kidnappings, extortion, corruption and even cowardly attacks on the authorities and civilian population".

Felipe Calderon, the Mexican President who has devoted much of his time in office to cracking down on the drug trade, used his Twitter account to describe the detention of a man who had a US$2.5 million price on his head a big blow against organised crime.

Mendez is now likely to be charged with shipping tonnes of cocaine to the US, with large volumes of methamphetamine and marijuana.

With the help of weapons bought in the US, his private army was also able to commit murder, kidnapping and extortion.

His arrest, like that of any major cartel chief, is unlikely to stem the flow of drugs through Mexico: the stratospheric profit margins on offer to traffickers (reported to be about 3000 per cent) mean there is never a shortage of candidates willing to do battle over newly vacant turf.

But it may represent the beginning of the end for La Familia, a unique sort of drug cartel which was as famous for its cult-like mentality and loosely Christian theology as it was for the violence that it used to maintain a grip on its territory along Mexico's strategically important western coast.

Founded during the 1980s, as part of the larger Gulf Cartel, the group split into an independent organisation six years ago.

Its existence became public in 2006, when members lobbed five decapitated heads onto the dance floor of the Sol y Sombra nightclub in the city of Uruapan.

They were accompanied by a message scrawled on a scrap of paper which read: "The Family doesn't kill for money. It doesn't kill women. It doesn't kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice."

La Familia styles itself as a sort of parallel government, financing social programmes in and around Michoacan, an impoverished and eminently bribable state whose seaports make it an important staging point for narcotics en route to the US.

La Familia has for years collected "taxes" from local business owners, and spent a portion of its income on propaganda, taking out newspaper adverts saying it wants to "protect" the region from more ruthless rival gangs. It buys some popularity by offering low-interest loans to farmers, churches and businesses.

Despite the nature of its core business, it also claims to be protecting locals from the scourge of drugs. La Familia has a "zero tolerance" policy on the sale of narcotics in Michoacan, and runs rehabilitation programmes for drug addicts. Many residents trust the cartel more than their notoriously corrupt police force.

Before his death in December, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez published a "bible" explaining a doctrine which includes forgoing hard drugs and attending regular prayer meetings.

But La Familia has, like every major cartel, acquired a reputation for ruthlessness.

In Acapulco last year, I was taken to a church plaza where members had left the decapitated head of a victim. The man's skin had been entirely removed, and was lying in a heap nearby, next to his torso. The level of killing had dramatically accelerated in the months after Gonzalez's death, with La Familia splintering into two groups.

One was loyal to Mendez, another faction to a longstanding Familia member called Servando "La Tuta" Gomez Martinez, who called his men The Knights Templar, after the warriors of the Crusades. They claimed responsibility for 22 murders over last weekend.

Analysts are now wondering if Martinez or one of his colleagues tipped off the authorities regarding El Chango's whereabouts. He is unlikely to now have the firepower to return his organisation to its former glories, but Martinez is expected to negotiate the absorption of La Familia into one of Mexico's remaining drug gangs.Independent