MEXICO CITY — Luis Reyes Enriquez was lying on the bed of a $13-per-night hotel room in a provincial town when federal troops came for him. Reyes, a leader in Mexico City of the infamous band of hit men known as the Zetas, was caught off guard: He was hung over from a wedding party the night before.
The arrest of the man also known as "Zeta 12" and "El Rex" was the latest in a series of blows in recent weeks to the Zetas, an organization born in the late 1990s when the Gulf cartel of drug traffickers began recruiting Mexican army deserters.
Reyes, 39, was an army deserter, as well as a former federal police officer who had once been assigned to work in the attorney general's office. As a well-trained gunman with an official pedigree, he was precisely the kind of man who helped build the Zetas' reputation as a paramilitary army at the service of drug traffickers.
Since taking office in December, President Felipe Calderon has declared an aggressive war on drugs and deployed thousands of federal troops throughout several Mexican states.
During the first seven months of his administration, authorities have arrested five Zeta leaders. A sixth Zeta was killed in an ambush with rivals. And the group's leader and founder, Osiel Cardenas, has been extradited to face drug-trafficking charges in the United States.
Three years ago, the Mexican attorney general's office had 44 members of the Zetas on its most-wanted list. As of May, with a growing number of Zetas in prison or dead in gun battles with authorities and rival traffickers, the number had declined to 27.
Analysts say Calderon's crackdown, along with a split in the Gulf cartel that is pitting old partners in crime against each other, is leading the Zetas to seek new avenues of income, such as kidnapping and extortion.
"There has been a clear effect on the Mexican drug market, which in turn has reduced the cash flow of these criminal groups and forced them to diversify their activities," said Erubiel Tirado, a security expert at the Ibero-American University here. "All of a sudden they're kidnapping businessmen. That's when they put themselves more at risk of getting caught."
A kidnapping scheme led to the arrest this year of Nabor Vargas, also a Zeta member.
Vargas, alias "El Debora," was captured in April when federal agents stormed a house in Ciudad del Carmen in the Gulf state of Campeche, looking for kidnapping victims and weapons. After a brief standoff, authorities rescued a prominent local businessman and arrested 19 people.
