Manuel Torres Felix, the head of security for the Sinaloa Cartel, has been killed by the Mexican military – Oct. 13, 2012.
Torres Felix, (photo left) was the brother of Javier “El JT” Torres Felix (photo right), who was the head of the cartel’s security before his arrest and extradition to the U.S.in 2006.
This time Army soldiers guarded his body to prevent it from being stolen — as happened to the corpse of Zeta leader Heriberto Lazcano a week before.
Manuel Torres Felix — also known as El Ondeado — was known to be especially bloody, and became, perhaps for that reason, the subject of numerous corridos by the new wave of corrido singers, most of whom are from Southern California and who seem to have chosen sides (or were forced to do so) in Mexico’s drug-cartel wars.
Check out, for example, Los Sanguinarios de M1 (the Bloodthirsty Ones of M1) by Los Bukanas de Culiacan (who are actually not from Culiacan, Sinaloa, but instead from Downey, CA), with plenty of references to decapitated heads, etc.
(Here’s some lyrics, and I’m not making them up:
With an AK-47 and a bazooka on our heads
blowing off heads that cross our path
We’re bloodthirsty and crazy – We love to kill
Bullets fired and extortions carried out, just like the best of us
Always in a caravan of armored cars, wearing bullet-proof vests and ready to execute people)
Man, where is the oblique, poetic style of Chalino Sanchez and his tales from the Mexican rancho now that we need them?
I find it interesting that M1, and another sicario, El Macho Prieto, became the focus of so many corridos, rather than Chapo Guzman or Mayo Zambada — the Sinaloa cartel’s leaders.
Don’t know, but his death might do something to undermine the idea that the government is in cahoots with the Sinaloa Cartel.
