DO THE MEXICANS REALLY HAVE THE SAN FERNANDO MASSACRE MASTERMIND?

By Juan Montoya
By now those of us who have lived along the border and are used to high falutin' pronunciamientos of Mexican law enforcement have grown to be skeptics of their claims.

That's why we are watching and judging the claims by the Mexican PGR with a hefty grain of salt that they have captured the mastermind of the San Fernando, Tamps. massacre said to be responsible for ordering the deaths of at least 83 people in April 2011 who were shot and whose bodies were burned and buried in two clandestine mass graves in the municipality.
The Mexican Marines reported the capture of Salvador Alfonso Martinez Escobedo (aka La Ardilla) in Nuevo Laredo on Saturday. He was then transferred to federal custody in Mexico City, the Marina Armada announced.
The arrest was announced with great fanfare by the PGR and none other than Mexican President Felipe Calderon who twitted that the capture of the reported to be the boss of an unnamed criminal organization operating in the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Coahuila. He is charged with perpetrating the massacre of Mexican nationals and Central American immigrants who were removed from buses traveling through northern Mexico and who refused to join the organization as soldiers and drug runners.
The Mexican government has made some claims in their war on the criminal organizations before. Unfortunately, some of the claims have been found to be overly magnified. Within the past three months, the government also claimed that they had captured a near relative of El Chapo Guzman, only to be embarrassed when the suspect turned out to be a different person.
On July 17, 2011, Federal police said Edgar Huerta Montiel, 22, told them he led the capture of two freight trucks packed with undocumented migrants in the state of Tamaulipas, then killed 10 of the victims. He intended to hijack the two buses so the Zetas could maintain control over these people and prevent the Gulf Cartel from recruiting them.
Montiel said he was following orders from Martinez Escobedo.
The bodies of the 72 migrants were found in August on a ranch in San Fernando after one member of the group escaped. In the same area, authorities found graves containing the remains of nearly 200 people believed kidnapped from buses headed toward the border
The San Fernando massacre catapulted the ongoing war between the government and cartel organizations in northern Mexico into the international arena. To date, running gun battles are a common-day occurrence in most areas along the northern Mexico border with the United States.