Notorious cartel leader with $1 million U.S. bounty on his head killed in Mexico

A leader of a notorious Mexican drug cartel who had a bounty on his head in the United States has died in a clash with army troops, authorities said Saturday.

Sinaloa state, where the powerful cartel of the same name is based, is enduring a war between two rival factions that has left some 1,200 people dead since September.

Jorge Humberto Figueroa — who went by the nickname “El Perris” — was shot and killed Friday in a raid carried out to arrest him, public safety secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch wrote on social media.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had been offering up to $1 million for information leading to his arrest on suspicion of fentanyl trafficking and money laundering.

Figueroa was one of the masterminds of an infamous clash with the authorities in 2019 in the city of Culiacan, Harfuch said.

In that case, cartel members fought security forces who had arrested Ovidio Guzman, a son of Sinaloa cartel co-founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Mexican authorities controversially released Ovidio Guzman at the time, saying they wanted to avoid further bloodshed. But he ultimately was re-arrested in 2023 and extradited to the United States, where he remains in custody.

Earlier this month, Harfuch confirmed that 17 family members of cartel leaders crossed into the U.S. recently as part of a deal between Ovidio Guzman and the Trump administration.  El Chapo’s ex-wife, Griselda Lopez Perez, and her daughter were among the family members to enter the U.S., local media reported.

Mexican press reports said Figueroa belonged to a Sinaloa cartel faction run by the sons of the older Guzman, who is serving a life sentence in the United States.

This group has been fighting another faction led by heirs of cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was lured to the United States in a sting operation in 2024 and arrested.

The newspaper Reforma said Figueroa was head of security for the faction led by Guzman’s sons — known as the Chapitos. According to a 2023 indictment by the U.S. Justice Department, the Chapitos and their cartel associates used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers.”