A fearsome cartel lieutenant who once confessed to murdering more than 500 victims received a prison sentence of 420 years from a Mexican federal judge.
Ricardo “El Ricky” Santillan Trejo went before a Mexican federal judge this week who handed down a prison sentence of 30 years for each of the 14 kidnapping charges that he was facing. The man was already serving a 23-year prison sentence on organized crime charges. The kidnappings occurred in 2012 under Santillan Trejo’s orders. At the time, he was using fear to rule over the city of Mante. His arrest came in 2014 when federal authorities deemed him a priority target.
Ricardo “El Ricky” Santillan Trejo. (Credit: Breitbart News Foundation / Cartel Chronicles)
Santillan Trejo is not to be confused with the recently captured Ricardo “Ricky or Mando R” Gonzalez Sauceda or Ricardo “Mando Ricky” Chapa Maldonado, who were also regional leaders with Los Zetas (Cartel Del Noreste) at the time of their arrests and were also known for their extreme violence.
Information from Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) revealed that the man known as El Ricky was a regional boss with Los Zetas in the central part of Tamaulipas from 2012 to 2014. He is credited with carrying out and ordering hundreds of abductions and murders.
Information provided to Breitbart News Foundation by law enforcement sources in Mexico revealed that El Ricky joined Los Zetas in 2005 and quickly climbed the ranks of the criminal organization until he became a regional boss. During the turf war that the Zetas had with their former bosses and allies of the Gulf Cartel, El Ricky set up roadblocks along the highways in the central part of Tamaulipas to stop incursions. The man also set up checkpoints and carried out kidnappings along the highway that connected the Tamaulipas capital, Ciudad Victoria, with Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.
El Ricky would kidnap motorists and passengers from buses to find possible rivals sneaking into his turf. Still, it is believed that he mostly kidnapped and killed innocent victims and migrants.
The man would take his victims to a farming area near Santa Engracia, where he would question them, torture them, kill them, and bury them in shallow graves.
Once in custody, El Ricky confessed to killing more than 500 victims that he and his men incinerated and buried in a ranch called El Papalote near El Cielo, Tamaulipas.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart News Foundation traveled to Mexico City and the states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and their original Spanish. This article was written by “Francisco Morales” from Tamaulipas.
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