A man who was shot to death in his car in the Solaris Residencial gated community in Zapopan has been identified as Héctor Huerta Ríos, the presumed one-time leader of the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel in the northern city of Monterrey.
Huerta was ambushed by masked gunmen as he drove through the fraccionamiento along with an unidentified woman and two children, all of whom were unharmed.
Huerta Ríos was arrested at his luxury car lot in Monterrey in 2009 and charged with various drug-related offenses, and only recently secured his release. He was once linked to two high-profile assassinations: the slaying of Marcelo Garza y Garza, the head of Nuevo León’s Investigation Agency, in September 2006, and the murder of Raquenel Villanueva Frausto, a well-known lawyer often referred to as “la abogada de narcos,” who was shot to death in the presence of her daughter and two bodyguards at a covered market in Monterrey in August 2009.