For investigators, the capture of Jorge Armando ‘N’ in Morelia was like finding a red thread to pull until reaching the upper echelons of the criminal structure of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). The Graduate, as the hitmen who obeyed his order to assassinate the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, called him on November 1, said by name and surname who his boss is. Ramón Álvarez Ayala, alias R-1, was the creator of the instructions dictated in the chat where the murder was orchestrated. Now he is in the sights of the authorities, deployed throughout the state of Michoacán with the aim of weakening the cartel. However, R-1 had already been arrested in 2012 and, after spending a decade in prison, was released three years ago on a judge’s order amid Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s corruption allegations that motivated judicial reform.
Jorge Armando ‘N’ referred to Ramón Álvarez Ayala in WhatsApp conversations with the perpetrators of the murder as “the boss”. He was the intermediary between the cartel bosses and Víctor Manuel Ubaldo, the teenager who pulled the trigger several times, as well as his two companions, Fernando Josué ‘N’ and Ramiro ‘N’, whose bodies were found lifeless on the Uruapan-Paracho highway. A few minutes after the murder, when the young men who survived the response of Manzo’s bodyguards were trying to escape, Jorge Armando ‘N’ sent them a thank you from above. “The boss tells us to thank us and asks us not to have any prisoners. Please pay attention to the instructions he will give us”, reads one of the messages from that chat.
The Secretary of Security, Omar García Harfuch, stressed on Wednesday that there will be more arrests in the case, as investigations continue into the other participants in that chat who were closely following Manzo days before his murder. Harfuch revealed in an interview with Group of formulas that the criminals shot the mayor two days before committing the murder among the Candle Festival crowd, in the midst of the Day of the Dead celebrations in central Uruapan. “On October 30 they identified him at a petrol station, took photographs of him and sent them to the chat, but they were unable to achieve the murder,” explained the secretary. “Those three (Víctor Manuel, Ramiro and Fernando Josué) together with other members received punishments for not doing so. They beat them, they locked them up…”, he added.
Harfuch did not explain who R-1 is or what the motive for such a crime could be for the whole world to see, but assures that his team knows that he operates “directly” in at least four municipalities in Michoacán with his brother, Rafael Álvarez Ayala, alias R-2, and other members. “This is a very, very, very local cell,” underlined the secretary, who admitted that investigations still have a lot of work to do to weaken the group in the state.
The name of the Álvarez Ayala brothers made headlines in 2012, when an army operation captured them in Jalisco. The maneuver, which involved air support, managed to locate R-1 in an apartment “in precarious conditions” in Guadalajara, a place he used as a refuge for his meetings with collaborators to manage the distribution of drugs in the area, as specified in a statement from the Secretariat of National Defense. There he was arrested along with five of his trusted men, long weapons, vehicles and documentation. “R-1 was the second most important man in the CJNG structure,” the authorities said, assuring that Ramón’s role was to implement actions against rival groups in the places where he operated, Guanajuato and Michoacán.
When he was arrested, he blamed the leaders of the Knights Templar group for placing narcomancers in Guadalajara chronicling the alleged rift between the CJNG and the Pacific Cartel. However, the authorities were looking for the Álvarez Ayala brothers for some blockades and vehicle fires in Guadalajara and Colima on August 25 of the same year.
His brother Rafael was arrested in a subdivision of Zapopan, Jalisco, along with two of his top assistants. One of them was a third brother, Jesús Santiago Álvarez Ayala, who worked as an escort for the R-2 and acted as his personal escort. Rafael was responsible for coordinating with R-1 the shipment of synthetic drugs to the United States, and according to authorities, R-2 claimed to have received orders directly from Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Menchothe boss who runs the most powerful cartel in Mexico. The Security Secretariat explained that, after the fall of Nicolás Balcázar López, alias El Bronco, three months earlier, Ramón became El Mencho’s main collaborator and trusted man. The boss of bosses put him in charge of controlling drug trafficking in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara and in the northern part of the state of Jalisco.
R-1 and R-2 remained in prison for ten years, until they were released in November 2022 by order of Jalisco First District Judge Yolanda Chávez Montelongo. During Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s morning press conference, the then Undersecretary of Security, Luis Rodríguez Bucio, used the case of Chávez and Ramón Álvarez Ayala to exemplify the judges’ alleged corrupt ties to organized crime. “Ramón Ángel ‘N’, known as R1 or Moncho, was a lieutenant of the Valencia cartel, the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel. He was tried for organized crime and health crimes and was released on November 22 last year,” he explained. “Yolanda Cecilia Chávez Montelongo acquitted him because she believed that there was no concrete evidence to prosecute him. This person had at least five investigative dossiers against him between 2012 and 2021, and in all cases he was released”, he added to fuel the president’s speech against the judges, which ended up consolidating judicial reform.
