A Lost Watch And Nine Gunshots: This Is How Édgar Millán, García Luna’s Right-Hand Man, Was Killed

Édgar Eusebio Millán Gómez turned on the light to enter his home. It was 12:45 a.m. on May 8, 2008. He had just stepped out of the armored SUV that had brought him from the Pedregal Tower—home to the Federal Secretariat of Public Security—following an operation against the Beltrán Leyva cartel. He entered the apartment complex on Camelia Street, in the Guerrero neighborhood, accompanied by only one bodyguard.

He inserted the key, opened the door, reached inside, and flipped on the light. According to his bodyguard’s statement, his boss managed to shout: “We’re fucked—he’s armed!” A man emerged from the darkness with a pistol in each hand; one of the guns was fitted with a silencer.

Millán—acting commissioner of the Federal Preventive Police and third in the chain of command under Genaro García Luna—was struck by the first shot immediately. Forensic experts would later document nine gunshot wounds on his body. Yet, he did not fall right away. Injuries to both his arms, according to the forensic report, were consistent with “instinctive defensive maneuvers” made against his attacker. The bodyguard was also wounded in the cheek and shoulder, dropping to his knees before collapsing. When he managed to look up, his boss was lying on the ground nearby, and the attacker was firing into his body at point-blank range.

Outside on the street, three other bodyguards heard what they initially thought were firecrackers. They ran toward the entryway, only to find it locked. They began kicking at it. Another gunshot wounded one of them in the leg; he managed to shout, “Partner, I’ve been hit in the leg,” while the others continued trying to force their way in.

One of the officers finally managed to kick the door open and took cover inside between a column and a wall. He saw his colleague with his face covered in blood and, on the other side—crouched behind a car parked in the courtyard—spotted a man. The attacker stood up and aimed at him. The bodyguard took cover behind the wall and saw the man pull the trigger of the gun held in his right hand. There was no shot; he had run out of ammunition.

The officer shouted twice for him to drop his weapons and raise his hands. The man let the weapons fall beneath the car and raised his arms. The gunman lunged at the bodyguard as he approached to handcuff him, attempting to use his left hand to turn the officer’s weapon against him and kill him with his own gun. They struggled and fell to the ground.

A second bodyguard arrived to help subdue him. At that moment, Édgar Millán—standing despite being gravely wounded—advanced toward his assailant, who was on the ground. “This son of a bitch wanted to kill me inside my own home,” he told his men while still alive, according to the case file. He then took matters into his own hands: he hoisted the man up and slammed him against the floor while shouting questions at him. “Who are you? Who sent you? Who ordered my killing? Who hired you? How did you get in?” he demanded over and over, striking the man whenever he remained silent. His own bodyguards had to restrain him to make him stop.

Federal authorities later revealed that the hitman was Alejandro Ramírez Báez—alias “El Chicote”—who did not divulge a single name that early morning.

According to the judicial record from that night, reinforcements from the Federal District Public Security Secretariat arrived fifteen minutes after the initial shots were fired, followed half an hour later by the public prosecutor.

Millán, his bodyguard (who had been shot in the shoulder), and the sub-officer (shot in the leg) boarded the ambulance under their own power. Left behind in the home’s courtyard were twenty-eight shell casings and bullets of at least three different calibers, along with a pair of latex gloves and a second pistol equipped with a silencer, hidden among the bushes.

Later, according to testimony given by Enrique Villarreal Barragán in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Édgar Eusebio Millán Gómez had been working for the faction of the Sinaloa Cartel led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. On the morning of May 9, 2008, he was accorded state honors in the presence of Mexican President Felipe Calderón. The interim commissioner had been one of the key figures closest to that war. 

This is a collaboration between ARCHIVERO and DOMINGA, reconstructing the case using court records from criminal case 310/2024, public judicial testimony, and archives long forgotten in drawers and old government offices. Cases like this reveal that, in Mexico, the official truth is always a work in progress—an unfinished structure.

Robbery was ruled out from day one

The field forensics report, later added to the judicial file, ruled out robbery from the start. An analysis of the home’s locks determined that the assailant had entered using two keys he had brought with him: one opened the main gate to the housing complex, and the other opened the door to Millán’s home. There were no signs of forced entry at the lock.

For the judges who would later review the case, that fact alone was sufficient to establish premeditation, treachery, and an unfair advantage: the attacker was carrying two pistols—one equipped with a silencer to minimize noise—and latex gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. The court determined that he had had ample time to “reflect upon and consider the manner and means” of the killing. Millán, by contrast, had no chance at all; he was returning from work and opening his front door to rest when he was ambushed.

According to information published by the weekly magazine *Proceso*, the investigation moved quickly during those early days of May 2008. The Federal Police arrested five people linked to the crime, including two women. Police discovered that the mastermind behind the assassination was José Antonio Martín Montes Garfias, an agent with the Federal Preventive Police who was on medical leave and assigned to the Sinaloa station; investigators found that he maintained direct contact with the Beltrán Leyva brothers’ organization. Gerardo Garay, the commander who led the force’s anti-drug coordination efforts, confirmed this himself at a press conference: a federal police officer had orchestrated the operation to kill another federal police officer on behalf of organized crime.

According to public records, Édgar Eusebio Millán Gómez was born in Mexico City in 1967. He studied law at the Universidad del Valle de México and, upon graduating, joined the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) as an investigative agent.

In 2001, he joined the then-newly created Federal Investigation Agency (AFI), where he eventually headed the kidnapping division. Between 2006 and 2007, he served as the agency’s director of Regional Police Deployment before moving to the Federal Preventive Police. By 2008, he was the Federal Police’s general coordinator for Regional Security and Social Proximity; from March of that year, he served as the interim commissioner for the entire force following his direct superior’s promotion to an under-secretariat.

In practice, he was the third most powerful figure in the Federal Secretariat of Public Security—led by Genaro García Luna—ranking just behind Luis Cárdenas Palomino. Various journalistic accounts regarding García Luna’s inner circle agree that Millán was a personal friend of his.

However, the weekly magazine *Proceso* documented that Millán actually had ties to organized crime structures—specifically to the network operating under the command of his own mentor. And in 2023, during the trial of Genaro García Luna in a New York court, Sergio Villarreal Barragán—known as “El Grande,” a former Sinaloa Cartel kingpin turned protected witness—testified that García Luna had been on the cartel’s payroll since 2001, receiving monthly bribes of between one million and 1.5 million dollars paid directly by Arturo Beltrán Leyva.

Those payments continued until the death of “El Barbas” in 2009. In that same testimony, he stated that Millán worked for the cartel—specifically for the faction led by “El Chapo” Guzmán and “El Mayo” Zambada.

The following day, during his second stint on the stand, Villarreal Barragán confirmed that they were the ones who had killed him: “We obtained the keys to Édgar Millán’s house, and a gunman waited inside and killed him.”

According to journalist Anabel Hernández, Millán had also allegedly taken a highly valuable watch belonging to Arturo Beltrán Leyva—a piece encrusted with over 400 diamonds and valued at half a million dollars. This item had been seized by the then-Attorney General’s Office on March 28, 2008, during a raid on one of “El Barbas’s” properties, yet it never appeared in the official inventory of confiscated goods.

The War That Split ‘El Chapo’ and the Beltrán Leyvas

In late 2007, the alliance that had for years united the Beltrán Leyva clan with ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and ‘El Mayo’ Zambada—under the so-called Federation—fell apart. On January 21, 2008, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva—known as ‘El Mochomo’—was arrested by the Army in Culiacán. According to the version of events circulating among the kingpins themselves, El Chapo had facilitated the arrest to get rid of him.

The story that circulated for years within the drug trafficker’s inner circle was that Alfredo had been betrayed with the promise of a gift: a watch that actually tracked his exact location for his capture.

Genaro García Luna reportedly sided with El Chapo and El Mayo during the split. Arturo Beltrán Leyva, who had previously been his ally, ended up on the opposing side. Consequently, ‘El Barbas’ decided to settle the score with the police apparatus he viewed as traitorous—a force that answered to El Chapo.

Édgar Millán was not the first to pay the price. A week earlier, Roberto Velasco Bravo—Director of Organized Crime at the Federal Police’s General Directorate of Tactical Analysis—had been assassinated. On the night of his own death, May 8, 2008, Millán was returning from leading an operation against members of the Beltrán Leyva cartel in Morelos, where nine alleged hitmen had been captured. ‘El Barbas’ would die a few months later, in December 2009, during a Navy operation in Cuernavaca. In 2011, a federal judge in Jalisco sentenced Alejandro Ramírez Báez to 60 years in prison for aggravated homicide (attempted) and the possession of a firearm restricted to exclusive military use. A second man received a one-year prison sentence for weapons possession.

However, the criminal case was reopened and retried years later; in May 2026, a federal court based in Puente Grande, Jalisco, handed down a new sentence—this time 30 years for the aggravated homicide, plus additional penalties for the attempted crime and weapon possession that totaled over 70 years, which were subsequently adjusted to the statutory maximum.

That second ruling revealed that Ramírez Báez’s own statement to authorities, obtained days after his arrest, had been invalidated by the court after it was proven to have been extracted under torture. Expert evaluations conducted during the proceedings were found—according to the ruling itself—to be “consistent with the allegation of torture.”

Source: Milenio