On Labor Day 2024, Morena activists in Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, rose early to prepare for the most anticipated event of the year. The following day, May 2nd, presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum was scheduled to hold a rally in the municipal plaza of Apatzingán, the epicenter of the battle between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the United Cartels.
Dozens of Morena supporters had taken advantage of the holiday to decorate the plaza. While some hung crimson ribbons, others trimmed the flowerbeds and painted the curbs. Still others invited their neighbors, going door to door. Spirits were high among the supporters of President López Obrador. A week earlier, “The Doctor” had once again defeated her rival Xóchitl Gálvez in a presidential debate, and polls placed her, on average, 20 points ahead of the second-place candidate. Another Morena presidency seemed inevitable.
Electoral defeat wasn’t a concern for the Morena activists. Nor were they worried about a low turnout. Even less so about the Bishop of Apatzingán, Cristóbal Ascencio García, potentially boycotting the presidential candidate’s event to prolong his dispute with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Only one thing kept the organizers on edge: the possibility of organized crime making its presence felt at the event. The mere thought of a shootout among the attendees or an attack on the almost certain future president kept the organizers awake at night.
The day before, April 30, two bodies with execution-style gunshot wounds were discovered in an abandoned house on the road to Apatzingán. And hours before the discovery, in the heart of the town, the owner of a furniture store was murdered by a hitman who was demanding payment for protection money. Organized crime wanted to make its presence felt on the electoral agenda, and Mayor José Luis Cruz Lucatero’s call for a truce between cartels had failed.
Perhaps for this reason, at midday, all activity stopped. From Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, Morena party members received disheartening news: “The Doctor” (Claudia Sheinbaum) had decided, at the last minute, not to visit Apatzingán and to move the rally to Chilchota. She would then continue on to Zamora and Uruapan. The official version insisted that the change in the schedule wasn’t related to the insecurity, but rather to a new strategy to reach as many people as possible in the final stretch of the campaign. Almost no one in the town believed them.
Dejected, the organizers dismantled the festivities. Ribbons, balloons, confetti—everything was packed away at the local Morena committee office. Most looked sad, although deep down they also felt a quiet relief: it was rumored that a well-known extortionist in the area wanted to get to Sheinbaum to hand her a letter with unknown contents. A very high-risk maneuver for the presidential candidate. Fortunately for the people of Apatzingán, the plan of César Alejandro Sepúlveda Arellano, “El Bótox,” had been thwarted by the cancellation of the rally.
García Harfuch put an end to the “Hugs, not bullets” strategy.
Around that time, Claudia Sheinbaum was confident of her victory. All the polls predicted a smooth win. So, in the midst of the presidential campaign, the Morena party candidate summoned her team with a clear instruction: each future cabinet secretary was to present a work plan for the first 100 days of the next administration.
Among those present was Omar García Harfuch, who was on track to become a senator but was already considering taking a leave of absence from his seat to become the next Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection.
The former head of the Mexico City police force got to work and drafted a complex project that would cover the period from October 1, 2024, to January 7, 2025. The document would implicitly put an end to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “Hugs, not bullets” strategy and usher in the “Zero impunity” era of Mexico’s first female president. In addition to outlining his priorities as the country’s security chief, it would define his policing style within a left-wing government.
García Harfuch decided he would invest his political capital in reducing crime in the 10 municipalities with the highest rates of intentional homicides, improving security in Chiapas, implementing a new highway security strategy, and strengthening criminal intelligence activities with technological resources.
He also added an ambitious task: addressing the extortion of lime growers in Michoacán, particularly in the municipalities of Nueva Italia, Antúnez, Buenavista, Tepalcatepec, Aguililla, and Apatzingán. Since then, “El Bótox” and his group, Los Blancos de Troya, allies of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, have been on García Harfuch’s radar.
On the night of June 2, with the confirmation of the electoral victory—35.9 million votes for the “Let’s Keep Making History” coalition that nominated Claudia Sheinbaum—he began transforming that draft into a national strategy.
But 53 days later, an unexpected event changed Mexico: on July 25, 2024, Joaquín Guzmán López, son of El Chapo Guzmán, betrayed his father’s closest friend and handed Ismael El Mayo Zambada over to US authorities at an airstrip in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Weeks later, on September 9, Sinaloa became the epicenter of a war between Los Chapitos and La Mayiza that continues to this day.
Sheinbaum wasn’t yet the constitutional president, nor was García Harfuch the Secretary of State, but their security plans had to adapt to the new reality. Sinaloa, which hadn’t been included in the strategy for the first 100 days, was now at the center of the discussion. Attention to the extorted lime farmers lost priority. Botox was buying time, while the bodies piled up in Culiacán.
After Sinaloa, Michoacán returned to the headlines.
The “war in Sinaloa” monopolized the attention of the security cabinet at the start of the new presidential term and the end of 2024. Then, at the beginning of 2025, Republican Donald Trump returned to the White House, and Mexico extradited 29 high-profile drug traffickers to the United States to avoid a tariff war. Later, they would send another 26 kingpins, and a few weeks ago, 37 more, bringing the total to 92 criminals extradited.
In March 2025, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco collective discovered a training camp called Rancho Izaguirre, 40 minutes from Guadalajara, and national outrage focused on forced recruitment. Then, that outrage shifted to a massacre in San Bartolo de Berrios, the battles in Fresnillo, the disappearances in Culiacán, the bodies of the musicians from Grupo Fugitivo in Reynosa, six severed heads in Tlaxcala, the arrest of the former Secretary of Public Security in Tabasco, Hernán Bermúdez, the murder of Father Bertoldo Pantaleón in Cocula, and more.
The suffering of the lime growers seemed to fade amidst the daily tragedies of the year until Michoacán returned to the headlines due to a high-profile murder: on October 19, 2025, lime grower leader Bernardo Bravo was murdered in Apatzingán. He was one of the few voices loudly demanding that the federal government pay attention to the forgotten people of Tierra Caliente.
The day after the crime, federal agents arrived in Michoacán to begin investigations. They soon learned that two weeks earlier, the lime grower activist had been kidnapped and released a few hours later by an armed group; but days later he was forced to attend a meeting in the community of Cenobio Moreno, where his captors murdered him with a .38 caliber weapon.
All the evidence pointed to the Blancos de Troya criminal group, partners of Los Viagras and allies of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho. And in every testimony, one name always came up in the conversation: the leader of the “Trojans,” César Sepúlveda, El Botox.
On October 23, less than 100 hours after Bernardo Bravo’s murder, the federal and state governments launched the plan to apprehend him. This time there would be no distractions. The State against a criminal.
‘El Botox’ was already on the United States’ red list of terrorists.
In reality, El Bótox’s fate was sealed long before. On August 14, 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department had placed him on its terrorist blacklist and announced a $5 million reward for his capture. The Michoacán state government and the federal government were closing in on him.
Despite his notoriety, El Bótox is a little-known criminal outside of Tierra Caliente; but within that territory, he is known as a false self-defense group member who, in 2013, joined Dr. José Manuel Mireles—founder of the self-defense groups—to fight against the abuses of the Knights Templar cartel. After the arrest of Servando Gómez, “La Tuta,” El Bótox revealed his criminal nature and took the place of his enemies as a ruthless extortionist.
Laconic but prone to violence, he managed to build a network of accomplices who respected and feared him equally. In 2018, his ability to infiltrate local politics was exposed when he was arrested in Cuernavaca, Morelos, for the murder of a Michoacán public official. The place of his arrest was the home of Samuel Sotelo Salgado, former legal advisor to the Morelos state government during the administration of Graco Ramírez, and former Secretary of Government during the administration of Cuauhtémoc Blanco, former soccer player and current federal congressman for Morena.
But thanks to his connections, El Bótox quickly returned to the streets and took refuge in the community of Cenobio Moreno, where his family still lives. There he deepened his criminal career, not only extorting lemon growers; he also stole the profits of growers of papaya, grapefruit, mango, melon, guava, and more. He demanded money for every new vehicle, plot of land purchased, business opened, and even for every home internet modem. At the height of his criminal power in 2021, the Mexican Army’s National Intelligence Fusion Center also identified him as controlling the buying and selling of chicken, recycling, and wine and liquor licenses, in addition to drug trafficking and kidnapping. He alone was capable of scaring away the few investments in the area, causing the loss of hundreds of jobs, and hindering regional development.
His capture went from urgent to a matter of national security 13 days after the murder of Bernardo Bravo: on November 1, during the Day of the Dead celebrations, the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, known throughout the country for his openly confrontational style with organized crime, was assassinated.
News of the assassination quickly reached Washington. Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, said at a press conference that President Donald Trump “is aware of what happened,” a statement that carried the implicit threat of U.S. intervention under the pretext that the Mexican government couldn’t neutralize the drug cartels.
The pressure intensified as the investigations progressed: the widow, Grecia Quiroz, and her team, the Sombrero Movement, suggested that the masterminds behind Manzo’s death had ties to state politics. This line of investigation pointed to “El Bótox” as the perpetrator, a theory that is still being pursued.
“El Botox” requested U.S. intervention in a viral video.
The Mexican government put together an urgent plan to apprehend him. They spared no effort, meticulously examining every detail and scrutinizing every arrest of those in his inner circle to assemble a precise operation: they reviewed with a fine-tooth comb the reports of the arrests of his partner Blanca, his son César Alejandro, his daughter Sandra, and his son-in-law Gerardo, as well as the file of his fugitive cousin, “El Jando.”
El Bótox, aware that a manhunt would be launched against him, made a desperate move: he recorded and posted three videos on social media in which he complained about the Mexican government paying so much attention to him and called on the Donald Trump administration to invade the country to apprehend criminals worse than him. “They’re looking for me,” the drug lord lamented, considering it an injustice that he was being targeted as a priority. A last-ditch effort. A desperate maneuver from someone who knew time was running out.
Finally, on Thursday, January 22, the federal government, along with the administration of Governor Alfredo Bedolla, launched the operation. The sign that El Bótox was doomed appeared in the air: a flock of military and armed helicopters flew over Cenobio Moreno, while a group of special forces surrounded a house in Santa Ana Amatlán, where everyone in the town knew he lived carefree, almost always with a bottle of rum or whiskey in hand.
The operation took less than 20 minutes. The leader of Los Blancos de Troya was asleep, and two accomplices, El Pánico and El Greñas, were guarding him when federal and state agents stormed the house. None of them were able to use their weapons. El Bótox tried to escape through the bathroom window when he saw that agents were also waiting for him in the courtyard. He raised his hands and knelt down in surrender.
In the following hours, El Bótox was sent to the maximum-security prison of Altiplano in Almoloya de Juárez, State of Mexico. While he was settling into a cell where the light never goes out, federal forces raided 19 houses in Cenobio Moreno, properties belonging to his criminal group. They found promissory notes signed by his extortion victims, lists of debts, weapons, drugs, and wooden planks he used to torture those who owed him money. This evidence will be added to the file of this criminal, who will likely be deported from Mexico and sent to the United States.
At 43, the criminal career of César Alejandro Sepúlveda Arellano came to an end, the man who united the White House, the National Palace, and Michoacán against him. He was never able to deliver that mysterious letter to President Claudia Sheinbaum. Some things, like time, can’t be stretched, not even with Botox.
Sources: Milenio, Cartel Insider Archives, Cartel Insider Archives, Cartel Insider Archives
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