Arnoldo Rueda Medina

Career

Criminality Rueda Medina was born on 15 December 1969 in Parácuaro, and first worked as a tortilla seller before deciding to start his criminal career by stealing automobiles in the year 2000. In 2004, he became the La Familia Michoacana's hitmen lieutenant responsible for tracking down cartel rivals and ordering gunmen to kill members of the Milenio Cartel, which had an alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel.

He reportedly started working for the cartel in 2000, when the drug lords Carlos Rosales Mendoza, José de Jesús Méndez Vargas, and Nazario Moreno González were fighting against the Valencia brothers of the Milenio organization for the control of the smuggling routes in western Mexico.

Minutes later, a group of more than two dozen gunmen tossed fragmentation grenades and opened fire on the federal police offices where Rueda Medina was being held. Five federal officers and two soldiers were killed that day, with ten federal policemen wounded by the reprisals. The 11 men and one woman had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed while off-duty as a retaliation attack for the arrest of Rueda Medina. The killing of the agents, whose bodies were found along with a warning note, showed that La Familia Michoacana was eager to directly attack the Federal government of Mexico.

Rueda has been convicted of multiple crimes and is being held at Penal del Altiplano, a maximum security prison.

Kingpin Act sanction On 25 February 2010, the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Rueda Medina under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (sometimes referred to simply as the "Kingpin Act"), for his involvement in drug trafficking along with twenty-one other international criminals and ten foreign entities. The act prohibited U.S. citizens and companies from doing any kind of business activity with him, and virtually froze all his assets in the U.S.