Moreno, whose nicknames included “El Mas Loco” (“The Craziest”), was a founder of Michoacan state’s La Familia drug cartel and its offshoot, the Knights Templar — groups that have moved massive amounts of methamphetamine and other drugs north to the United States.

In Mexico, the groups have run extensive extortion rackets, corrupted dozens of local governments and engaged in blood-drenched warfare with federal troops and rival drug gangs, all the while spouting Moreno’s mix of evangelical Christianity, self-help advice and the writings of Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran.

Moreno fancied himself a protector of his people and an enforcer of rules. Among other things, he forbade the use or sale of methamphetamine on his home turf, insisting that it only be shipped to the U.S. As cracked as that moral code was, it could feel like something to cling to in an often lawless land, and it made Moreno a kind of legend.

Although it’s unclear whether his death in Sunday morning’s shootout will help quell the violence in western Mexico, it is likely to help President Enrique Peña Nieto sell the argument that his administration is fighting a smarter and more sophisticated drug war than that of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon.

When Peña Nieto took office in December 2012, there was a fear that he might go soft on the cartels in an attempt to calm the violence. But now, two mythic drug lords have been felled in a matter of weeks. A joint U.S.-Mexico operation nabbed Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman on Feb. 22.

Jorge Chabat, a professor at Mexico City’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching, said that at the very least, the elimination of the two capos shows that “there is a part of the Mexican state that is indeed effective and is capable of functioning.”

It was the bumbling of the federal government that helped turn Moreno into a folk saint in the first place. In December 2010, Mexican authorities claimed they had killed Moreno in a shootout. They hadn’t, and soon Moreno was making appearances all over Michoacan, his spiritual powers growing in the eyes of campesinos who began praying to him and setting up shrines in his honor.

One printed invocation dug up this week by Reforma, the Mexico City newspaper, went:

Blessed light of night

Defender of the sick

St. Nazario, saint of ours

I always entrust myself to you.

Mexican authorities say Moreno was finally gunned down — for real, this time — by federal troops in a rural Michoacan municipality Sunday. His body was recovered and his fingerprints checked against a government database.

The effect Moreno’s slaying will have on the cartel-related unrest that has gripped Michoacan, and become a major source of embarrassment for the government, remains to be seen.

Last year, “self-defense” militias sprang up in the rural state and threatened to confront Moreno’s Knights Templar directly, given the lack of government action. Outside the village of Buenavista Tomatlan, the vigilantes trashed a shrine to Moreno.

In January, Peña Nieto sent a massive deployment of troops and federal police to avert a conflagration between the two groups. Since then, those troops and police have been rounding up suspected cartel members, often acting on tips from cooperating vigilantes.

The heightened presence appears to have led to the realization that Moreno was still alive: Monte Alejandro Rubido Garcia, head of the National Public Security System, said the government was first tipped off to the possibility Feb. 7 when authorities patrolling the area arrested a man carrying drugs and weapons who told them he worked in “direct service” to Moreno — one in a chain of clues that eventually led them to the capo’s door.

The encounter suggests that Moreno was acting as more than a spiritual leader for the group. If so, his death could deal an operational blow to the Templars.

At the same time, the federal government said it has recently reestablished its control over the port of Lazaro Cardenas, on Michoacan’s Pacific coast. The Templars long exerted a strong influence at the port, controlling the importation of drugs and methamphetamine precursors and shipping out minerals the cartel extracted from illegal mines — all major sources of income. On March 3, the government announced that it had seized 119,000 tons of illegally mined iron at the port that the cartel had been hoping to ship to China.

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

In December 2010, Mexican officials believed that they had killed Moreno, known alternately as “El Chayo” and “El Mas Loco” (“The Craziest”), in a shootout in the troubled state of Michoacan. His body was not recovered, however, and many locals doubted the story.

Since then, western Mexico has been rife with rumors that the charismatic leader had been seen. He has earned a cultlike following for preaching a cracked version of evangelical Christianity to go along with his cartel’s extensive extortion and drug-running rackets.

On Sunday, the federal government again announced that it had killed Moreno, this time in a Sunday morning shootout in Michoacan. And this time, officials said, they have a body, and the fingerprints, to prove it.

In a news conference, Monte Alejandro Rubido, the executive secretary of Mexico’s National Public Security System, said the Mexican military tried to arrest Moreno on Sunday morning in the municipality of Tumbiscatio but had to fire upon him after they were attacked.

Rubido said federal authorities had been receiving “constant reports” from locals that Moreno was, in fact, still alive.

Afterward, Tomas Zeron, an official with the federal attorney general’s office, showed fingerprints and thumbprints from a body that was recovered, projecting them alongside what they said were matching prints on file with the Mexican military. Zeron said the government had “100%” identified the body as Moreno’s.

The killing of Moreno — if he is really dead this time — is another high-profile victory in the drug war for the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office in December 2012 promising to fight the cartels in a smarter and more efficient manner.

On Feb. 22, Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, one of the world’s most-wanted criminals, was apprehended in the Pacific resort city of Mazatlan in a joint Mexican-U.S. operation.

Although the takedown of these crime bosses may deal a short-term operational blow to their respective criminal networks, it remains unclear whether the Peña Nieto government has devised an effective long-term strategy to reduce the power of the cartels inside Mexican territory.

The Knights Templar have created one of the most pressing conundrums for Peña Nieto in his short time in office. In January, the administration had to send a massive surge of troops and federal police to Michoacan territory controlled by the cartel after an uprising of vigilante “self-defense” groups who were threatening to take on the drug group and potentially spark a regional conflagration.

The self-defense groups have since been integrated into a preexisting, federally controlled rural defense corps, and in some cases are working alongside troops and federal police in an effort to break the Templars’ control.

The Knights Templar, a spin-off of the La Familia drug cartel, has adopted some of the original group’s quasi-religious trappings, as well as rhetoric in which its members cast themselves as true protectors of the people.

Some residents of western Mexico readily bought into the mythology, constructing religious shrines to Moreno. But the day-to-day operation of the Knights Templar appears to have fallen to a former schoolteacher named Servando “La Tuta” Gomez Martinez, who remains at large.

MEXICO CITY — A Mexican regulatory agency has ordered the massive companies that dominate this nation’s telephone and broadcast television sectors to share their network infrastructure with competitors, a move that could seriously alter Mexico’s telecommunications landscape in the months and years to come.

MEXICO CITY — When historians write about 21st century Los Angeles, they’ll probably observe that Eric Garcetti was the second Spanish-speaking L.A. mayor in a row to make an official visit to the Mexican capital.

But Zambada is likely to discover, much as Guzman did, that inheriting the throne of top capo comes with a series of complications worthy of a Shakespearean king.

Like his predecessor, Zambada is a country boy made good who hails from the badlands of Sinaloa, the traditional heart of Mexican drug-smuggling culture. Though he has enjoyed less publicity than Guzman, he has long been considered a high-level target for U.S. and Mexican authorities, who have managed to nab a number of his family members and close associates in recent years. Now that pressure is likely to increase substantially.

As long as Zambada remains free, however, close observers of the Mexican drug world will be analyzing the little that is known about his style in an effort to divine the future for his global drug empire. They will also be attuned to Zambada’s personal history — particularly his longtime business alliance with Guzman. The current state of that partnership could be the difference between a smooth succession within the Sinaloa cartel and a bloody fracturing of what has long been a loose-knit and volatile confederation of killers, smugglers and outlaws.

A U.S. federal law enforcement official said Friday that American authorities were watching Mexico closely, expecting that Guzman would be handing the reins of the Sinaloa cartel to his “most trusted” confederate.

“But the question is: Does he want it?” said the official, speaking confidentially because there is a pending criminal case against Zambada. “Does he want to become the lightning rod by becoming the head of the cartel? If he does that, he knows the U.S. and Mexico will come after him like an avenging wind.

“But he’s probably got no choice. Chapo, through his lawyers, will send a message to El Mayo that he has to take over the cartel, simply because he’s the only guy there for a smooth transition.”

In a 2010 interview with the weekly Mexican newsmagazine Proceso, Zambada, whose nickname is a diminutive often given to boys named Ismael in Sinaloa, said that he and Guzman “are friends, compadres,” who “talk on the phone regularly.” The two men do seem to have much in common. They are of roughly the same generation (Guzman, officials say, is either 56 or 59), grew up poor in rural Sinaloa, and both sport cowboy-style mustaches.

Both men have also spent decades in the drug business, the reason the U.S. government issued individual rewards of up to $5 million for information leading to their capture. Zambada is said to have begun at age 16 — “since before Christ resurrected Lazarus,” Michael S. Vigil, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s former chief of international operations, said in an interview Friday.

Early on, Vigil said, Zambada worked the Mexicali area, lording over the region against rival drug smugglers. “He killed several individuals that were trying to take over that plaza,” Vigil said.

Eventually, Zambada and Guzman formed a bond. In 1989, they were said to be among the emerging cartel leaders who were granted control of key geographical sectors of Mexico by Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a powerful capo of the era known as “El Padrino,” or the Godfather. At the time, Felix was seeking to disaggregate the drug trade’s leadership, making it more difficult to police.

According to federal grand jury indictments filed in 2008 and 2012 against Zambada, Guzman and others, the two men came to control two distinct and powerful factions in the Sinaloa cartel. Prosecutors said they continued their alliance in order to more effectively coordinate massive shipments of cocaine and heroin to U.S. markets, employ squads of assassins and threaten violence against buyers in the United States who dared to consider doing business with the competition.

In Mexico, there were rules, but Guzman, in particular, was happy to break them. On the website of the Mexican newsmagazine Nexos last week, Guillermo Valdes Castellanos, the former director of the Mexican government’s Center for Investigation and National Security, said that the 1989 meeting with El Padrino established dues that regional drug chiefs would have to pay to move through another’s territory.

Guzman frequently ignored these territories in his quest for expansion — one reason why Mexico saw so many battles break out in key nodes on the drug route, including Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo. Now, Valdes argues, it is Zambada who will have to decide whether to continue with the same adversarial approach.

“Everything indicates that El Mayo Zambada will stay at the front of the organization. What’s less clear is whether, with the detention of Guzman Loera, his business model will come to an end,” Valdes wrote, referring to Guzman by his full surname.

Little is known about Zambada’s management style. Writer Malcolm Beith, in his 2010 book, “The Last Narco,” credited him with a sophisticated business acumen, saying he was careful not to flood the U.S. market with drugs and thus drive down street prices.

One U.S. law enforcement official Friday described Guzman as “the muscle” at the top of the Sinaloa organization and Zambada as all the rest. “He is everything,” said the official, who asked to be unnamed because of the pending criminal charges. “The brains. The logistics. Security. Everything.

“He’s very respected in the Sinaloa cartel and even among their rivals. They respect him because he is one of the old drug traffickers in Mexico, and he’s also very feared because, like Chapo, he will exert violence. Not in a wholesale manner. He’s a little more surgical. Because he knows it’s bad for business.”

The Zambada faction and what remains of Guzman’s faction may still be close. But there is also a possibility that one may have betrayed the other, a not-uncommon occurrence in the Mexican drug world. A few days before Guzman’s Feb. 22 arrest, Mexican authorities had carried out operations that led to the arrest of a number of Zambada’s closest associates.

Two of Zambada’s sons are in U.S. federal custody, awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges. One of them, Jesus Vicente Zambada, has argued in court documents that he should be immune from prosecution because he was cooperating with U.S. officials.