Mexican security forces on Tuesday arrested accused drug kingpin Damaso Lopez, believed to be locked in a bloody struggle for control of the Sinaloa Cartel against the sons of its captured leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

The attorney general’s office announced that its agents with the help of the army had captured Lopez, 51, one of the top-ranking figures in the world’s most successful drug cartel, which has been destabilized by “El Chapo’s” extradition in January to the United States.

Guzman’s latest imprisonment triggered a violent power struggle that has led to daylight gun battles involving truck-mounted machine guns in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, with Mexican officials attributing the bloodshed to a tussle between Lopez and the former leader’s sons.

“(Lopez) is considered one of the main drug traffickers and generators of violence in Sinaloa and the south of the Baja California peninsula,” Omar Garcia, head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, told a news conference.

Last month the body of a man tossed from an airplane landed on a hospital roof in Lopez’s Sinaloan home town, Eldorado, and shootings have become common this year around the tourist resorts of Baja California.

Read the whole story from Reuters.