Mexican security forces have apprehended Francisco Javier Román-Bardales, a high-ranking leader of the notorious MS-13 gang, marking a significant blow to the transnational criminal organization. The 47-year-old Salvadoran, known by the alias “El Veterano,” was taken into custody along a highway in the coastal state of Veracruz after an anonymous tip alerted authorities to his presence.
Román-Bardales, who had been on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted fugitives, now faces deportation to the United States. There, he is charged with a litany of crimes, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, narco-terrorism, racketeering, and alien smuggling. The U.S. had placed a $250,000 bounty on his head following a September 2022 arrest warrant.
The arrest comes amid heightened U.S. efforts to dismantle MS-13, a gang founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s that has become one of the Western Hemisphere’s most violent criminal networks. In February, the Trump administration designated the gang a foreign terrorist organization, along with Venezuela’ s Tren de Aragua and six Mexican cartels.
This latest capture follows the recent arrest of another MS-13 member, Kevin Fernando Perdomo Díaz, also known as “El Kino,” who was wanted by both El Salvador and the U.S. Earlier this month, alleged gang leader Moises Humberto Rivera-Luna appeared in a U.S. district court after being extradited from Guatemala to face racketeering charges.
In a separate development, the U.S. government deported 23 alleged MS-13 members, including two ringleaders, to El Salvador on Sunday. This action, taken despite court orders and under an 18th century wartime statute, also saw more than 230 people, mostly Venezuelans, sent to the Central American nation. In exchange for payment, El Salvador agreed to hold them in a 40,000-person “terrorism confinement center” for a renewable one-year term, per President Nayib Bukele.