Mexico City , Mexico ( CNN ) -- Teodoro `` El Teo '' Garcia Simental , one of Mexico 's most wanted drug traffickers , was arrested Tuesday , Mexican and U.S. authorities said . The capture of the high-level drug trafficker comes on the heels of successful military operations against another cartel last month . Mexican federal police , assisted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration , made the arrest in the city of La Paz , Mexico , the capital of the state of Baja California Sur , DEA spokesman Michael Sanders said . Garcia Simental was a top lieutenant of the Tijuana cartel until he defected to the rival Sinaloa cartel after a power struggle . `` He is one the most notorious drug lords and was on a list of the Top 24 drug traffickers in all of Mexico '' said another DEA official , who asked not to be identified because officials were still gathering preliminary information . Authorities presented Garcia Simental , together with another man captured in the raid , Diego Raymundo Gutierrez Gomez , to the media in Mexico City on Tuesday . Garcia Simental is accused of more than 300 murders , most of them since he split from the Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix organization in April 2008 , Federal Police Section Chief Ramon Eduardo Pequeno said . One of his jobs for the Arellano-Felix cartel was disposing of bodies , Pequeno said . Garcia Simental is accused of disposing of 300 body parts by dipping them in acid , Pequeno said . Once he split from the Arellano-Felix cartel , Garcia Simental continued to operate a drug trafficking organization in Tijuana with the help of rival cartels . The Sinaloa cartel and the Michoacan , Mexico-based La Familia cartel supplied Garcia Simental 's group with drugs , which he would smuggle into the United States , Pequeno said . This splintering of the Tijuana cartel was a cause of much of the violence seen in the border city since 2008 , he said . Tuesday 's arrest was the result of more than five months of intelligence operations , Pequeno said . There was a reward of up to 30 million pesos ( U.S. $ 2.4 million ) for Garcia Simental 's capture . CNN Justice Producer Terry Frieden in Washington contributed to this report .
Teodoro `` El Teo '' Garcia Simental one of Mexico 's most wanted , it says . Garcia Simental is accused of more than 300 murders . He was captured in a raid on his home last year and has been held at the Altiplano prison complex for nearly two years.