Mexican police are celebrating the arrest of one of the country's most wanted drugs barons, picked up while jogging in a park in Mexico City.

Vicente Carillo Leyva, the 32-year-old heir to the Juarez cartel, was still wearing his white Abercrombie & Fitch tracksuit when he was paraded before the media in the Mexican capital on Thursday.

The arrest was seen as a major coup for the security forces, who are often accused of letting drugs barons operate with impunity.

By a happy coincidence, however, Carrillo Leyva was captured just hours before the US Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano and Eric Holder, Attorney General, arrived for talks about plans for tougher border controls to stop US weapons reaching Mexican drug gangs.

“His capture marks another significant victory for Mexican law enforcement,” the S. Embassy in Mexico said in a statement.

Carrillo Leyva is the son of the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was known as “Lord of the Skies” for flying jetliners full of cocaine into Mexico in the 1990s. Mexico's No 1 drugs trafficker, he died in 1997 during plastic surgery to change his appearance.

Mexico put a $2 million reward on Carrillo Leyva’s head in a list of two dozens top drug smuggling suspects made public last month. Prosecutors say he was second only to his uncle Vicente Carrillo Fuentes in the gang, whose battles with upstart cartels have fed a bloodbath that saw 1,600 people killed in its home base of Ciudad Juarez, a northern border city, last year.

Masked police officers wearing helmets and bulletproof vests hauled Carrillo Leyva before cameras at yesterday's press conference after his arrest in the upmarket neighbourhood of Las Lomas. In his dark-framed glasses and tracksuit, Carrillo Leyva looked more like a well-coiffed college student than a ruthless drugs kingpin and showed little emotion before the flashlights.

Police said that he had using an alias, Alejandro Peralta Alvarez, and was passing himself off as a businessman, but authorities were able to track him down through his wife, who did not change her name.

The US-Mexican talks are aimed at finding new ways both to stop cross-border smuggling and to fight the cartels. More than 9,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006.

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