Face of Mexico's drug war dies in chopper crash

Updated at 7:45 p.m. ET

The country's top Cabinet secretary, Francisco Blake Mora, a key figure in Mexico's battle with drug cartels, died Friday in a helicopter crash that President Felipe Calderon said was probably an accident.

The Presidency spokeswoman, Alejandra Sota, said authorities located the bodies of the secretary and seven others. They included Interior Undersecretary Felipe Zamora, said agency spokesman Jose Alfredo Garcia.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who appointed Blake Mora as interior secretary in July 2010, said the Super Puma helicopter was flying in fog when it went down in a remote area southeast of Mexico City. Still, he said all possible causes were under investigation. He said the pilot had sufficient expertise.

"Mexico has lost a great patriot ... and I lost a dear friend," said Calderon, who struggled to maintain composure at one point during an address to the country. "He was not only an exemplary minister, he was an exemplary Mexican."

President Barack Obama called Calderon to offer his condolences.

Calderon appeared to try to quell any suggestions of sabotage, saying Blake Mora's helicopter "was always under guard" in the hangar of Mexico's equivalent of the Secret Service and that it had recently undergone maintenance.

Blake Mora was traveling to a prosecutors' meeting in the neighboring state of Morelos when the helicopter went down in a mountainous area of Mexico state southeast of Mexico City.

The secretary of the interior is the country's top official after the president, overseeing internal political affairs and security, making him a key figure in directing the battle against drug cartels, as well as negotiating with opposition political parties and with the legislature.

President Felipe Calderon lost Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino in the crash of a Learjet in Mexico City on Nov. 4, 2008. Despite widespread speculation that that accident, which killed 14, was caused by sabotage, investigators eventually ruled that out and blamed pilot error.

Mexico plane crash kills gov't official

One of Blake's last postings on his Twitter account commemorated the loss of Mourino

"Today we remember Juan Camilo Mourino three years after his death, a person who was working to build a better Mexico," Blake tweeted on Nov. 4.

Blake Mora, 45, started his political career in the mid-1990s as an official in his native Tijuana and served as a federal congressman through the 2000s, as well as interior secretary of Baja California.

Like Mourino, he was Calderon's point man in the government's war against organized crime, frequently traveling to the country's most dangerous places for meetings with besieged state and local security officials.

He was an embodiment of the Mexican government's get-tough attitude, publicly pledging to bring the fight to the traffickers instead of backing down.

"Organized crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing atrocities that we can't and shouldn't tolerate as a government and as a society," he said.

He also oversaw response to disasters, such as flooding and the massive oil pipeline explosion that laid waste to parts of the central city of San Martin Texmelucan last year, killing at least 28 people.

He led the creation of a new national identity card for youths under 18, with modern features including digitalized fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.

Blake Mora's funeral was scheduled for Saturday.

Calderon canceled many of his appearances, including a trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting of world leaders in Hawaii next week.

"Polls have been showing that insecurity now tops poverty as the No. 1 concern among Mexicans, and my sense is an accident like this or an event like this ... is going to increase the senses of uncertainty and insecurity," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Suspicions commonly swirl around the deaths of prominent people in Mexico. It was hard for many to believe that two interior secretaries could die in air accidents in the same administration.

"This is very unfortunate," said Sinaloa Congressman Manuel Clouthier, whose own father, a popular politician in Calderon's National Action Party, died in a still-unexplained highway accident in 1989. "There are many coincidences because now we have two interior ministers (lost) in one presidential term ... who knows if we'll ever really know what happened."

In the crash that killed Mourino, the jet smashed into rush-hour traffic in a posh Mexico City business district, killing all nine on board and seven on the ground. Mexican investigators blamed the Learjet 45 crash on the turbulence from a larger plane flying ahead.

The investigation found that the pilots were slow to follow the control tower's instructions to reduce speed and appeared to be nearly one nautical mile too close behind a Boeing 767-300 on the same flight path to Mexico City's international airport.

Also killed in the crash was former anti-drug prosecutor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who had been the target of at least one previous assassination plot.

The Mexican government provided a detailed account of the crash aimed at quelling widespread rumors that the plane was brought down by powerful and increasingly violent drug cartels.

In 2005, a helicopter crash blamed on poor weather conditions killed Mexico's top police official, public safety secretary Ramon Martin Huerta, who was head of federal police, and seven other people.