Faces of the Sinaloa Cartel: Investigating the Mexico region ruled by the world's most powerful drug
Faces of the Sinaloa Cartel: Investigating the Mexico region ruled by the world’s most powerful drug lords
EXCLUSIVE: In the first part of Independent en Español’s special investigation ‘Narcomundo’, José Luis Montenegro travels to the Mexican state of Sinaloa to see how people’s daily lives are gripped by the cartel
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In northwestern Mexico lies a beast with a thousand heads. At times, calm; sometimes angry; but if confronted by mistake, it destroys everything in its path. It’s lethal. It’s the Sinaloa Cartel. An organisation that despite the arrests and murders of its main leaders, is still in force and is perhaps the most powerful criminal structure in the underworld. Independent en Español traveled to Culiacán to shed light in a territory that lives under the tyranny of the criminal enterprise led, to a greater extent, by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and some of the children of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Among them, Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús and Ovidio Guzmán López. Independent en Español spoke with different protagonists of the political and public life of the Aztec land, and entered the most remote places of a city where no one kills, no one rapes, no one steals; where nobody does anything without the knowledge of “those above”. They have the power. They are in control.
“Apparently, nothing is going on here,” says the taxi driver as he cautiously enters Avenida de los Insurgentes, stops at Paseo Niños Héroes before reaching the University Stadium and adding: “The best thing to do is to wait and not honk your horn.” The traffic light stays green and no driver flinches. "You don’t know who’s coming in front of you," he says. This is how you live in the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa. In a tense calm. Organised crime has injected a kind of ‘civility of fear’ into the so-called “culichis”.
Contrary to its reputation, Culiacán is not a noisy or overwhelming city; at least not during the day. As the sun rises and the thermometer reads 31° C, motorists do not exceed the speed limit, young people listen to regional Mexican music but do not dare to play a “narcocorrido” on their motorcycle speakers; the waiters ask the necessary questions and no more, while street vendors do not insistently impose on potential customers. The State Police and even the National Guard patrol the area, but at night they all disappear. And the tense calm returns.
Time moves quickly in the capital and the Sinaloa Cartel knows this. Commanded largely by the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the Sinaloa Cartel is the only organization in the state that, for decades, has co-opted communities, authorities and a large part of the Sinaloa mountains to carry out one of the most thriving businesses in the underworld: drug trafficking. The city of Culiacán serves to measure the pulse of what is happening in other municipalities of the state, since it has the highest crime rate.
And not only that. In recent years, a strange stillness prevails. It is “la pax narca” or “the peace of the tombs”. A way of giving in to organised crime without the null application of the power of the State; an “unwritten pact” between the state or federal government and the drug barons, which ends up subcontracting the fate of citizens to the dynamics and criminal interests of “Los Chapitos”, “Los Ninis”, “Los Minions”, “Los Ántrax”, “Los Mayitos”, “Los Guanitos” and other groups and cells, all belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel and its main leaders.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sinaloa-cartel-el-chapo-mexico-b2055649.html