Sinaloa cartel battle intensifies in northern Mexico after arrest of 2 drug lords in July

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The killings of about a dozen people in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa appear to be linked to infighting within the country’s largest drug cartel, confirming fears of repercussions following the July 25 arrest of two of the cartel’s top leaders.

Last month, Joaquín Guzmán López, a capo of a faction of the Sinaloa cartel — the Chapitos, or “Little Chapos,” the sons of imprisoned cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán — turned himself in to U.S. authorities. However, he allegedly kidnapped the leader of the rival faction, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, forcing him onto the same flight to El Paso and turning him in.

Mexican authorities are caught in the middle of the coming storm: They were not involved in the July 25 arrest, but they do not want to take the opportunity to crack down on the Sinaloa cartel. The cartel is falling apart, and what is at stake is who will take over Zambada’s faction now that he is in a U.S. prison.

To paraphrase a famous Mexican corrido song, “Smuggling and betrayal,” the combination of the two always leads to murder.

Analysts say the government is reluctant to get involved because both sides in the Sinaloa cartel’s internal conflict have damaging information about officials that they could release at any time. So they have limited themselves to increasingly desperate appeals for both sides not to fight among themselves.

On Monday, Sinaloa state Governor Rubén Rocha acknowledged that four killings on Friday and six killings on Saturday were linked to the dispute between warring factions of the cartel.

“These are related to the drug cartels … and they can be linked to the situation that arose after the arrests of July 25,” Governor Rocha said. “What I want is peace, and I have to ask for it from whoever, from the violent.”

That is in line with an earlier statement by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who acknowledged that two other killings were linked to the conflict.

“We don’t want the situation in Sinaloa to deteriorate,” López Obrador said. “It has remained stable in terms of violence. That doesn’t mean there was no violence, but there was no confrontation, no fighting between groups.”

That kind of peace — where drug cartels are allowed to smuggle, deal and extort, but not cause too much violence — is something the president has praised in the past. Eradicating the cartels, he says, is a policy that has been imposed on Mexico by the United States in the past, and one he disagrees with.

But Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said authorities are reluctant to intervene for another reason: Zambada, the jailed drug lord, appears willing to use the damaging insider knowledge he has about corrupt Mexican politicians to pressure them.

Zambada has already shown he is willing to do so. In a letter from prison, Zambada gave a version of the murder of Hector Cuén—a political rival of Governor Rocha who was killed the same day Zambada was kidnapped—and blamed it on the Chapitos faction.

Rocha and prosecutors claimed that Cuén was killed in a random, unrelated gas station robbery, and released security camera footage confirming that. But federal prosecutors later said the governor’s version was inaccurate and likely fake.

Zambada apparently has more information he can release if tempers flare in Sinaloa and his sons can’t take over his part of the business: the names of politicians, police officers and military personnel he has bribed.

“It seems to me that Mayo Zambada’s media strategy is aimed at ensuring an orderly transition in the organization that he commands,” Saucedo said. “With these (media) hand grenades, these public opinion bombs, Zambada is trying to ensure that federal authorities do not try to interfere with the leadership succession in his organization.”

If that is the goal – keeping things in order in Sinaloa so that leadership of the drug sector can be passed from one generation to the next and politicians are not publicly exposed for collaborating with drug cartels – then the latest killings do not bode well for that strategy.

At least two of the men killed last week – tortured, shot and found with their heads wrapped in duct tape – were close associates of Zambada.

But as usual, it is difficult to determine which murder or violent act was committed by which cartel faction, and why.

For example, someone began methodically destroying the lavish family tomb of a prominent Sinaloa cartel clan a few days after the arrests of the two capos on July 25. They used bulldozers and excavators to break open the mausoleum’s walls and excavate the crypts.

The clan whose grandfather and uncle’s bodies lie in the grave (both bodies were stolen) had previously had violent conflicts with both the Chapitos and Zambada factions.

If there is one obvious casualty that needs to be buried in the conflict, it is the idea that the Sinaloa cartel was once a monolithic, hierarchical gang with a single leader at the top. As the War of the Luxurious Tombs in Culiacán, the state capital, shows, the cartel has always been a loose alliance of drug-trafficking clans trying to outdo each other, even in death.