Last Christmas, the Sinaloa Cartel made a show of sending branded gifts to children’s hospitals. This year, a bloody war between rival factions of the notorious Mexican drug mafia has cast a shadow over the holiday, leaving Culiacán’s Christmas market nearly empty and the city quiet at night.
Sinaloa has always had a complex relationship with its narcos, who portray themselves as generous bandits with a code of conduct. But as the war enters a fourth month, with more than a thousand dead or disappeared, the myth of the good narco is beginning to fade.
The conflict was sparked by the arrest of two of Mexico’s most powerful crime bosses in El Paso, Texas. Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who founded the Sinaloa Cartel with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was arrested along with one of Guzmán’s sons after a small plane landed in the US.
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El Mayo accused El Chapo’s son of betraying him and extraditing him to US authorities. Now one faction led by El Mayo’s son is waging war against another, led by El Chapo’s two sons, who remain free in Mexico.
The unpredictable and sometimes spectacular violence has brought normal life to a standstill and has given rise to reflection in Sinaloa about the relationship with the narcos.
One argument that can be heard in Culiacán is that the old guard – figures like El Chapo and El Mayo – had rules: they provided alms, certain services, a kind of law. And they left the innocent out.
But El Chapo and El Mayo are now in American prisons. And their sons – a new generation of narcos who grew up wealthy – are different.
Local residents point to October 17, 2019 as the moment when this became clear.
When Mexican authorities arrested Ovidio Guzmán, one of El Chapo’s sons, his sicarios seized the city for 24 hours, shelled the city with security forces and killed three civilians. The government released Guzmán within hours.
“The unwritten pact not to touch the civilians, the innocent, was shattered,” said Miguel Calderón, coordinator of the State Council for Public Security, an NGO.
The prolonged intensity of the current war has confirmed this.
Along the railway lines in Culiacán, where hundreds of displaced families live in makeshift huts, one man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he always heard his parents and grandparents talk about the old guard with respect.
“El Chapo and El Mayo always said: women and children, innocent people – they should not be touched. But now they are forcibly recruiting people who don’t even know how to use a gun, even children.”
“There used to be more respect for the lives of ordinary people,” he said bitterly but resignedly. “Now they just want to win their war, no matter what.”
In another neighborhood, where a block was cordoned off as soldiers prepared to raid a safe house, a group of women said some boys hung out there smoking pot but disappeared 10 days ago.
The women – all mothers – started talking about the sons of friends and relatives who had been found dead.
“There’s no such thing as a good narco,” one of them interjected, adding that her son was addicted to drugs. “How can you give me alms if you poison my child?”
“They should go to the countryside, kill each other there and leave us alone,” she said, as the others murmured their agreement.
“Today I feel anger, a demand that this time it be made clear once and for all that public enemy number 1 is crime,” Calderón said.
“It wasn’t so clear before,” he added. “El Chapo would deliver food parcels at Christmas, or El Mayo would renovate a school and then they would throw a party. It was a kind of marketing to get close to the community. After that, I don’t think it will be that easy.”
Yet the new generation has not given up yet. In addition to the bloodshed, there is a parallel propaganda war to claim the mantle of the good narco.
Near the Christmas market, a man said that a small plane flew overhead dropping leaflets, and that the El Mayo faction had come by to hand out business cards with a number and tell them to call if anyone tried to call them to extort.
He started reminiscing about the good old days, before extortion was such a thing, and then laughed.
“There’s no way I’m actually going to call the number.”
