At around two in the morning on Monday, November 25 – just hours after my arrival in the city of Culiacan in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, home of the eponymous drug cartel – I was awakened by gunfire in the street that lasted approximately 20 minutes.
Later in the day, media reports of the night’s casualties began rolling in. According to the newspaper El Pais, at least seven people had been killed in various shootouts across Culiacan and two had been disappeared. A house had been set on fire, and 80 security cameras had been shot up, along with an assortment of shops, restaurants, and homes.
The following day, November 26, five bodies bearing signs of torture were dumped outside the faculty of agriculture of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. Two more corpses then materialised elsewhere in the city, the latest victims of an internecine cartel war that has been ravaging this Mexican state since September 9. Culiacan is the epicentre of the conflict that, as of November 28, had killed at least 425 people statewide and disappeared more than 500.
This particular spate of violence was triggered by the capture in July of Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was subsequently hauled off to a court in none other than New York City to face trial. Never mind that the United States itself has been a key participant in the international drug trade since forever – or that the simultaneous US demand for and criminalisation of drugs is what makes their trafficking so lucrative, thereby enabling cartels.
In theory, then, the US should be categorically ineligible to inflict “justice” on El Mayo or anyone else from the narco-world. But the US is an old pro at trafficking in hypocrisy – not to mention fuelling violence and brutality in Mexico, as in the case of the US-backed “war on drugs” which quickly proved to be more of a war on people. As the US Council on Foreign Relations noted in August, shortly after El Mayo’s detention, Mexico “has seen more than 431,000 homicides since 2006, when the government declared war on the cartels” with US support.
Predictably, El Mayo’s arrest kicked off a power struggle within the Sinaloa cartel, pitting his followers against “Los Chapitos,” the sons of the mythical cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is presently serving a life sentence in the US state of Colorado. Just as predictably, US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar has managed to put a positive spin on the bloody panorama, stating: “We should be celebrating what happened in Sinaloa” – and so what if decapitated heads are turning up in ice coolers and folks are often too afraid to leave their homes.
I had not visited Culiacan since 2021, and the change this time around was palpable. Streets are empty after dark, shops and restaurants close early, classes are intermittently suspended, and everyone keeps a running tally of the cartel war victims,