On October 17, estimable border reporter Ali Bradley at NewsNation revealed that an alert has been sent to Border Patrol’s El Paso sector stating that members of the Sinaloa cartel have been given the green light from their bosses to shoot at agents. If true, it marks a new and vicious era in the decades-long violence spurred by the illegal drug trade at the Southwest border.
Sinaloa Cartel. Of all the drug cartels operating in Mexico, Sinaloa is the most well established. It has its roots in small-scale, family-run smuggling operations in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, which InSight Crime explains “has long been a center for the cultivation and smuggling of marijuana and heroin poppy in Mexico”.
From cultivation and smuggling, those groups quickly expanded as they started running Colombian cocaine and shipborne methamphetamine through Central America and into the United States. By 2012, Sinaloa was estimated to control somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the Mexican drug trade, reaping profits of up to $3 billion annually.
The figure most commonly associated with Sinaloa is Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, better known by his professional name, “El Chapo”. As ICE explained when he was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 30 years:
From the mid-1980s until his arrest in Mexico in 1993, Guzman Loera was a mid-level operative of the Sinaloa Cartel, earning a name for himself and the nickname “El Rapido” for how quickly he transported drugs from Mexico to the United States for the Colombian cartels. After he escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by hiding in a laundry cart, Guzman Loera formed an alliance with fugitive co-defendant Ismael Zambada Garcia and, together, they became the preeminent leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzman Loera enforced his will and maintained control of his drug empire through an army of lethal “sicarios” or hitmen and a sophisticated communications network.
Curiously, for a cartel capo whose name once appeared on the Forbes billionaire list, that conviction only came after a couple of “rearrests”, the first of which was in February 2014 at what the U.S. Justice Department described as “a modest resort hotel in Mazatlan, Sinaloa”.
El Chapo didn’t stay in custody for long, escaping in July 2015 from Altiplano federal maximum security prison in Mexico by crawling through a hole in a shower block and then passing through “a lighted and ventilated tunnel nearly a mile long that stretched from the prison to a half-built house”.
Mexican authorities caught up with him again, this time at a house in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, in January 2016. A gunbattle ensued, and El Chapo again scampered through a tunnel to escape. After stealing a car to evade the police, he was finally apprehended near the town of Juan José Ríos.
If you want to send Guzman Loera a card, mail it to his current home, U.S. Penitentiary Florence in Colorado, aka: “Supermax”. He shares the address with any number of well-known criminals.
The Cartel Fractures Between “El Mayo” and the “Chapitos”. As InsightCrime notes, Sinaloa doesn’t have a strict hierarchical structure, per se. Rather: “It is a network of various cells that cooperate with each other, while the cartel’s operations abroad, and even within Mexico, are generally outsourced to local partners.”
The outlet continues:
Currently, the Sinaloa Cartel has at least two leadership structures. The first is commanded by loyalists of [“Ismael Zambada García, alias ‘El Mayo’”], who was arrested in July 2024 in the United States. The other is made up of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, Ovidio Guzmán López, Iván Archivaldo, and Jesús Alfredo, known collectively as “Chapitos.”
El Mayo and Joaquin Guzmán López were taken into U.S. custody together in July, after they flew from Mexico to El Paso together in a small plane. There are suspicions Joaquin either kidnapped or lured El Mayo to go along for the ride, but in any event the latter appeared in federal court in New York last Friday to answer drug-trafficking charges, while the former is in Chicago answering charges of his own.
Did I mention the part where Mexican authorities have reportedly issued a warrant for Joaquin’s arrest, “claiming he committed treason by kidnapping Mexican citizen El Mayo”?
Each group has its own “mini armies”, and since that arrest they have been at each other’s throats as rivals attempt to fill the power vacuum. According to El Pais International:
The fracture has sown chaos in Culiacán — the capital of [Sinaloa] state in the northwest of Mexico — and in several surrounding communities, leaving a trail of murders, forced disappearances, blockades by drug traffickers and clashes between criminal groups and the Armed Forces. Caught in the crossfire, the population has sunk into fear and uncertainty, despite the government’s insistence that “everything is calm” and under control.
The Battle Spills Over to the U.S. Border. That internecine battle seemingly is no longer limited to Sinaloa. As Bradley explains, the rival factions are fighting for control of plazas on the Mexican side of the border, because those plazas are “the corridors to enter the United States, whether California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas”.
Apparently, contractors working on a ranch on the U.S. side claimed they were shot at from across the border. “The workers saw several individuals in Mexico where the shots came from, per the [Border Patrol] memo, but could not determine how many people were out there.”
That, and likely some intelligence gleaned from both sides of the Southwest border, was enough to prompt Border Patrol to issue its alert memo.
If all of this is true — and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t — it marks a new and troubling chapter in a lengthy war.
For years, cartel heads curbed random violence among and between their members so as not to draw attention from authorities, in either the United States or Mexico.
Despite that internal policing, Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012, declared war on the cartels, and after deploying tens of thousands of troops managed to kill or capture 25 of the 37 known cartel kingpins.
Critics complained that this crackdown just fractioned the groups, which led to less disciplined leadership at the helm of the respective criminal organizations.
Calderon’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, focused more on reducing the violence than on imprisoning the leaders of the groups. That worked for a while, but by the end of Peña Nieto’s term in 2018, “the number of homicides had risen to the highest level in modern Mexican history”.
Next up was Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), and he offered a novel “hugs not bullets” strategy that eased up on enforcement while focusing on the “socioeconomic drivers of organized crime by creating job opportunities”.
As The Wall Street Journal explained in February: “Arrests by Mexico’s national guard, created under López Obrador to replace federal police, fell to 2,800 in 2022 from 21,700 in 2018, according to the national statistics agency.”
Let’s just say that didn’t work out so well, either, at least not according to the Journal, given that more than 200 criminal gangs are currently engaged in turf wars in Mexico, “compared with 76 in 2010”.
Still, up to this latest report at least, the U.S. side of the border was largely a no-go zone for cartel violence. It’s one thing to risk the ire of Mexican authorities, but the United States comes with a law-enforcement system and an arsenal that even the most ardent gangster doesn’t want to test.
NewsNation quoted GOP presidential candidate (and former president) Donald Trump, who evidenced little trepidation about using that hardware against the cartels: “We need a military operation. These people have become military. ... They’re very rich, have a lot of money. They’re among the richest people, probably in the world.”
Needless to say, that could likely have some diplomatic ramifications, but AMLO’s successor and protege, newly inaugurated Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, doesn’t have any real plans to diverge from her mentor’s “hugs not bullets” approach at this point.
If Trump wins, perhaps he can convince the new Mexican president to rein in the cartels threatening her country’s security, and apparently ours now as well. But if cartel bullets start claiming American lives on this side of the border and Trump’s in charge, the United States likely will respond with lead, not hugs.