Faced members of the most feared Fentanyl Cartel in the world, staggering for the internal war and the repression of Mexico and the United States, have forged a desperate alliance with a rival band, threatening to transform the criminal underworld into tens of countries.
The Sinaloa Cartel has directed for years a global empire built through alliances with criminal groups and affiliates from the American continent to New Zealand, harvesting millions of dollars of drug smuggling such as fentanyl at a devastating cost, especially in the United States.
But the cartel has been divided by violence between two main factions for months, since Mexico, pressed by Donald Trump‘s government, has acted aggressively against him.
In that agitation, a faction of the cartel led by the children of the drug trafficker known as El Chapo has allied with an old and powerful adversary, the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, according to four people familiar with the matter. The risky movement of the children of El Chapo could end up turning the Jalisco cartel into the largest drug dealer in the world, a change that could redraw alliances and power structures in the international drug markets, according to analysts.
“It is as if the east coast of the United States separated during the Cold War and held the hand to the Soviet Union,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert in non-state armed groups of Brookings Institution. “This has global implications on how the conflict will develop and how criminal markets will be reorganized.”
Taking advantage of the financial muscle, the experience in Fentanil and the international scope of the children of El Chapo could reinforce the global ambitions of the Jalisco cartel and help to cement their domain in Mexico, said Eduardo Guerrero, security analyst.
Guerrero compared it to incorporate the soccer team to Lionel Messi. He added that combining both forces will mean having a huge capacity for production worldwide.
But this remodeling of the criminal map of Mexico triggers several important regional wars among rival groups, he added.
Exhausting resources and suffering casualties, the children of Chapo, called Los Chapitos, have asked the Jalisco cartel for help in recent months, giving territory in exchange for money and weapons.
The Alliance, described by two high -level operations of the Sinaloa Cartel and two people in the United States with knowledge of the matter, supposes in itself a radical change. The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels had fought for years a bloody territorial war throughout Mexico, terrifying millions of people in the process.
The turn in the war on drugs highlighted not only the treacherous nature of the trade of the cartels, but also how traffickers are adapting to the aggressive pressure of the Trump government against them. The United States has intended intensely to Mexico to stop the fentanyl flow, and those efforts, combined with the internal struggles of the cartels, have brought together two criminal adversaries.
Mexico has acted aggressively against fentanyl traffic in recent months, deploying thousands of soldiers in the native state of the Sinaloa Cartel. The Trump government has praised its own efforts, stating that the seizures on the border between the United States and Mexico have decreased by 30 percent.
Cartel -affiliated operations were endangered when talking to The New York Times and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
A high -ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel said the Chapitos needed funds desperately, staggering for the financial losses caused by the interruption of fentanyl production and the surprising deaths in their ranks.
The cartel member said that the Chapitos could no longer bear the pressure that was increasing, taking into account the millions they spend daily in the war: combatants, weapons and vehicles.
The war inside the Sinaloa cartel arose from a fracture between two main groups. To those who follow the children of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the leader of Sinaloa known as El Chapo, the Chapitos are usually called, as their leaders. His rivals follow Ismael Zambada García, another founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, who is known as May.
An important sign of the weak position of the Chapitos is that they would give in territory in exchange for support from the Jalisco cartel. An exchange thus seriously weakens the Sinaloa cartel, because the territory is crucial to ensure traffic routes.
The alliance took months to materialize, since both parties worked to profile the details, sometimes gathering in neutral areas outside their dispute territories, and even outside the country, according to the two operations of the cartel.
A high -level agent compared it to a negotiation between China and the United States, in which both parties do not want to go to the foreign territory and, therefore, take time to determine where the meetings and those who will attend will be held.
The decline of the Sinaloa cartel has also been accelerated by a recent concerted effort of the Mexican government to end it, especially in the state of Sinaloa. Hundreds of additional Mexican soldiers and laboratories, arrests and drug seizures appear in the headlines every week have been sent there.
But so far, the Sinaloa cartel has received excessive attention. The rest of Mexico has not seen the same government effort, and the cartel operations said they had transferred most of the fentanyl production to other states to avoid being detected.
“It is well to dismantle these groups, but it is almost impossible to achieve a sustained interruption of drug flows,” said John Creamer, a retired American diplomat that served in US embassies. Uu. In all of Latin America, more recently in Mexico.
“You can never nail a stake in the heart of an entire cartel,” he said. “You can disturb them and create chaos, but drug trafficking always recovers. That is what makes the war on drugs so frustrating.”
The current internal struggles began when Joaquín Guzmán López, one of the Chapitos, betrayed Zambada, his father’s partner for a long time. Last summer, the younger Guzman kidnapped Zambada and transferred him by plane through the border to put him in custody of US federal agents.
The struggle for the power that was triggered has left more than 1300 dead and more than 1500 missing in the state of Sinaloa, according to official data and local search groups, and violence has not yielded.
Three people were brutally killed this month in a single afternoon in separate events in Culiacán, the state capital. A man was found lying on the outskirts of the city, with bandados, hands tied behind his back and with torture signs.
The next day, a father and his son suffered an ambush while driving on a very busy street. The father died at the scene and the son was seriously injured; His car was achieved by at least 50 large -caliber projectiles.
A fruit seller was installed with enthusiasm in the crime scene, and the soldiers rowed to ask for lemonade and other drinks under the scorching sun.
While a forensic team took out the body of the driver’s seat and put it in a bodies bag, his nearby family, who sobb and hugged himself, threw guttural screams.
The seller told a journalist that it was his first good business in months. So many people had fled Culiacán because of the violence that the streets were empty of customers.
But he asked not to reveal his name due to violence, he said that his hands were shaking and that he does not like to sell in those circumstances.
