There was a time, the story goes, when if a local collided with a drug trafficker’s car on the streets of Culiacán — a bastion of the infamous Sinaloa cartel — the narco was likely to hop out to check that everything was ok.
“They’d say: ‘If you have any problems call this doctor and I’ll pay,'” says journalist Javier Valdez, who specializes in delving into the entrails of drug trafficking culture in Sinaloa. “Not anymore. Now they’ll get out of the car with a pistol. Not only will they not pay you; they’ll beat you, threaten you, or kill you.”
Such tales of shifting mafia etiquette are part of the legend of the underworld in Sinaloa but, close observers like Valdez say, there is also truth to the idea that the newer generations rising up within the Sinaloa drug trafficking scene are more violent and impulsive. And none more so than the one emerging to take control right now.
‘There’s no reason to think that things will get better. They’ll either stay the same or get worse.’
Many in Sinaloa today fear that the recapture in January of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel’s highest profile leader and one of the last of its so-called elder statesmen, could accelerate this transition to rule by the so-called narcojuniors.
Few in Culiacán dispute Chapo’s status as a ruthless and bloodthirsty operator, but many credit his generation of Sinaloa traffickers with ensuring the cartel is still considered less wholeheartedly exploitative and sadistic than some other Mexican groups, such as the Knights Templar or the Zetas. While the point is often overstated, the Sinaloa cartel leadership has traditionally limited the expansion of side-rackets, such as extortion and kidnapping, at least on its home turf.
“The government lauds Chapo’s arrest as if it were the end of drug trafficking or the end of the Sinaloa cartel,” says Valdez, who writes for the Sinaloa investigative weekly Rio Doceand whose most recent book is titled Los Morros del Narco, or Narco Youth. “But there’s no reason to think things will get better. They’ll either stay the same, or get worse.”
At first glance, Culiacán appears little different from any other mid-size Mexican city, yet it is dotted with reminders of its status as the bastion of what is still the nation’s most powerful criminal organization. The hills on the edge of the city are lined with opulent mansions, while a few abandoned houses riddled with dozens of bullet holes stand as a reminder of what happens when all is not well within the cartel.
Many of those holes date from a terrible battle between Chapo and his former allies from the Beltrán Leyva organization that, at the time, residents of Culiacán described as a civil war. It led to a sharp spike in the level of violence across the state from 2008 to 2010, as well as spin off conflicts in other parts of the country where the two groups held sway. Chapo won that war and the Beltrán Leyva group fell apart.
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