Vortex of Evil: Gangs and Narcos in Tapachula, Mexico

 

Sitting on a rock in a street on the outskirts of Tapachula, on Mexico’s southern border, Poison and Malandro share a cigarette as they reminisce. They met just two weeks before but have been inseparable since. Like countless other migrants who’ve settled in Tapachula, they were part of the gang wars in Central America before fleeing to Mexico.

This friendship could never have formed if they had met in El Salvador, where Poison is from, or Honduras, where Malandro grew up. In those places, they would have likely taken out a pistol, a machete, or a knife, and drawn blood.

Both of them are members of Central America’s infamous street gangs, which have waged one of Latin America’s longest running gang wars. Poison is with the MS13, and Malandro is part of the Barrio 18. Both arrived in Tapachula after fleeing their countries.

Now, every night, they go out to smoke together on the same rock in front of the migrant shelter where they live. They talk of old times in their neighborhoods, where they decided who could enter and who could not; who paid extortion and who did not; who lived and who died.

But since they arrived here in February 2023, they both live under the control of something much more powerful than anything their gangs can impose.

Poison and Malandro now live in a neighborhood where it is clear who is in charge: “Los Señores,” they explain, using the euphemism, which, roughly translated, means “The Bosses.”

The bosses are the drug traffickers, members of the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG).

Tapachula has a complex criminal landscape. And while street gangs like the MS13 and Barrio 18 once had a strong influence over extortion, street-level drug sales, and migrant smuggling here, these gangs are now pawns in a larger game.

If the border city’s role as a migration hub once helped sustain those street gangs, it is now sustaining two of Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking groups and contributing to an ongoing conflict between them.

RTWT