A Drug Cartel Civil War Leads to a Surprising Alliance

There is civil war taking place within the Sinaloa drug cartel and the body count is piling up. This story was published today.

Twenty bodies, several of them decapitated, were found on a highway bridge in a part of Mexico where factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel are fighting each other, authorities said Monday.

Four headless corpses were found by the roadside while 16 bodies were discovered inside an abandoned vehicle, the Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office said.

Five human heads were found inside a bag at the scene.

The killers left a note identifying themselves as one of the factions in the ongoing war but authorities didn’t say which side it was. The fighting has been going on for about a year, even since one of El Chapo’s sons betrayed a co-founder of the cartel last July.

Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada is one of the most notorious names in drug war history, synonymous with the fearsome power and corrosive influence of the most important drug cartel in the world.

The last of an original generation of drug cartel leaders, he created the Sinaloa Cartel alongside Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman from the remnants of the Guadalajara Cartel after it collapsed in 1989…

He was lured to the US as part of an elaborate sting operation, masterminded by the son of his former partner, El Chapo. Joaquin Guzman Lopez, one of the heirs to El Chapo’s operation, was arrested alongside Zambada having led him to believe he was travelling to northern Mexico to look at prospective properties for clandestine airstrips.

El Chapo is serving a life sentence in a US prison. One of his sons tricked his old partner, ‘El Mayo’ into getting on a plane which landed in El Paso. They were both arrested but this set off a divide between those loyal to El Chapo’s sons and those loyal to El Mayo. One side or the other is responsible for all the bodies found this week.

But keeping a civil war going is expensive and the cartel hasn’t been making as much money thanks to a crack down by the Trump administration and the Mexican authorities. That has led the sons of El Chapo to reach out to their former rivals in another cartel for help.

…a faction of the cartel led by sons of the drug lord known as El Chapo have allied with an old and powerful adversary, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, according to four people familiar with the matter. The risky move by El Chapo’s sons could ultimately turn the Jalisco cartel into the world’s biggest drug trafficker — a shift that could potentially redraw alliances and power structures across international drug markets, analysts say….

The alliance, described by two high-level operatives of the Sinaloa Cartel and two people in the United States with knowledge of the matter, is itself a sea change. The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels had waged a bloody, yearslong turf war across Mexico, terrorizing millions of people in the process…

One high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel said Los Chapitos were in desperate need of funds, reeling from financial losses caused by the disruption to fentanyl production and staggering deaths within their ranks.

“Los Chapitos were gasping for air, they couldn’t take the pressure anymore,” he said. “Imagine how many millions you burn through in a war every day: the fighters, the weapons, the vehicles. The pressure mounted little by little.”

It’s too early to tell what the outcome of this will be but one possibility is that the Sinaloa cartel eventually disappears.

Regardless of which faction comes out on top, she added, the war is likely to mean the end of the Sinaloa Cartel as we know it.

“The question is whether there will be anything left of the cartel, or of the Mayo faction, or will it be defeated, fragmented and shattered by C.J.N.G.,” she said.

So the Trump administration is having a big impact on the cartels. No doubt they will eventually reorganize and push back once the ongoing internal war is settled.