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On a recent Thursday afternoon, a mule grazed at the end of a quiet dirt road near the entrance to a gated, walled ranch on the outskirts of Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico.
Notices posted on the doors indicated that the property had been seized and sealed by the Mexican attorney general’s office.
This is where a fratricidal war began within one of the most powerful transnational criminal organizations in the world.
Not far from here, on a side road, heading east towards CuliacanFederal police officers deployed yellow tape on a driveway leading to a house where a man in his 20s was found dead on the floor near his bed. He was shot once in the head and once in the chest.
Later, that same Thursday, December 11, in a cornfield south of Culiacanthe head nurse at a local health center was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head.
As the man’s body was loaded into the back of a forensic van for transport to the morgue, smoke billowed over the horizon. A car was on fire in a neighboring village after an armed attack that left one dead near a municipal office.
The multiple deaths are another round of alleged salvos in the war within the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s largest suppliers of cocaine, methamphetamines and fentanyl, consumed by a crisis at its core.
Nobody has control
This internecine war has sowed fear and violence Culiacan and its surroundings. The sunny Sinaloa capital, with a population of just over a million people, is also known as the birthplace of the Sinaloa cartel.
Control of the city means control of the sprawling criminal organization whose tentacles stretch from South America to Canada to Europe.
The Humaya and Tamazula rivers join to form the Culiacan River near the center of this picturesque town, flanked to the east by the rolling Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. About 50 kilometers to the west, as the crow flies, is the Pacific Ocean.
Apparently, life flows at a regular pace there. Traffic is heavy during the morning commute, shopping malls are full of Christmas shoppers, and local restaurants, known for their Sinaloan flavors, are bustling.
But at any moment, in a flash, violence can erupt in the fibers of the city.
He disappears with the same speed, on the back of a motorcycle or a car traveling at high speed, leaving a tight network of eight bullet holes through the passenger side window of a silver SUV, a body slumped inside, on a Tuesday morning in front of a convenience store.
“It’s something everyday, it happens all the time,” said Miguel Ángel Vega, an independent journalist from Culiacan who often works as a fixer for international journalists who travel here.
There’s an old local saying that even houseflies don’t fly without permission from “narcos,” said Vega, who worked with CBC News on a recent reporting trip to the city.
“Things have changed,” he said.
“People… don’t feel safe anymore.”
Where once the Sinaloa Cartel established some semblance of order in its underworld, now no one is in control.
Murders and disappearances have increased
WARNING: This section of the story contains the image of a dead body.
The Sinaloa Cartel, once led by Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán and the more discreet Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada, split into two factions on July 25, 2024, at the now-abandoned ranch at the end of the alley.
It was here that one of Guzmán’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, kidnapped Zambada, took him on a plane and handed him over to U.S. authorities.
The war between “Los Chapitos”, those loyal to the Guzmán sons, and “Los Mayitos”, those loyal to Zambada, broke out on September 9, 2024, with two violent exchanges of gunfire in the fortress areas held by each side, said Adrien Lopez Ortizdirector of Noroeste Media in Sinaloa, which produces a daily newspaper and broadcasts news on YouTube.
“Our lives literally changed overnight,” he said.
The Noroeste maintained a daily count of murders and disappearances since the start of the wave of violence.
The outlet has recorded more than 2,400 murders and more than 2,900 reports of missing persons in Sinaloa since September 2024. Noroeste bases its figures on official figures and its own reporting.
“Disappearances of people currently constitute the main form of deadly violence in this war,” said Lopez Ortiz.
The current level of violence is on pace to surpass the Sinaloa Cartel’s bloodiest conflict to date, which took place between 2008 and 2011 and left nearly 10,000 dead, he said.
The era falls within the 2006-2012 term of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who launched a so-called “narco war” against organized crime groups across Mexico, triggering a wave of deaths and disappearances.
U.S. foreign policy, through its decades-old war on drugs and the ineffectiveness of Mexican institutions, created the circumstances that made the people of Sinaloa vulnerable when that war broke out, said Lopez Ortiz.
He believes the United States likely played a role in Zambada’s kidnapping — which was interpreted by Zambada loyalists as an act of treason, sparking the conflict — while “Mexican security and justice institutions failed” to protect the population from the violence that followed, he said.
The Mexican federal government has since responded by strengthening its presence in the state by sending thousands of additional troops.
The National Guard, Army, Navy and Security Secretariat as well as the Federal Civil Protection Police are deployed throughout the country. Culiacan and its surrounding region.
These agencies, along with state forces, conduct constant, highly visible patrols throughout the city and region, securing crime scenes, sometimes several times a day, or administering permanent, spontaneous checkpoints.
Major-General. Julices Julián González Calzada, who oversees the National Guard in Sinaloa, said the Secretariat of National Defense, along with Mexico’s national security cabinet, had launched “high-level” operations throughout Sinaloa to pacify the region.
González Calzada said much of the current violence is contained between members of the warring factions.
“These executions all concern members of the same criminal group. (…) They know each other, they know where they live.”
Peace is returning to Culiacán, González Calzada said.
“We are restoring safety to the population so that they can resume their normal activities…I think we are on the right track.”
An evening at the ball game
Life in Culiacán is seeking its own path toward normalcy.
Like a hockey arena in a Canadian prairie town, Tomateros Stadium, named after the Culiacán baseball team, houses the beating heart of the city. Sinaloa, one of Mexico’s major agricultural states, is a major producer of tomatoes.
On good days, before this conflict began, the 22,000-seat stadium was filled to the brim with fans “screaming, crying, drinking beer, doing everything,” said Carlos Castro, 54, of Culiacán.
“Baseball is a passion, baseball is something that runs in the veins of the Sinaloa people,” he said as he watched the local team take a 6-0 lead against the Cañeros, from the northern Sinaloa town of Los Mochis, on Dec. 10.
Although the Tomateros would still lead the Mexican Pacific League in attendance, they no longer sell out games like they used to, he said.
“Unfortunately, at the moment, with the situation we are living in, people are no longer coming [to the games].”
The Sinaloa Cartel’s internal war, which is taking place across the state, is also displacing people from villages and settlements across the hilly countryside.
Maria Guadalupe Rodrígez said she fled her home in El Tepuche, located about 17 kilometers north of Culiacán, last October after armed men appeared in her community.
“They said people had to leave, they wouldn’t do anything, but they wanted [the people] leave,” said Rodríguez, a mother of three who left with only the clothes she could fit in a bag.
Rodríguez, who lives in town, said her village is now completely empty and she doesn’t know when, if ever, she will be able to return.
“Some days it seems like it’s pretty calm, but then the next moment it gets worse,” said Rodríguez, who was attending a Christmas picnic with her young daughter in a Culiacán park organized by volunteers for about 800 families displaced from their communities by the conflict.
“We cannot say whether [we’ll be able to return] the following month or the following month. It’s really difficult.
Within the war, some combatants believe that the conflict will only end when one side – the Chapitos or the Mayitos – is wiped out or absorbed by the other.
‘Of the two factions, only one can remain,’ says Sinaloa Cartel security agent said in an interview.
CBC News is not revealing the individual’s identity or faction for security reasons.
“Right now the situation is hot,” the agent said. “There is no respect for children, no respect for women, no respect for the elderly. There is no respect for anything.”
