The years go by, also for the old bosses of the Sinaloa cartel. Ismael The May Zambada and Aureliano Guzmán, known as El Guano, leaders of their respective factions, are both approaching 80. The DEA said a few weeks ago that Zambada is in poor health. In recent days, Mexican authorities arrested El Guano’s alleged security chief, El Chapo’s brother, in a town in Durango. Some media outlets have speculated that El Guano, for whom the U.S. government is offering a $5 million reward, managed to escape into the mountains.
If it weren’t for the serious accusations hanging over the elder Guzmán, it would be comical to imagine an octogenarian fleeing from a handful of soldiers, walking through the dusty paths of the golden triangle, an outlaw to the end. But there are the accusations. In two separate charges, the US State Department accuses Guano of trafficking heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and marijuana to that country. Guano is one of the most important targets of the Sinaloa organization for the Joe Biden government, second only to his eldest nephew, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán.
Since Joaquin’s third and final arrest El Chapo Guzmán, in 2016 in Sinaloa, and his subsequent extradition north of the Rio Grande, the Pacific cartel is accumulating disputes and problems. The fall of El Chapo was followed by that of his old collaborator, Dámaso López, and his son, who faced Guzmán’s descendants, popularly known as Los Chapitos. The Government captured one of them, Ovidio, in January 2023, who was extradited months later. Ovidio’s fall was followed by the arrest of El Nini, head of security for Los Chapitos, news about Zambada’s poor health, and the arrest of R8, El Guano’s lieutenant, this week.
Such a series of calamities should impose obstacles on the Sinaloa cartel’s production and distribution chain, a matter that is not at all clear. In its latest report on the threat of drug trafficking, released this year, the DEA points out that the Sinaloa cartel continues to be one of the most violent criminal groups and the one that traffics the largest quantity of different drugs in the world. In any case, the sentences in the previous paragraph only show the surface of equally or more serious problems. A series of internal skirmishes and battles have threatened the unity of the organization for more than eight years. Los Chapitos, led by Iván Archivaldo, are trying to expand their domain and control. The old bosses, for their part, are trying to maintain it.
“Aureliano Guzmán always considered himself the successor of El Chapo, above his sons,” says Eduardo Guerrero, director of Lantia Consultores, a company that monitors the evolution of crime in Mexico. “It is a rivalry that has been going on for a long time, approximately since the arrest of El Chapo, but it has intensified due to various incidents, such as confrontations, conflicts over places, arrests, etc. One incident that distanced Los Zambada from Los Guzmán was the capture of El Ratón, for example,” Guerrero says, referring to Ovidio Guzmán.
It is not clear, however, what role El Guano plays, whether he is closer to one faction or another, or if, on the contrary, they are all distant from each other right now. If it is true that El Chapo’s brother was in Tamazula, in the State of Durango, where R8 was arrested, logic points to a distancing from the Chapitos, strong in Culiacán. Guerrero argues that “the Guanos, although members of the Sinaloa cartel, are rivals in internal conflicts and right now they are at odds with Los Zambada and El Chapo’s sons.”
In the criminal world, betrayal is sometimes less important than the perception of being betrayed. Given the impossibility of knowing who ordered what murder, criminals act on intuition. This is what happened in mid-2015, when gunmen killed the half-brother of El Chapo and El Guano, Ernesto Guzmán, in a town called Badiraguato, in the mountains of Sinaloa, the birthplace of the clan. The local press reported at the time that El Guano had ordered the murder, a situation that has not been confirmed.
That murder provoked a reaction from the criminal group with which the half-brother, heir to the Beltrán Leyva family, an old ally of El Chapo and then a bitter enemy, allegedly worked. Between December 2015 and the following June, armed commandos from this group arrived in Badiraguato, supposedly looking for El Guano. They did not find him, but they left a trail of dead in their wake. This dispute intersected with the escape of El Chapo, who had escaped from prison in July 2015 and was on the run, and with the first hostilities between Los Chapitos and Dámaso López’s group.
The rest is history. El Chapo was arrested in Los Mochis in January 2016 and was later extradited. The same happened with López, whose son turned himself in to the United States authorities. The doubts over the years point to the capabilities and inertia of each of the structures that orbit under the Sinaloa umbrella. And the friction between them. In its last report on the threat of drug trafficking, the DEA indicated that Los Chapitos and Los Zambadas were at war, but said nothing about El Guano, which it put on the same level as the other two groups.
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