Mexico City.- The murders of a dozen people in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa appear to be linked to a fight within the drug cartel that dominates the state, confirming fears of reprisals following the arrest of two leaders of the organization on July 25.
Joaquin Guzman Lopez, the head of a Sinaloa Cartel faction known as “Los Chapitos” made up of the sons of jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, surrendered to U.S. authorities last month. But he allegedly kidnapped the rival faction’s leader, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, taking him against his will on the same flight to El Paso to hand him over.
Mexican authorities have been caught in the middle of the storm: They had no role in the July 25 capture, but they are not willing to seize the opportunity to take action against the Sinaloa Cartel. The criminal group is fragmenting, and at stake is who will take the reins of Zambada’s faction now that he is detained in the United States.
Paraphrasing a well-known Mexican corrido, “betrayal and smuggling are unshared things.”
Analysts say the government does not want to get involved because both sides in the conflict have damaging information about government officials that they could reveal at any time. As a result, they have limited themselves to making increasingly desperate appeals to both sides to keep the peace.
On Monday, Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha acknowledged that four murders on Friday and six on Saturday were related to the dispute between cartel factions.
They are related to “organized crime organizations… to the environment that is occurring after what happened on July 25 when the capture took place,” said Rocha. “I want peace… and we must ask for it from whoever it may be, from the violent ones themselves.”
It was a statement similar to one made hours earlier by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who acknowledged that two other murders were related to the dispute.
“We hope that the situation in Sinaloa does not get worse,” said López Obrador. “It had remained very stable in terms of violence. This does not mean that there were no homicides, but there was no confrontation, there has been no confrontation between groups.”
That kind of peace — in which drug cartels go about their business of smuggling, distribution and extortion, but without causing too much violence — is something the president has praised in the past. Cracking down on cartels, he says, is a policy imposed on Mexico in the past by the United States, and it is something he does not agree with.
But Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said authorities appear reluctant to intervene for another reason: Zambada, the drug lord arrested in the United States, appears willing to use damaging information he has on corrupt Mexican politicians to pressure them.
Zambada has already made it clear that he is willing to do so. In a letter sent from prison, Zambada offered a version of the murder of Hector Cuen — a political rival of Governor Rocha who was killed the same day Zambada was kidnapped — and attributed it to “Los Chapitos.”
Rocha and state prosecutors claimed Cuén had died during a robbery at a gas station and released security camera footage they said supported that account. But federal prosecutors later said the governor’s story did not add up and was likely false.
Zambada apparently has more information that he can reveal if the situation becomes more tense in Sinaloa, and if his sons are prevented from taking over their part of the business: the names of politicians, police officers and military personnel he has bribed.
“It seems to me that this media strategy by ‘El Mayo’ Zambada is aimed, in my opinion, at ensuring an orderly handover in the organization he commands,” said Saucedo. “With all these hand grenades, these bombs that ‘El Mayo’ Zambada can drop in public opinion, he ensures that the federal government does not try to influence the succession within his organization.”
If that is the goal — to keep things in order in Sinaloa so that leadership can be passed down through the generations and politicians are not publicly exposed for cooperating with the cartels — then these recent murders do not bode well for that strategy.
At least two of the men killed last week — tortured, shot and found with their heads wrapped in duct tape — were close associates of Zambada.
But as is often the case, it is difficult to determine which murder or act of violence was committed by which cartel faction and why.
For example, someone began methodically destroying the lavish family tomb of a prominent Sinaloa Cartel clan a couple of days after the two kingpins were arrested on July 25. They used bulldozers and backhoes to break through the mausoleum walls and unearth the crypts.
The clan whose bodies of a grandfather and uncle lay in the grave — and were stolen — had had violent clashes with both the “Los Chapitos” and Zambada factions in the past.
If there is any clear casualty of this conflict, it is the idea that the Sinaloa Cartel was once a monolithic, hierarchical organization with a leader at the top. As the war of luxury graves in Culiacán, the state capital, demonstrates, the cartel has always been a loose alliance of drug-trafficking clans trying to outdo each other, even in death.
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