Civil war in the home of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel: Fear grips Culiacan

The man is lying, top off, trousers pulled down, amid the rubbish just off a main road in the capital city of the state of Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico.

It’s late September and he was dumped by a criminal group the night before, another victim of a power struggle that is ripping through Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.

Shootouts in broad daylight, convoys of armed men travelling through the city outskirts, and more than 90 people confirmed dead so far have characterised the latest cartel war in one of the most violent countries in the world.

It emerged later that the man was a father who had been walking with his daughter the evening before, when they were stopped and he was taken by a criminal group. His daughter, age five, was left alone on the street until a neighbour found her.

This is the new reality for Culiacan: fear and violence on a daily basis.

One man’s neck hangs at an acute angle. Another has cuts on his face. One more, with terrible bruising on his stomach and ribs.

They’ve been left on the main highway out of Culiacan. Lines of motorists, diverted by police and soldiers at the scene, drive slowly past.

This city has long lived with “narcos” — it’s the epicentre of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, which is “largely responsible” for the massive influx of fentanyl into the United States, according to US authorities.

But it hasn’t seen violence like this for 15 years.

It all started on the morning of July 25, according to a letter released by the lawyer of the cartel’s leader, Ismael Zambada Garcia, better known as “El Mayo”.

El Mayo was perhaps the most powerful man in the cartel, especially after the US incarceration of his fellow founder and kingpin Joaquin Guzman Loera, alias “El Chapo”, in 2019.

The letter claims that on that day in July, El Mayo was heading to a meeting with Joaquin Guzman Lopez, El Chapo’s son and a member of the Sinaloa cartel’s younger generation.

The two men were rivals, but El Mayo says that he also trusted Guzman Lopez because he had known him “since he was a young boy”. They had come together at a local events centre, El Mayo’s letter said, to try and help resolve a local political dispute.

But according to his letter, things quickly took a different turn: “As soon as I set foot inside of that room, I was ambushed. A group of men assaulted me, knocked me to the ground, and placed a dark-colored hood over my head. They tied me up and handcuffed me, then forced me into the bed of a pickup truck.”