Sinaloa Cartel Research Articles

Illegal Market Governance and Organized Crime Groups’ Resilience: A Study of The Sinaloa Cartel

Abstract Since its emergence in the early 1990s, the Sinaloa Cartel has effectively surmounted all challenges to its existence, while, simultaneously, successfully developing its illegal ventures in Mexico and beyond. Based on evidence from the accounts of witnesses who testified in the prosecution of Joaquin Guzmán Loera (also known as El Chapo), one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s most prominent figures, we argue that this OCG’s resilience partially derives from the illegal governance practices it has implemented in the criminal markets in which it operates. In particular, we contend that the Sinaloa Cartel’s reliance on four types of illegal governance have been pivotal in promoting its capacity to weather adversity, namely: (1) judicial, (2) financial, (3) political and (4) regulatory governance.

Is the Sinaloa Cartel a Mafia?

Abstract Aiming to reduce the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the topic of organized crime, this study assesses the extent to which the Sinaloa Cartel, the most prominent Mexican drug syndicate, has the characteristics of a mafia. The study uses Paoli’s 2020 mafia framework, which identifies seven typifying characteristics of mafias, such as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra or the Japanese Yakuza. It relies on a broad review of the literature, court transcripts and media sources. The Sinaloa Cartel fully meets none of the seven typifying traits of mafias. It comes closest on the last trait, popular legitimacy and power-sharing, but it is properly characterized as a large drug-selling enterprise. Lastly, the study draws (sombre) policy implications from the analysis.

Saint Hershele

History pursues the truth through facts; fiction juices those facts until it is possible to extract their truthfulness. The story of Henry Eisenberg Glantz (1959–2020), alias El Santo Judío, a Mexican Jew whose life is the stuff of myth on the US-Mexican border, is surrounded in controversy. An idiot savant, “Hershele” was the child of an Auschwitz survivor and the grandchild of an important Yiddish poet. Obsessed with urban planning, he was particularly interested in the role traffic lights might play in easing vehicular fluency. He coined the now-ubiquitous term “vialidad,” a metaphor for metropolitan dynamism. After entering and abruptly exiting Mexico City’s political establishment, Hershele moved to Tijuana, where he became a successful radio host. In time, he metamorphosed into an associate of the Sinaloa Cartel with influence to commit crimes whose ultimate goal was, in his words, “to bring justice to earth.” As this false profile suggests, at the core of Hershele’s quest was the redemption of the “caged” children of Central American immigrants imprisoned in warehouses by the Trump Administration—“‘los pequeños que los nazis siguen acribillando,’ the little people the Nazis are still massacring.” There is a petition to beatify Hershele being considered by the Vatican.

A Social Network Analysis of Mexico’s Dark Network Alliance Structure

This article assesses Mexico’s organized crime alliance and subgroup network structures. Through social network analysis (SNA) of data from Lantia Consultores, a consulting firm in Mexico that specializes in the analysis of public policies, it demonstrates differential alliance structures within Mexico’s bipolar illicit network system. The Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación’s (CJNG) alliance structure is top-down and hierarchical, while the Sinaloa Cartel is denser, particularly in the broader Tierra Caliente region. Additionally, our analysis found a sparse overall network with many isolates (groups with no relations to other groups) and disconnected components. Further, we identified organized crime networks that might fill future power vacuums based on their network positions, following state or rival high-value targeting of major cartels. The implications of these findings are discussed, and policy recommendations are provided.

The continuum of women’s abduction in Mexico. Porosities between sexual and armed violence in a drug-producing area (Badiraguato, Sinaloa)

This paper takes the abduction and rape of a woman as a social situation and, by putting it in perspective with other cases, looks at how these acts of violence are commented on locally in order to grasp how they reveal the broader configuration of power. I show that this armed abduction, followed by rape, finally reduced into a conjugal quarrel, appears to be a particularly brutal and vivid version of the “continuum of sexual violence”. Locally apprehended by the category of “stealing a woman” (robo de mujer), the radicality of this porosity between armed and domestic violence refers to the singular political economy of Badiraguato, a Mexican municipality considered to be “the cradle of drug trafficking” and “the base of the Sinaloa Cartel”. From a materialist feminist perspective, I argue that the extreme porosity observed in gendered violence refers to the forms of exploitation and predation that characterize an insertion into global capitalism based on exclusion and isolation. This research is based on an 18-month ethnography conducted between 2013 and 2016 in the main village, the offices of the town hall, and the poppy-producing hamlets spread across the territory.

Chaos from order: a network analysis of in-fighting before and after El Chapo’s arrest

Abstract The effect of leadership decapitation—the capture or killing of the leader of an armed group—on future violence has been studied with competing conclusions. In Mexico, leadership decapitation has been found to increase violence and in-fighting among drug cartels. However, the causal pathways between leadership decapitation and in-fighting are unclear. In this article, it is hypothesized that leadership decapitation will weaken alliances between armed actors, lead to greater preferential attachment in networks of cartels and militias, and result in greater transitive closure as cartels seek to expand their power. These hypotheses are tested with a stochastic actor oriented model on a network dataset of episodes of infighting among cartels and the militias formed to opposed them between the five years before and after Joaquín, “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in 2016. The results show that alliances have virtually no effect on the decision of cartels and militias to fight each other; weaker organizations faced a higher reputational cost after El Chapo’s detention; and post-arrest cartel in-fighting did not increase as a result of uncertainty about the relative balance of power among cartels.

The Potential Threat of The Sinaloa Cartel to Canada

Since the first police bust of fentanyl in Canada in 2013, fentanyl may have become a more powerful and deadly drug than ever before (Howlett & Woo, n.d.). The Canadian healthcare system is likely impacted, with the likelihood of the situation worsening because of COVID-19. One of the possible reasons for this could be Canada’s role as a consumer in the supply chain of fentanyl. Accessibility to fentanyl is becoming easier with online purchases and delivery services, such as Canada Post (Brownell, 2019; Howlett & Woo, n.d.). This threat may continue as long as there is financial motivation for drug cartels, such as the Sinaloa cartel to transport fentanyl across borders with the assistance of China. Additionally, the success could potentially incite the production of more man-made synthetic drugs. Hence, in order to minimize this potential risk to Canadian communities, the direct impact Canada is facing must be addressed first. 
 APA Citation
 Tung, G. (2020). The potential threat of the Sinaloa cartel to Canada: production and transportation of fentanyl. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare, 3(2), 46-53. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/jicw/article/view/2373/1811.

The conceptual puzzle of violent non-state actors in Latin America: a critique of the convergence hypothesis

ABSTRACT Current research often emphasizes the typological convergence of violent non-state actors, which according to this literature tend to mix the characteristics of actors conventionally understood as criminals, insurgents, terrorists, or warlords. In this article, we examine the adequacy of such proposals to explain the evolution of violent actors in Latin America. Through a comparative study of the long-term development of two important Latin American violent actors, the Colombian FARC and the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, we arrive at the conclusion that convergence phenomena occur with much less frequency and intensity than suggested, and when they do occur, they are caused by mechanisms typically not considered in the literature. This may indicate a significant limitation regarding the empirical reach of the convergence hypothesis as well as a need for further conceptual clarification.

NAFTA’s Cartel Economy

This article combines elements of a personal essay with travel writing, in which geographers have expressed renewed interest. Constructed not through contemplations of the mind but from lived corporeal experience, it reflects both fieldwork discomforts and moments of somatic exhilaration when the mind reacts, producing the epiphany of a new idea or insight. The article follows two researchers who travel through insecure parts of Mexico in an effort to understand how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has affected the Mexican cattle sector and implications for its forest biomes. Land cover change data show a decline in Mexico’s deforestation rate, and the authors hypothesize that agricultural intensification enabled by the neoliberal reforms of NAFTA are responsible. The article starts with a road trip from Culiacán—home of the Sinaloa cartel—and ends in Chiapas, where the Zapatistas rebelled against NAFTA in 1994. At the Guatemalan border they confirm the unchecked flow of about 1.4 million contraband calves from Central America, on their way to Mexican feedlots. The authors estimate that the herd producing this number of animals would require as much as 100,000 km2 of pasture, presumably formed on mostly forested lands. Thus, deforestation in Mexico might be on the decline but only because its post-NAFTA beef supply chain has displaced it elsewhere. The authors reject their hypothesis about agricultural intensification. The article concludes with a speculation about the melding of Mexico’s corporate and criminal organizations into a cartel economy.

The neoliberal Houdini who escaped from (poverty and) prison: Chapo’s narcocorridos, political communication and propaganda

Chapo Guzmán was the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Although he was a well-known criminal, there is a scarcity of first-hand information about his career. This situation raises a question: how did Guzmán become a public figure without having public exposure? This communicative phenomenon is possible because drug cartels have sophisticated propaganda techniques that allow them to challenge the state not only in the military realm but also in the cultural realm. Among other media, these criminal organizations use narcocorridos, a popular music genre, as a medium for propaganda. This article studies, through a narrative analysis of 66 lyrics, how music, as a form of political communication, is used as propaganda. This study found three main narratives in the narcocorridos dedicated to Guzmán: (i) the origins of this drug dealer; (ii) the masculine features that led him to be a global kingpin; and (iii) his genius for corrupting political systems. These lyrics are propaganda because: (a) they spread knowledge in the form of stories about Guzmán; (b) they create a mythology about the kingpin and the narco-world; and (c) they distort reality by picturing Guzmán as a great man and blur reality by suppressing any reference to the drug wars.

The “Narco-stories” of Kate del Castillo: Stardom, Gender, and Entrepreneurship in a Transnational Context

This article analyzes the transnational persona of actress Kate del Castillo across her portrayals of female narcotraffickers, her transmedia interactions with audiences, and her pursuit of a film project on the life of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Through discourse and textual analysis of news coverage, popular media, and first-person testimonials, this article argues that del Castillo’s persona of a rogue entrepreneur on-screen and off-screen shaped her success and made her a target for state and media organizations. Del Castillo’s narrative struggles across media and languages countered longstanding conceptions of women’s roles in narcotrafficking and in narco-cultural productions. The article illuminates the continued appeal that the cultural grammar of narcotrafficking holds as a way to articulate power in North America.

Bacterial Conjugation as a Framework for the Homogenization of Tactics in Mexican Organized Crime

This article posits a competitive bacterial ecology as a framework for Mexican drug trafficking with a novel focus on bacterial conjugation (one type of horizontal gene transmission) to explain tactical homogenization. Individual drug traffickers consciously switch between Mexican organized crime groups sometimes three and four times, much like individual bacteria exchange their DNA in a horizontal genetic transfer that allows rapid evolution and resilience. Bacterial conjugation is a useful amplifying variable for understanding the homogenization of violence and this article probes its plausibility by providing examples of traffickers switching groups and taking tactics with them. Drawing on examples of traffickers and cells from the Arellano Felix Organization, the Sinaloa Cartel, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the Viagras, Zetas, and the Gulf Cartels, this article traces the genealogy of violent tactics, techniques, and procedures such as dissolving bodies in acid, asphyxiation, and infantry tactics, through individual traffickers into new groups drawn generally in the direction of more powerful, proximate, and similar trafficking groups.

A Tale of Two Mexican Border Cities: The Rise and Decline of Drug Violence in Juárez and Tijuana

This paper examines the tale of the two cities, Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. These two municipalities are the largest of Mexico's metropolises along the country's roughly 2,000-mile frontier with the United States, the longest land border between the “global north” and the “global south.” This narrative builds on several years of research regarding Mexico's rule of law challenges, during which the author conducted multiple field research trips to both Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. By virtue of their status as border cities, both lie at the fringes of the state and the very limits of its coercive monopoly on force. Consequentially, these are two cities that also stand at the frontiers of globalization, thanks to the opening of trade, new technologies, and infrastructure that has expanded flows of commerce, capital, and people across the US–Mexican border. This article examines the factors that contributed to the eruption of enormous violence in both cities around 2008, and the factors that contributed to its gradual reduction in both places. The author explains that the socio-economic context in these two border cities has deprived individuals of educational and employment opportunities, while the international market for illicit drugs has helped to fill the gap. Ultimately, though, the author argues that violence among drug trafficking organizations resulted from splits and the breakdown of alliances attributable to dynamics within and among these organizations, as well as newfound pressures from US and Mexican law enforcement. The author contends that the reduction of violence can be attributed to the gradual monopolization of control over organized criminal activities by the Sinaloa cartel.

A Network Flow Model of the Complex Illicit Trafficking Network Operating in the El Paso-Juarez Area

In 2013, El Paso, TX, was selected for the third time in a row by the Congressional Quarterly Press as the number one safest city with a population over 500,000 people (Borunda, 2013). Just across its border though, sits Ciudad Juarez, considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world. There is a unique social ecosystem between the two cities, a product of many years of shared history and traditions. The El Paso-Juarez area also happens to be one of the most valuable plazas for the Mexican Drug Cartels. According to BBC Mundo, the Sinaloa Cartel has won the El Paso-Juarez territory over the Juarez Cartel and the Zetas (Najar, 2012). Consequently, now that the territory is dominated by one cartel, drug trafficking through the area will likely increase and smuggling through border crossing check points will continue to be more prevalent. The purpose of this research effort is to assist the Border Patrol in allocating its resources towards improved interdiction of illicit trafficking. Whether it is manpower, money, technology, or any other resource, the Border Patrol desires to efficiently allocate to maximize interdiction. This analysis is intended to suggest a tool that will assist in allocating resources and aid the extremely important effort to maintain El Paso, TX, as the safest city in the U.S. by keeping drugs away from the streets. This research presents a network flow model of the complex illicit trafficking network operating in the El Paso-Juarez area, and provides insight that will aid such agencies as the Border Patrol in allocating its resources.

Enduring Menace: The Triad Societies of Southeast China

Since the 1980s, Hong Kong triad societies have evolved from hierarchical, pyramidal organizations to loose, compartmentalized syndicates that retain a modicum of hierarchy. Changes in triad organization and modus operandi occurred in response to stringent anti-organized crime measures enacted in Hong Kong. However, organizational evolution has facilitated triad transplantation to China and improved triads’ ability to engage in transnational crime. Triads have exploited favorable circumstances in China: prevalent corruption, rapid urbanization, and high demand for illicit goods and services. This paper includes two case studies of the Sun Yee On triad. The first examines Sun Yee On's localized activity by tracing the evolution of one Shenzhen area chapter. The second case study examines Sun Yee On's role as a supplier of methamphetamine precursor chemicals to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. Sun Yee On exemplifies how modern triads have become hybridized, assuming attributes of both local Chinese organized crime and transnational criminal networks.

A broken Mexico: allegations of collusion between the Sinaloa cartel and Mexican political parties

The Mexican drug war, in full swing since December 2006, has now claimed more than 40,000 lives. Dozens of high-level cartel operatives have been captured or killed, yet the leadership of one cartel, from Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico, has remained apparently untouched. The apparent lack of a crackdown on the Sinaloa Cartel has spurred criticisms of the Calderón administration, as well as US authorities aiding in the drug fight – some critics contend that the Sinaloa Cartel has enjoyed protection from the authorities. The Sinaloa Cartel's history of protection and collusion by authorities goes back a long way – during the reign of the PRI from 1929 to 2000, Sinaloa's drug traffickers were allowed to operate with near-total impunity. But mounting evidence – captures and deaths of high-level operatives from Sinaloa as well as arrests of relatives of the leadership – suggests that the claims of collusion against the current Mexican administration are false.

Functional Assessment of Drug Trafficking Terms: A Substantive and Methodological Expansion of a Verbal Behavior Research Program

Narcotics trafficking is often described in ambiguous and inaccurate terms. This is problematic because imprecise verbal behavior in relation to some state of affairs inhibits effective action with regard to those events. An innovative methodology was used to explore verbal behavior in diverse media reports following the 2001 prison escape of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, reputed prominent agent of the “Sinaloa Cartel.” Results demonstrated that the terms “cartel,” “mafia,” gang,” and “organization” were controlled in part by the same stimulus conditions, but which was emitted on a particular occasion was predictably related to other variables, including the speaker’s affiliation, immediate verbal context, and country of publication. We conclude that more precise terminology could improve efforts to understand and curtail narcotics trafficking. We also believe this methodology should continue to be developed as it may prove useful in analyzing other terms related to important social issues.