A cartel leader says he is trying to find out how to protect his family in case the US army attack within Mexico. Another says that he is already hidden and that he rarely leaves his house. Two young people who produce fentanyl for the cartel say they have closed all their drug laboratories.
A flood of arrests, drug seizures and laboratories by Mexican authorities in recent months has hit the gigantic Sinaloa cartel, according to Mexican officials and interviews with six operations of the cartel, forcing at least some of its leaders to reduce the production of fentanil in the state of Sinaloa, its bastion.
The cartels have sown terror throughout Mexico and have caused incalculable damage in the United States. But here, in Culiacán, the state capital, the dynamics is beginning to change, at least for now. The operations of the cartels say they have had to transfer the laboratories to other areas of the country or temporarily interrupt production.
“You can’t be calm, you can’t sleep because you don’t know when you are going to grab you,” said a high -ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel who, like other operations of the cartel, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being captured.
“Right now the important thing is to survive,” he added, with trembling hands.
The government offensive against organized crime intensified after the Trump government threatened with reprisals unless Mexico stopped the supply of fentanyl to the United States, promising high tariffs if the flow of migrants and drugs continued.
President Trump began to raise the possibility of imposing tariffs shortly after his election in November, but last month he announced 25 percent levies on Mexican products if the country did not act on border security and drug trafficking. The president gave Mexico a month to obtain results, threatening to promulgate tariffs on March 4 if he was not satisfied.
Given the possibility of economic chaos, the Mexican government went on the offensive. President Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 soldiers from the National Guard to the border and hundreds of soldiers more to the state of Sinaloa, an important Fentanyl traffic center where a war between cartels has caused agitation for months.
“There has been many insurance, arrests to date,” said Omar Harfuch, Secretary of Security of Mexico, at a recent press conference after returning several days in Sinaloa. The arrests have led to a “constant weakening” of the cartel, he said.
The country’s security forces seized in the last five months almost the same amount of fentanyl as in the previous year. The Sheinbaum government states that it has made almost 900 arrests since October only in Sinaloa.
Then, last week, the Mexican government said it had begun to send more than two dozens of cartels sought by US authorities to the United States, a clear signal to Trump’s government that he was willing to fight the cartels, although Trump said last week that he was not yet satisfied with the government’s efforts and that the tariffs would enter into force on March 4.
“Organized crime groups had not felt this type of pressure for a long time,” said Jaime López, security analyst based in Mexico City.
In the interviews, the cartel operations agreed. Some said they were selling properties and dismissing unnecessary personnel to compensate for the loss of income due to the decrease in fentanyl trade. Others said they were investing money in advanced teams to detect the drones of the US government, which the United States also flew to Mexico during the Biden and Obama governments.
Mexico’s criminal organizations have a long history of survival of efforts to dismantle them, or simply divide into new groups. But several operations said that, for the first time in years, they really feared being arrested or dying at the hands of the authorities.
Experts pointed out that a decrease in production in Culiacán would not necessarily affect the flow of fentanil to the north, since the drug is easy to manufacture and the cartel can move its laboratories to other places. And it is not clear how much any interruption in Culiacán would last. Cooks and experts said they expected the cartel to start laboratories in the city if the pressure decreased or if the group needed an influx of cash.
But the strong measures have had an immediate impact, they said, and some cited the new Trump pressure.
“Trump established a Deadlinewe are seeing everything that could have been seen and done in years, in a month, ”said López. “The government is sending a message that when you really want you can exert this type of pressure.”
But even before tariff threats intensified, Sheinbaum had shown his willingness to face the cartels as soon as he took possession on October 1.
His predecessor and political ally, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had followed a strategy that he called “hugs, not shots”, focusing on the deep causes of crime and, in general, avoiding violent clashes with criminals.
Although he promised loyalty to his mentor’s vision, Sheinbaum jumped to the headlines for a series of clashes between soldiers and cartels that left dozens of dead at the beginning of their presidency.
Cartel members said they were making their own preparations for increasing Trump under pressure. American officials claim that the United States has recently begun to expand drone flights in Mexico to detect drug laboratories, and last week the government appointed several cartels as terrorist organizations.
In interviews, cartel operations said they were importing scanners to detect drones and hiring more people with experience in the management and monitoring of this type of aircraft. They also said that arms shipments had increased from the United States, the origin of most illegal weapons used by criminals in Mexico.
Within the Trump government there is still some division over whether the United States must take unilateral military actions within Mexico against cartels, or if it must collaborate more closely with the Mexican government in the fight against drug trafficking.
Mexican cartels are known for kneading military degrees, including improvised explosive artifacts (FDI) and land mines, although operations recognized in interviews that could hardly compete with the American army arsenal. Even so, a high -level operation said the cartel would be prepared to respond if raids or attacks were carried out.
“If a helicopter comes with 20 or 30 soldiers of them,” said the operation, “or how we stay with our arms crossed.”
A fentanyl chef of the cartel, speaking from jail, said he was actually in favor of the Mexican government intensifying the application of the law, because he believed that curbing the violence of the cartels could avoid the death of innocent people.
Last week, the Mexican forces arrested two heads of the Sinaloa Cartel, who were intimate members of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, the most powerful son of the drug trafficker known as the “Chapo”. After spreading the news of the captures, the Mexican army deployed a wave of soldiers throughout the city, establishing control stalls and blocking entire apples.
Despite the arrests, violence in Culiacán continues to charge lives. A recent Wednesday morning, a man’s body appeared face down in the middle of a street, at a very busy crossing, with his hands and bloodied head.
The next day, another man was found in a nearby residential neighborhood, with his feet tied and a plastic bag in the head. The agents present at the scene said that the victim had died of a shot in the place.
Sheinbaum has defended his history to fight the cartels and has responded hard to the accusation of Trump’s White House that the Mexican government maintains “an intolerable alliance” with drug traffickers.
“We are all fighting organized crime groups, so there can be no doubt,” he said at a press conference this month, he added: “We are acting against organized crime.”
But few discuss that corruption is rampant in Mexico. The last great offensive against organized crime was led by a security chief who was subsequently sentenced in an American federal court for accepting bribes of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Cartel members said that the only reason the government had not really fought against them until recently was because they had bought enough officials. A leader of a cartel cell said he doubted that this new effort seriously harm the cartel because the group could ensure their survival buying key officials.
“There are always skinny capes,” he said, “there are always loose ends that can be reached.”
When asked what they felt when they were qualified as terrorists, the responses of the cartel agents ranged between apathy and indignation.
The jailed Fentanyl chef argued that true terrorists were consumers of the United States, whose insatiable appetite for drugs feeds trade. The other two young chefs agreed that the worst actors were north of the border: weapons traffickers who obtain huge profits by introducing weapons that kill so many people in Mexico.
The high -level operation said he considered himself a businessman, not a terrorist.
“We are talking about supply and demand,” he said, “not from AK-47s, much less to put bombs on Times Square.”
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Even if the Government bombard all drugs of Mexico’s drugs, he said, he will not make Americans less dependent on drugs, which is one of the most addictive synthetic opioids that exist. He said that, with the appropriate ingredients, the fentanyl can be synthesized almost anywhere – in tiny or rudimentary kitchens mountain laboratories – and that while the Americans want fentanyl, it will be manufactured.
“The demand will never end, the product continues to consume,” said the operation. “Addiction makes the demand end.”