Cover us!
In 2019, the Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman
was sentenced to life in prison
after a decades-long effort to extradite him to the US
to stand trial.
The long road that led Chapo Guzman from the mountains of Sinaloa
to the courthouse behind us today
was paved with death, drugs, and destruction.
Convicted Mexican drug lord El Chapo,
a federal judge right here in New York City today
sentencing Joaquín Guzman to life in prison plus 30 years.
The capture of El Chapo
was hailed as the biggest apparent victory in the war on drugs
since the fall of Pablo Escobar in 1993.
Guzman had risen to power as the figurehead of the Sinaloa Cartel,
thought to be Mexico’s and perhaps the world’s
biggest drug trafficking network.
But what actually is the Sinaloa organized crime group?
We kill people.
But with a reason.
Move in!
Pure Sinaloa!
This is how the biggest drug trafficking empire
in the world operates
and why, despite all the millions of dollars spent capturing him,
its power has only continued to grow since the fall of El Chapo.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[THE SINALOA CARTEL]
Drug smuggling in Mexico’s Sinaloa state
goes right back to the roots of the war on drugs itself.
When the US first banned cocaine and heroin in 1914,
it was farmers in Sinaloa
who first spotted the new black market opportunity
and began growing opium,
a trade that continues to today.
This is the ball that provides the gum and the heroin.
This gets scratched with a blade, and the heroin comes out.
But it was America’s cocaine explosion of the 1980s
that fundamentally changed the Mexican drug trafficking business.
This is crack cocaine.
It’s as innocent-looking as candy,
but it’s turning our cities into battle zones.
In 1985, the giant Guadalajara Cartel
was broken up into three smaller operations—
based in Tijuana, Juárez, and Sinaloa—
who immediately began violently competing
for control of Mexico's drug trade.
The Sinaloa Cartel
came under the broad control of El Chapo Guzman
and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
But the Sinaloa groups always operated
less as a rigidly organized command structure
and more as a loose network of drug traffickers
who can work together and collaborate as the situation demands.
All the drug traffickers in Sinaloa chip in.
They know that the shipment is going to arrive on a given day.
The amount of money is enormous.
From what I gather, there were 50 kilos of fentanyl
to distribute in the whole state of Sinaloa.
Their structure is more complicated
and perhaps more usable for adaptation
than the structure of other criminal groups.
So the structure is one that on the one hand
has clear lines of command,
but at the same time, there is enough flatness to it
that losing a particular branch or particular segment of the network
doesn’t bring the whole organization under.
Sinaloa were able to use this highly adaptable entrepreneurial structure
to outcompete and outlast
rival criminal groups who challenged them.
Perhaps the best example of this was when, in 2010,
a new cartel called Los Zetas
challenged the established trafficking groups,
bringing almost paramilitary levels of violence to the Mexican drug war.
Los Zetas is a powerful and violent criminal syndicate in Mexico.
The cliché is
That is, silver
or
The group was formed by soldiers who defected from
the Mexican army’s elite air-mobile special forces.
The Zetas’ military-style approach of seizing and holding territory
allowed them to grow extremely fast.
And for a time, they even appeared to challenge Sinaloa’s dominance.
But the Sinaloa Federation had more established networks
in international drug trafficking.
And in the world of organized crime,
nothing can compete with the profits from drugs.
These are members of the Sinaloa Cartel.
They’re picking up packages of chemicals
that have been left floating at sea.
These are the raw ingredients to cook fentanyl and other drugs.
They find the floating packages,
then haul them ashore.
By 2017, even as El Chapo was being extradited to the US,
the Zetas were already falling apart,
while the Sinaloa Cartel was using its adaptability
and capacity for innovation to increase its criminal power.
Once we reach land, the merchandise is unloaded.
We leave it.
We don’t really know who owns the merchandise.
Everything is confidential, even among us.
The Sinaloa Federation was also helped by the fact that
authorities in the US seemed to misunderstand
the loose network style of their organization.
This is made clear by the staggering resources
and attention poured into the decades-long hunt for El Chapo.
We need to have the concerted effort of both the Mexican government
and the US government
in recapturing Mr. Guzman.
There's no doubt that El Chapo is a fascinating figure.
Born into a poor family in Sinaloa,
he rose to control a drug trafficking empire
estimated to turn over upwards of $3 billion a year.
But it was a series of dramatic prison escapes,
one involving a mile-long tunnel dug straight into his cell,
that turned Chapo into a sort of Mexican folk hero
and the most important target for international narco enforcement.
This morning, a massive international manhunt
for one of the world’s most powerful and deadly
drug trafficking kingpins is underway.
This is the opening of the tunnel from which authorities say
Joaquín El Chapo Guzman managed to escape from
the Altiplano federal prison.
El Chapo became perhaps the world’s most famous criminal.
The fact that he twice escaped from prison,
including maximum security prison in Mexico,
clearly with the help of corrupt government officials.
He was very purposeful in cultivating the Robin Hood image
of bringing drugs to the gringos
and bringing resources to poor communities.
But of course, it is very rare that toppling, arresting,
or killing the leader of a criminal group
will bring down the drug trafficking network.
In fact, El Chapo’s imprisonment changed almost nothing.
For one thing, the Sinaloa Cartel’s co-founder, Ismael Zambada,
who always kept a much lower profile than El Chapo,
remains at large.
And while there have been power struggles
between various factions within the cartel,
these don’t seem to have affected
their ability to traffic thousands of tons of drugs across the US border.
Nothing has changed here.
Drug trafficking will never end.
They caught El Chapo, but there’s already someone else.
If they catch him, someone else will take his place.
This doesn’t have an end.
In 2019, when the Mexican Army
tried to arrest one of El Chapo’s sons,
the Sinaloa Cartel took to the streets
with military-grade equipment,
effectively taking over the state capital, Culiacan,
until the Army backed down and released him.
Violence paralyzed the streets of a Mexican city yesterday
as security forces traded gunfire
with heavily-armed members of a drug cartel.
The son of the notorious drug kingpin El Chapo
was taken into custody, then let go.
The ability to calibrate violence,
to apply it when necessary
but not go over the top in the style of the Zetas,
is also central to how the Sinaloa maintain their cash flow.
And the Sinaloa Cartel
under El Chapo’s leadership from the late 1980s
made the choice to rule through having support among local people,
that, yes, you will kill your rivals,
but you are not going to shoot up a disco full of people in doing so.
People will prefer brutality that is predictable and restrained
to brutality that doesn’t give anything back.
The crucial skill that set the Sinaloa Federation
apart from other cartels
is that while some were buying heavy weaponry,
the Sinaloa Cartel were buying politicians.
Do the police ever come by here?
Once in a while, they pass by, but they just go on their way.
Many times, we just give them some cash.
Other times, they just ask for food, and sometimes they want women.
The current mass bloodshed in the Mexican drug war
originates in 2006,
when the government launched an all-out war on the cartels.
The man largely responsible for organizing that offensive
was Genaro García Luna,
Mexico's secretary of public security.
In 2019, García Luna was arrested in the US,
accused of taking tens of millions of dollars in bribes
directly from El Chapo,
specifically to protect the Sinaloa Cartel
and target other traffickers.
And Luna is accused of taking bribes
from especially drug kingpin Joaquín El Chapo Guzman
while providing protection for him.
US prosecutors say the bribes
could be in the tens of millions of dollars.
So what does the immediate future look like for the Sinaloa Cartel?
They’re incredibly effective
at capitalizing on the opioid crisis in the US,
expanding the supply of fentanyl brought over from China.
At the same time,
they’re rumored to be expanding meth export and production
in both Europe and Asia.
Since the transition post-Chapo,
an innovator in building networks,
relations in East Asia with the Triads
and now in competition with the Triads
in places like New Zealand and Australia as well as in Africa.
Things can explode.
We use liquids and chemicals that are extremely dangerous.
An explosion can injure or even kill someone.
It can make you faint.
It keeps you out of breath. It attacks your breathing.
Though they do face new competition in Mexico,
particularly from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,
it does look like, that for all the fanfare
around the capture of El Chapo,
the Sinaloa Cartel have adapted
and will simply go on making billions.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.