Mexico News Report

The war in Mexico’s Sinaloa state between factions of the Sinaloa Cartel (see here, here,
here and here) is still going on.

There have been 200 reported deaths since the outbreak of the conflict on September 9th.

An Associated Press article by Mark Stevenson reports how this latest conflict is changing life for regular people. It’s entitled In the heartland of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, the old ways have changed and violence rages.

Stevenson reports that “Residents of Culiacan [capital of Sinaloa] had long been accustomed to a day or two of violence once in a while. The presence of the Sinaloa cartel is woven into everyday life there, and people knew to stay indoors when they saw the convoys of double-cab pickups racing through the streets. But never have they seen the solid month of fighting that broke out Sept. 9 between factions of the Sinaloa cartel after drug lords Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López were apprehended in the United States after flying there in a small plane on July 25…

Residents of Culiacan are mourning their old lives, when the wheels of the local economy were greased by cartel wealth but civilians seldom suffered — unless they cut off the wrong pickup truck in traffic.

But the cartel factions have turned to new tactics, including a huge wave of armed carjackings in and around Culiacan. Cartel gunmen used to steal the SUVs and pickups they favor for use in cartel convoys; but now they focus on stealing smaller sedans.

They use these to go undetected in their silent, deadly kidnappings.

Often, the first a driver knows is when a passing car tosses out a spray of bent nails to puncture his tires. Vehicles pull up front and rear to cut him off. The driver is bundled into another car. All that is left for neighbors to find is a car with burst tires, the doors open, the engine running, in the middle of the street.

Talking on a cellphone can get you killed.

Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel. Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who’s a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong person, the phone owner is dead. Then, they’ll go after everyone on that person’s contact list, forming a potential chain of kidnapping, torture and death. That has left residents of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, afraid to even leave home at night, much less visit towns a few miles away where many have weekend retreats.

“You can’t go five minutes out of the city, … not even in daylight,” said Ismael Bojórquez, a veteran journalist in Culiacan. “Why? Because the narcos have set up roadblocks and they stop you and search through your cellphone.”

And it’s not just your own chats: If a person is traveling in a car with others, one bad contact or chat can get the whole group kidnapped.

That’s what happened to the son of a local news photographer. The 20-year-old was stopped with two other youths and something was found on one of their phones; all three disappeared. Calls were made and the photographer’s son was finally released, but the other two were never seen again.

There’s a daily death count.

The State Council on Public Safety, a civic group, estimates that in the past month there have been an average of six killings and seven disappearances or kidnappings in and around the city every day. The group said about 200 families have fled their homes in outlying communities because of the violence.

Even a hospital is not off limits.

…Last week, gunmen burst into a Culiacan hospital to kill a patient previously wounded by gunshots. In a town north of Culiacan, drivers were astonished to see a military helicopter seeking to corral four gunmen in helmets and tactical vests just yards from a highway; the gunmen were shooting back at the chopper.

What about the Mexican federal government?

President Claudia Sheinbaum’s response to all this has been to blame the United States for stirring up trouble by allowing the drug lords to turn themselves in. “Sinaloa practically didn’t have homicides” before the two drug lord’s capture on July 25, Sheinbaum said. “Starting with that, a wave of violence was unleashed in Sinaloa,” she said. Her claim is easily disproved: the cartel factions had been killing each other for years, albeit at lower levels. But it illustrates the government’s head-in-the-sand approach: Sheinbaum and her predecessor, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had little problem with the existence and local dominance of drug cartels as long as they didn’t make headlines.

What is the government doing to stop it?

Now that the violence has boiled over, the government has sent in hundreds of army troops. But irregular urban combat in the heart of a city of 1 million inhabitants — against a cartel that has lots of .50-caliber sniper rifles and machine guns — is not the army’s specialty.

Squads of soldiers went into a luxury apartment complex in the city’s center to detain a suspect and they wound up shooting to death a young lawyer who was merely a bystander.

[Estefanía] López, the peace activist, has been asking for soldiers and police to be posted outside schools, so children can return to classes — most are currently taking classes online because their parents judge it too dangerous to take them to school.

But police can’t solve the problem: Culiacan’s entire municipal force has been temporarily disarmed by soldiers to check their guns, something that’s been done in the past when the army suspects policemen are working for drug cartels.

The local army commander recently acknowledged that it’s up to the cartel factions — not authorities — when the violence will stop.

Peace activist Estefanía López: “A lot of businesses, restaurants and nightclubs have been closed for the past month.” That’s bad for the local economy.

Estefanía López sums up the situation thusly: “In Culiacan, there is not even faith anymore that we will be safe, with police or soldiers.“