Violence in Sinaloa surges despite increased militarization

MEXICO CITY (CN) — The first month of Mexico’s new president Claudia Sheinbaum’s term has been marred by violence, specifically in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, and much of it due to the fight for control of the Sinaloa Cartel and the intervention of the Mexican military.

Sheinbaum addressed the violence in her morning press conference on Monday, blaming the uptick on the recent capture of drug trafficker, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was arrested by U.S. authorities on July 25 in El Paso, Texas for his involvement in trafficking fentanyl.

“Sinaloa has a special situation. You know, as a result of the arrest that took place, information is still being requested. It was an arrest in the U.S. based on a process that is still not very clear,” she said. 

General Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, head of the Ministry of National Defense, also blamed the violence on El Mayo’s arrest and the fight between criminal organizations La Mayiza and Los Chapitos, which are affiliated with El Mayo’s son and El Chapo’s sons, respectively.

“Basically we have a struggle between the old-school narcos, El Mayo — not that he’s a noble mafioso, but he was more connected to the community because he paid good money for opium — and more of a neo-liberal cartel of diversification with Los Chapitos,” said Benjamin Smith, a Latin American history professor at the University of Warwick and author of The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. 

Smith says U.S. reliance on the “kingpin strategy” — targeting known high-level leaders of criminal organizations and leveraging one against the other — has led to more violence in Mexico. 

“This completely breaks down the bonds of trust. The Americans wash their hands [of the situation] and sit back to watch Mexicans kill each other,” Smith said. 

On Sunday night, one person was killed in the coastal city of Mazatlán during a night of shootings that caused a city-wide curfew and suspended school classes on Monday. The state prosecutor’s office also recorded 14 homicides on Saturday in Sinaloa’s capital, Culiacán, and its outskirts.

172 people have been killed in Sinaloa between Sept. 9 and Oct. 18, according to Sinaloa Attorney General Claudia Zulema Sánchez Kondo.

Sheinbaum inherited a dire criminal problem from her predecessor. During September, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s final month as president, 143 people were victims of homicide in Sinaloa, the state’s highest amount since 2017. 

On Sept. 25, in one of López Obrador’s final acts as president, his Morena party passed a reform that put Mexico’s National Guard under military command, giving more power to the military to perform everyday security tasks, a reform that Sheinbaum, also a member of the party, favored.

In the weeks leading up to her inauguration, the State Commission for Human Rights of Michoacán published a document prepared by the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of the Navy and the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, outlining the Sheinbaum administration’s security priorities during her first 100 days as president.

The main objectives are to combat crime in the 10 largest areas of high-impact crime by creating a new intelligence and police investigation unit.

Sheinbaum has not seen a break from the violence since the first day of her term. On Oct. 2, just one day after she took office, the Mexican army fired on a caravan of 33 migrants traveling in two vans in the southern border state of Chiapas, leaving six dead and 10 injured. 

On Oct. 14, 650 army troops, special forces and national guardsmen entered Culiacán amid the wave of violence that began in September. The army killed 19 gunmen on the night of Oct. 21 during an operation that captured Edwin “El Max” Antonio, a drug trafficker linked to El Mayo.

Sheinbaum defended the army’s actions in Sinaloa. 

“When the armed forces, be it the National Guard, the navy, the army, are attacked, then, within the framework of the law, they have the right to respond within the framework of self-defense,” she said during an Oct. 24 press conference. 

That same day, the military also killed 17 armed men in a confrontation in the rural area of Técpan de Galeana, Guerrero. Two members of the military were also killed during the incident.

“When you have the military acting as police, this violence is just the tip of the iceberg. This stuff happens at a relatively regular basis outside the major cities,” Smith said. “We know very little about what the military is actually doing. The military dominates the center of Culiacán and murders people outside of [the center]. If you pile more military into other areas, we could see violence in other places spilling out.”

Including recent confrontations in Guerrero and Sinaloa that left a total of 36 killed, the Mexican military has killed 257 people this year in armed confrontations, the highest number since 2014.

“We may see an escalation of violence like what happened between 2008 and 2011 when El Chapo broke with Arturo Beltrán Leyva. It will be interesting to see how much the Jalisco Cartel gets involved in this and if it spreads to the Gulf region as well,” said Smith.

The violence has carried over to innocent members of the public, including in two separate incidents in the border city of Nuevo Laredo in the state of Tamaulipas, that Sheinbaum later explained away.

Yuricie Rivera, a nurse, was shot and killed while driving home with her family on Oct. 11 when they were caught in the crossfire between criminal organizations and the army.

A day later, eight-year-old Lidia Iris Fuentes was shot in the head by a National Guard bullet while she was in a car driven by her grandmother on the way to a stationary store. 

“The military in the provinces is rarely investigated. [The Mexican state] has militarized border patrol in Chiapas and the violence is increasing there as well, which leads to extrajudicial murders, which is basically what you get when you get rid of the federal police and make pacts with the cartels,” Smith said.