All hell breaks loose: CIA-armed Sinaloa Cartel unleash war on Mexico
Arrest of El Chapo's son activates world's most feared cartel.
The notorious Sinaloa Cartel has besieged the Culiacan International Aiport in Mexico. Videos from the northern parts of the city show military helicopters lighting up the night as shots rain down. The cartel has blocked all roads out of the city. Videos posted by locals show them hiding as dozens of cartel cars rush to the scenes of fighting reminiscent of war.
The colossal and feared cartel, whose force count 100,000 members, has all but declared war against the Mexican government after the arrest of El Chapo’s son, Ovidio Guzmán López.
El Chapo lead the Sinaloa Cartel for decades until his arrest, extradiction to America and conviction a few years ago. When Mexican authorities arrested his son in 2019, the Sinaloa Cartel unleashed a campaign so violent it surprised the Mexican government, who was forced to release him in order to spare civilian lives.
This time around, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) must be prepared for a final and ultimate confrontation with the cartel, whose might and strength can match up to most nation state militaries in the world.
In its pursuit to monopolize the drug trade and protect its multi-billion dollar industry, the Sinaloa Cartel has infiltrated every sector of the Mexican society, from the press to the police to academia. It has recruited tens of thousands of teenagers, murdered an equivalent amount and disappeared countless others.
But the cartel didn’t reach this stature without external help from a certain neighboring country. Most Mexicans are aware of the deep ties between the Sinaloa Cartel and the U.S. intelligence community, but this history is to most Americans, to borrow a word from our immigration discourse, alien.
In 2014, Mexican outlet El Universal published its investigation into court documents that proved a clear collusion between the CIA, DEA and the Sinaloa Cartel. Between 2000 and 2012, the agencies had an arrangement with the cartel that allowed it to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels. At that point, Sinaloa was providing 80% of the drugs entering the city of Chicago. The written statements published by El Universal were made to the U.S. District Court in Chicago in relation to the arrest of Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of Sinaloa leader Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and allegedly the Sinaloa cartel’s "logistics coordinator."
Here's what DEA agent Manuel Castanon told the court:
"On March 17, 2009, I met for approximately 30 minutes in a hotel room in Mexico City with Vincente Zambada-Niebla and two other individuals — DEA agent David Herrod and a cooperating source [Sinaloa lawyer Loya Castro] with whom I had worked since 2005. ... I did all of the talking on behalf of [the] DEA."
A few hours later, Mexican Marines arrested Zambada-Niebla (a.k.a. "El Vicentillo") on charges of trafficking. Castanon and three other agents then visited Zambada-Niebla in prison, where the Sinaloa officer "reiterated his desire to cooperate," according to Castanon.
Zambada-Niebla's lawyer claimed to the court that in the late 1990s, Castro struck a deal with U.S. agents in which Sinaloa would provide information about rival drug trafficking organizations while the U.S. would dismiss its case against the Sinaloa lawyer and refrain from interfering with Sinaloa drug trafficking activities or actively prosecuting Sinaloa leadership.
In 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives created Operation Fast and Furious as part of an effort to stem the flow of U.S. weapons to Mexican gangs and drug cartels. That was the alleged pretense. In 2014, El Universal reported that the program in fact was a part of a scheme to intentionally arm the Sinaloa cartel so that it could defeat rival drug gangs.
Mexican authorities were recurringly perplexed by the American military-grade weapons they found in the possession of the Sinaloa Cartel:
In April 2011, a large cache of weapons, 40 traced to Fast and Furious but also including military-grade weapons difficult to obtain legally in the US such as an anti-aircraft machine gun and grenade launcher, was found in the home of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a prominent Sinaloa Cartel member, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Torres Marrufo was indicted, but evaded law enforcement for a brief time. Finally, on February 4, 2012, Marrufo was arrested by the Mexican Police.
Also:
On November 23, 2012, two firearms linked to the ATF were found at the scene of a shootout between Sinaloa cartel members and the Mexican military. One of the weapons was an AK-47 type rifle trafficked by Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino, and the other was an FN Herstal pistol originally purchased by an ATF agent. Mexican beauty queen Maria Susana Flores Gamez and four others were killed.
These stories lead multiple Mexican officials to openly accuse the CIA. The local authorities of the largest Mexican state of Chuhuahua accused the CIA of wanting to “manage” the drug trade instead of ending it. Around 2013, the relationship between the CIA and the Sinaloa Cartel broke down. There has never been conclusive reporting as to why that occurred, but that very same year the cartel announced its expansion into the Asian market when it sent a hit squad to the Philippines. This expansion would almost certaintly have occurred without U.S. greenlighting, as it would spin Sinaloa’s economic might out of the control of American agencies. Within weeks, president Barack Obama flew to Mexico to discuss, among other things, the two countries’ relationship with Asia.
U.S. authorities ended their arms shipments to the Sinaloa Cartel and restricted its drug flow. Within a few years, El Chapo would be arrested by Mexico and extradicted. Now, the cartel is attacking Mexico on behalf of his son and they are armed with military-grade U.S. weaponry. In the northern city of Culician, cartel members have now blocked all major roads into the city. Gunmen attacked a military air base and Culiacán international airport, where a passenger jet was hit by a bullet as it was preparing to take off. If not immediately defeated, they’ll have hundreds of thousands of civilians at their mercy.
"We continue to work on controlling the situation," said Cristobal Castaneda, Sinaloa's public security chief, according to Reuters.