Fear, death and hope in a city under the shadows of a Mexican cartel war

A mule grazed on a recent Thursday afternoon at the end of a quiet dirt road near the entrance of a gated and walled ranch house on the outskirts of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state in northwestern Mexico.

Notices attached to the gates indicated that the property had been seized and sealed by the Mexican Attorney General’s office.

This is where a fratricidal war within one of the world’s most powerful transnational criminal organizations began.

Not far from here, down a secondary highway, headed east toward Culiacán, federal police agents unfurled yellow tape across a driveway leading to a home where a man in his early 20s was found dead on the floor by his bed. He was shot once in the head and once in the chest.

Later, on this same Thursday, Dec. 11, in a cornfield south of Culiacán, the chief nurse from a local health-care centre was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head.

As the man’s body was loaded into the back of a forensics van for transport to the morgue, smoke billowed on the horizon. A car was burning in a nearby village after an armed attack that left one man dead near a municipal office.

The multiple deaths are another round of suspected salvos from the war within the Sinaloa cartel, one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine, methamphetamines and fentanyl in the world that is consumed by a crisis coursing through its heartland.

No one in control

This internecine war has brought fear and violence to Culiacán and its surrounding area. The sun-seared Sinaloan capital, with a population of slightly more than one million, is also known as the cradle of the Sinaloa cartel.

Control of the city means control of the sprawling criminal organization that has tendrils stretching from South America to Canada to Europe.

The Humaya and Tamazula rivers meet to form the Culiacán River near the centre of this picturesque city, flanked on its east by the rolling Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. Roughly 50 kilometres to its west, as the crow flies, lies the Pacific Ocean.

On the surface, life flows to a regular rhythm here. Traffic snarls during the morning commutes, the malls are full of Christmas shoppers, local restaurants, famed for their Sinaloan flavours, bustle.

But at any moment, in a muzzle flash, violence can burst through the fibres of the city.

It vanishes with the same velocity, on the back of a motorcycle or a speeding car, leaving a tight pattern of eight bullet holes through the passenger side window of a silver SUV, a body slumped inside, on a Tuesday morning in front of a convenience store.

“This is an everyday thing, it happens all the time,” said Miguel Ángel Vega, an independent journalist from Culiacán who often works as a fixer for international journalists who travel here.

There’s an old local saying that around here that even houseflies don’t fly without permission from the "narcos," said Vega, who worked with CBC News during a recent reporting trip to the city.

“Things have changed,” he said.

"People … don’t feel safe anymore.”

Where once the Sinaloa cartel established a semblance of order in its underworld, now, no one is in control.

Killings, disappearances surged

WARNING: This section of the story contains a picture of a dead body.

The Sinaloa cartel, once headed by Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán and the lower-profile Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada, split into two factions on July 25, 2024, in the now-abandoned ranch house at the end of the lane.

It was here where one of Guzmán’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, kidnapped Zambada, bundled him onto a plane and flew him into the hands of U.S. authorities.

The war between "Los Chapitos," those loyal to the Guzmán sons, and "Los Mayitos,” those loyal to Zambada, exploded on Sept. 9, 2024, with two furious gunfights in stronghold areas held by each side, said Adrián López Ortiz, director of Sinaloa’s Noroeste Media, which produces a daily newspaper and hosts news broadcasts over YouTube.

“Our lives literally changed from one day to the next,” he said.

The Noroeste has maintained a daily tally of killings and disappearances since the wave of violence began.

The news outlet has recorded more than 2,400 killings and more than 2,900 reports of disappeared persons across Sinaloa since September 2024. Noroeste bases its numbers on official figures and its own reporting.

“Disappearances of persons is, right now, the main form of lethal violence in this war,” said López Ortiz.

The current level of violence is on pace to surpass the Sinaloa cartel’s bloodiest conflict to date, which unfolded between 2008 and 2011 and saw almost 10,000 people killed, he said.

This era fell within the 2006-2012 term of former Mexican president Felipe Calderon, who launched a so-called “narco war” against organized crime groups across Mexico, triggering a surge in deaths and disappearances.

U.S. foreign policy, through its decades-old war on drugs, and ineffective Mexican institutions, created the circumstances that left the people of Sinaloa vulnerable in the outbreak of this war, said López Ortiz.

He believes the U.S. likely had a hand in Zambada’s kidnapping — which was interpreted by Zambada loyalists as a treasonous act, sparking the conflict — while “Mexican security and justice institutions failed" to protect the population from the ensuing violence, he said.

The Mexican federal government has since responded, stepping up its presence in the state by sending thousands of extra troops.

The National Guard, Army, Navy and Security Secretariat and Civil Protection federal police force are deployed across Culiacán and its surrounding region.

These agencies, along with state forces, are on constant, highly visible patrols throughout the city and region, securing crime scenes, sometimes multiple times a day, or administering permanent and spontaneous checkpoints.

Maj.-Gen. Julices Julián González Calzada, who oversees the National Guard in Sinaloa, said the Secretariat of National Defence, along with Mexico’s national security cabinet, have been launching “high-level” operations throughout Sinaloa to pacify the region.

González Calzada said much of the current violence is contained between members of the warring factions.

“These executions are all of members of the same criminal group.... They know each other, they know where each other lives.”

Peace is coming back to Culiacán, said González Calzada.

“We are bringing back security to the population so they can return to their normal activities.... I feel we are on the right path.”

A night at the ball game

Life in Culiacán seeks its own way back to normalcy.

Like a hockey arena in a Canadian prairie town, the Tomateros Stadium, named after Culiacán’s baseball team, holds the beating heart of the city. Sinaloa, one of Mexico's top agricultural states, is a major producer of tomatoes.

In the good days, before this conflict began, the 22,000-seat stadium would be filled to the brim with fans “yelling, crying, drinking beer, doing everything,” said Carlos Castro, 54, from Culiacán.

“Baseball is passion, baseball is something that runs in the veins of the Sinaloan people,” he said as he watched the home team take a 6-0 lead against the Cañeros, from the northern Sinaloan city of Los Mochis, on Dec. 10.

While the Tomateros still reportedly top the Mexican Pacific League in attendance, they don’t sell out games like they used to, he said.

“Unfortunately, right now, with the situation we are living in, people have stopped coming [to the games].”

The Sinaloa cartel’s internal war, which is playing out across the state, is also displacing people from villages and settlements throughout the rolling countryside.

Maria Guadalupe Rodrígez said she fled her home in El Tepuche, which sits about 17 kilometres north of Culiacán, last October after armed men appeared in her community.

“They said that the people had to leave, that they weren’t going to do anything, but that they wanted [the people] to leave,” said Rodríguez, a mother of three children who left with only the clothes she could fit into a bag.

Rodríguez, who has been living in the city, said her village is now completely empty and she doesn’t know when, if ever, she’ll be able to return.

“Some days it seems that it’s kind of calm, but then, at the next moment, it gets worse,” said Rodríguez, who was with her young daughter at a Christmas picnic in a Culiacán park organized by volunteers for about 800 families who’ve been displaced from their communities by the conflict.

“We can’t say whether [we’ll be able to return] the next month, or the month after. It’s really tough.”

Inside the war, some combatants believe the conflict will only end when one side — the Chapitos or the Mayitos — is annihilated or absorbed by the other.

“Of the two factions, only one can remain,” a security operative with the Sinaloa cartel said in an interview.

CBC News is not revealing the individual’s identity or their faction for security reasons.

“Right now the situation is red hot," said the operative. "There is no respect for children, no respect for women, no respect for the elderly. There is no respect for anything.”