Mexico’s president has praised the special forces for “bringing down” the country’s most wanted man, drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes.
Oseguera, better known as “El Mencho”, died in custody on Sunday, shortly after being captured amid a bloody firefight in Jalisco.
But as the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville found in another Mexican cartel hotspot – Culiacán in northern Sinaloa state – the vacuum left by the removal of a powerful cartel leader can trigger a surge in violence as warring factions battle for control.
“The fear is everywhere and the fear is constant,” said paramedic Héctor Torres, 53, from the front seat of the ambulance in Culiacán.
We had just come from the scene of a shooting inside a garage in the city centre.
The owner was lying dead in his office, blood spreading across the white tiled floor. As Héctor and the other paramedic, Julio César Vega, 28, entered the premises, a woman ran in wailing.
She was the man’s wife, but there was nothing to be done. Héctor checked for vitals and then placed a paper blanket over the corpse.
For the last year and a half, the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s largest and most feared drug gangs has been at war with itself, after the son of one of its leaders betrayed another.
The removal of that cartel leader, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who is now in prison in the US, has wrought mayhem across Sinaloa and provides a warning of the dangers facing the country.
Héctor said the violence in Culiacán had never been so bad or gone on for so long. Last year, their number of call outs increased by over 70%.
But in the week I spent with Héctor and Julio almost every incident they responded to ended the same way, with a dead body in a building or by the side of the road, and grief-stricken relatives nearby asking for answers.
Few cartel victims survive, and nowhere is safe; schools, hospitals and even funerals have been attacked.
“Sinaloa cartel was like a family. Everyone was united in a single cartel. They were friends, they ate at the same table,” Héctor explained. “They were like brothers –parents, uncles, sisters – and suddenly they were fighting… and locked in a deadly feud,” he said.
That family business was built into a billion-dollar enterprise producing the deadly drug fentanyl and flooding US streets with opioids which have cost tens of thousands of lives.
US President Donald Trump declared the cartel, and others, terrorist organisations, and labelled fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. He’s threatened Mexico with direct military action if it doesn’t bring the drug and the traffickers under control.
BBC
