Can a Mayos Victory End the Sinaloa War?
The year-long bloodbath is one of the worst cartel battles in history
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With Juan Alberto Cedillo and Ieva Jusionyte reporting in Sinaloa and Ioan Grillo
Last September, when war erupted between the two biggest factions of the Sinaloa Cartel - the Chapitos and the Mayos - a convoy of gunmen stormed into the rural municipality of La Concordia, on the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains. The cartel squad, residents say, were killers for the Chapitos under a local commander known as El Pekín who wanted to seize the area that had long been dominated by the Mayos. Pekín’s gunmen ravaged the surrounding villages, beating and killing, torching houses and woodland, and blockading roads, leaving hungry families without supplies. Hundreds fled.
“They beat me up three times. They said they didn’t want me in the village,” says Don Roque Vargas, a 72-year-old farmer who was forced to abandon his home and go the city of Mazatlán. “They burned our cars. They stole our animals. They harassed us.”
Finally after months away, Don Roque was able to go back to his home in June because gunmen from the Mayos had recaptured the area. The Chapitos had painted some walls in Concordia’s central town with pictures of pizzas, residents said, a symbol of their faction (which would be funny if it wasn’t such real violence), but when CrashOut visited at the beginning of August they had been painted over.
“Now that we have returned we are rebuilding our homes that were burned down,” Don Roque says. “We are remaking our lives.”
The experience of Concordia reveals two key facets of the Sinaloa Cartel civil war, which as it reaches a year has proven to be one of the worst cartel battles in history. The first is the immensity of suffering inflicts on Sinaloans. Since it kicked off on Sept. 9, there have been more than 1,800 murders and a similar number of disappeared, according to a count by El Noroeste newspaper. The war has displaced thousands, many who have fled to other parts of Mexico or the United States. Thousands of businesses have shuttered and billions of pesos been lost in earnings. Sinaloans long for peace.
A second development, according to various sources in Sinaloa, is that the Mayos appear to have gained a clear strategic advantage, capturing territory in both countryside and the capital of Culiacán. The Mayos are helped by more arrests of Chapitos commanders, the “flipping” of Chapitos to their side, and the support of more allies. While the Jalisco New Generation Cartel is backing the Chapitos, its gunmen are mainly on the other side of the mountains, battling from Zacatecas into Durango.
The fog of cartel wars is particularly thick, and we need to analyze the information with caution, especially when it comes from a certain side in the conflict. A big kill or arrest could abruptly change things. But sources in the Mayos faction claim they are confident they will achieve a victory by the end of this year.
A former member of the security team for Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who gave CrashOut an exclusive last year about Mayo’s kidnapping, described the developments of the war in detail. He said that a victory of the Mayos would lead to a new balance of power in the Sinaloa Cartel.
“A new map of the cartel is being drawn,” he said, “and it’s clear that the new bosses will be…
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