Cartel Cash in the Community

What percentage of Mexico's GDP is in organized crime?

This is part four in a series on narco cash, or cartel-onomics. The first parts are:

I. How Much Money Do Cartels Make and Where Is It?

II. Narco Bling and Dirty-Money Laundromats

III. The Narc Asset Seizure Business

Part IV : Cartel Cash in the Community

As the Covid pandemic exploded in 2020, and people round the globe got hit by sickness, lock-downs, and shortages, cartels in Mexico handed out goodie bags of supplies and posted videos of their charity on social media. Often masked and toting rifles, the cartel operatives staged the hand-outs from Tamaulipas, on the border with Texas, to the mountains of Michoacán, on the Pacific Ocean. But the closest incident to Mexico City was in a video reported to be of La Familia mob in the municipality of Villa Guerrero, a two hour drive into Mexico State.

A couple of days after the video came out, I rented a car and headed there with a friend, arriving in Villa Guerrero’s central town, which is famous for selling flowers and the plaza was filled with wonderful floral arrangements mixing yellow, purple and turquoise. I asked residents about the cartel hand-out and while most had heard about it they weren’t sure exactly where it happened and we spent hours traipsing around barrios and villages. Eventually, we tracked it to a hamlet in the hills called La Loma de Concepcíon, and found families who had received the goodies.

Loma de Concepcíon only has about 900 residents so the cartel’s charity effort reached few people but made a big noise on social media. Familia operatives had rolled onto a village field in a couple of trucks and word spread quickly down the streets. They handed out the goods in transparent plastic bags with a note saying, “Support from La Familia Michoacana, the M Comando.”

On the edge of the village, I found an extended family of flower farmers living in two households next door to each other, their yards full of chickens. When they heard of the hand-out, they told me, two teenage girls from the family went to line up and collect a pair of bags. Their auntie said she was impressed by the goods. “The bags had milk, sugar, soap, rice,” she said. “These were not cheap brands. They were…

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