Cuautla, Capital of Extortion

I investigate how the touristic state of Morelos became the second most violent in Mexico

This is from the series “Piso,” a special series on extortion in Mexico

Stories include:

Mexico State: Golden Goose For Extortion

Acapulco - From Mother of Mexican Tourism To Extortion Central

Cuautla, Capital of Extortion

Para leer en español click aquí.

For years, Graciela ignored threatening phone calls demanding money from the profits of her grocery store in the city of Cuautla but this time was different. A teenage boy came into the shop and put the phone to her ear. A man on the other end of the line gave detailed information about her children, their schooling, jobs, partners, and hit the punchline: he wanted half a million pesos ($27,000 U.S.) plus her SUV, or he would target her family.

Graciela contacted a friend in the police about the threat but the answer wasn’t good. “He advised me that the best thing to do was come to an agreement and pay. He said the police could arrest some of the gang when they came to collect but they wouldn’t get all of them and the others would take revenge.” Graciela bargained with the extortionists and eventually paid 200,000 pesos ($11,000). She hasn’t heard back since but she is nervous.

Extortion is rampant in Cuautla, a city with 480,000 residents in its metro area in the green touristic state of Morelos - which is home to Cuernavaca “the city of eternal spring,” Tepoztlán, the “magical pueblo,” and the deep lake of Tequesquitengo. One study even found that Cuautla had the worst rate of extortion in all Mexico.

But while gangsters extract what is known as their piso, or shakedown payments, from so many Cuautla businesses, from shops to buses to even private schools, it was difficult for me to get anyone to talk about it as people are so terrified. Even though I promised I would change the name of “Graciela” and there would be no cameras or recording, we took precautions so people would not see us meet.

While Morelos sits next to the much safer Mexico City, where it draws a lot of its tourism, it suffered the second worst murder rate per capita in the entire country in 2024 with 77 homicides per 100,000 people. It was only beaten by Colima, where cartels ship precursor chemicals through the grand port of Manzanillo and fight over the turf.

This year has seen a significant reduction of murders in Morelos under a new governor, Margarita González Saravia. But it still suffers a very high rate and extortion doesn’t seem to have waned.

It’s counter intuitive that Morelos would be one of Mexico’s most violent states given that it’s no longer a major trafficking corridor and hasn’t produced top kingpins like in Sinaloa or Tamaulipas. There are few reports of convoys of gunmen, attack drones, and sustained gun battles like in Michoacán or Zacatecas.

Yet bodies pile up, so I went to investigate what was happening.

Red News Reporter

Cuautla is the epicenter of violence in Morelos but it’s an unlikely setting. It was the home of revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and his bones are buried here, and is a land of campesino farmers, market traders, flowery plazas, colonial churches, and more recently, taco joints, gyms and bars.

Francisco “Pacooooooo” Cedeño is the top local reporter covering violence and he shows me round, letting me sit on the back of his quad bike as we race across the sprawl. Like many of those who cover the nota roja, or “red news,” Paco is a colorful character, brave, outspoken, and hardworking, and as we zap about the city, residents wave to him and he points to old crime scenes. Almost every other block, he shows me a spot where someone was shot, a body was dumped, or a business was burned out.

Paco risks his life covering the beat. Gunmen shot up his car twice, and during one of these attacks he sped into an army base for protection. Another time, a vehicle tried to run him off the road and in yet another, police beat him unconscious. Yet he keeps reporting and gives me a stern statement about the state of his city.

“We are up to our necks in it. Violence has permeated every level,” Paco says. “The butchers have to pay the maña, the criminals. Every kilo of beef they sell they pay 20 pesos. The tortilla shops pay. The public transport, the buses and taxis pay.”

Paco said that one gang even gave buses a sticker of a panda bear with two machine guns, showing they had paid their piso, which is normally a monthly charge. “They have a better registry of all the vehicles than the government,” he said.

Extortion in Cuautla is controlled by five or six gangs that Paco calculates have over a thousand operatives between them. The gangs are also into selling drugs (meth, cocaine and weed) and brewing adulterated liquor, which bars will sell as brand names.

Many of those who collect the piso payments and do hits are just teenagers, who will serve less time in prison. Cartel gunmen in many areas use Kalashnikovs and AR-15s but in Cuautla they often use pistols and drive round on motorbikes and Paco calls them “moto-sicarios.”

While these crews have contacts with major mobs, such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and La Familia, they are local operations. So how did they emerge from the fires of Mexico’s cartel wars and how do they now fit into this bigger picture? To find the answer we need to peer back to when Sinaloa Cartel boss Arturo “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva ruled Morelos and through the controversial reign of footballer-turned politician Cuauhtémoc Blanco.

Homemade booze or Morelos moonshine

The Fragmentation Effect

While Beltrán Leyva is not a household name, he was one of the biggest cocaine traffickers Mexico has ever known, on a level with El Chapo and El Mayo who he worked with. “On the business side, I think he’s unmatched,” the former Chicago cocaine trafficker Margarito Flores told me about Beltrán Leyva.

Born in the mountains of Sinaloa, Beltrán Leyva settled in Morelos, a beautiful state that the conquistador Hernán Cortés also made his home. Beltrán Leyva bought off police and officials, hired local thugs into his crime army and flew cocaine into Morelos to traffic north. In 2007, a Super King Air 200 touched down in Cuernavaca’s airport full of blow followed by the DEA but corrupt cops could have let the narcos get the dope.

Yet while Beltrán Leyva was a powerful crime lord with operatives all the way to Acapulco on the coast, he had no competition in Morelos and stuck to drug trafficking, keeping the murder rate low and most people unbothered. The situation changed drastically when Beltrán Leyva went to war with his old partner El Chapo in the Sinaloa Cartel and then in 2009, Mexican marines, acting on DEA intel, gunned down Beltrán Leyva in a luxury Cuernavaca apartment.

Beltrán Leyva’s lieutenants fought over his empire and founded smaller cartels in the region, especially the Rojos and Guerreros Unidos. They moved from cocaine to heroin and became more brutal with local “civilians.” The Guerreros Unidos carried out the horrific disappearance of 43 students from the school of Ayotzinapa, working with police and maybe other security forces.

Yet as Rojos and Guerreros leaders were killed or arrested, their own affiliates broke away into even smaller crews. These are the gangs now operating, the fragments of the fragments of the fragment from the original Sinaloa Cartel. Without the capacity to move drugs across international borders, they turned to extortion with a vengeance. They became so effective at preying on people, the sources here say, thanks to corruption and ineptness in the Morelos state police.

From World Cup to a Photo With Narcos

Cuauhtémoc Blanco was one of Mexico’s best strikers, playing in teams including América, Real Valladolid in Spain and Chicago Fire and gaining fame for an unorthodox “bunny hop” kick in the 1998 World Cup. Retiring from football, he bunny-hopped into politics, elected mayor of Cuernavaca in 2016 and governor of Morelos in 2018, and is currently a federal deputy for the ruling Morena party.

Cuauhtémoc governed over a huge spike in murders in Morelos, with a jump from 823 killings in 2018 to 1525 in 2024. A photo made its way to the press (above) in 2023 of Cuauhtémoc posing for a photo with three top gangsters from the Morelos crews. Cuauhtémoc denied knowing them saying, “I’m such a good guy that I take photos with everybody.”

Raúl Alberto García (below) served in the Morelos state police following work in federal law enforcement, but made complaints about corruption in the force under Cuauhtémoc and his head of security José Ortiz Guarneros. For his efforts, Raúl was fired and himself arrested and imprisoned before he finally cleared his name and sued the department.

Raúl describes to me a nightmare situation, with commanders stealing money and leaving officers without gasoline or guns, an accused kidnapper being appointed, and police officers taking drugs and working with criminals. I ask him why he made the complaints knowing how Mexico works.

“We are in a bad place,” he says. “People think this is our job. And it’s not. They don’t let us do our job. They tie our hands.”

I ask Raúl how bad police corruption is in a state like Morelos and how many could work for the gangs. He said that maybe 10 percent but that is enough to cause a major problem because it means they are leaking information to criminals who are one step ahead.

This allowed extortion to grow as those who went to make statements to police could end up being killed or disappeared, he said. Sometimes, police were just too slow to act but in other cases corrupt cops could leak the name of the witness to the gangsters.

It’s like a bucket with a hole in it, which means it doesn’t work as a bucket.

“The Real Dick” and “Three Wise Men”

It’s confusing to keep track of all the cartels and gangs operating in Morelos and Raúl says that even the police aren’t sure which crews are where. One media report noted dozens of groups from major mobs like La Familia and Jalisco Cartel to crews with comical names like La Mera Verga (The Real Dick), Los Mismos de Siempre (The Same As Always), and Los Reyes Magos (The Three Wise Men).

They sell drugs and Raúl shows me discarded baggies on the streets of Cuernavaca, they run prostitutes and Raúl shows me the zone of sex workers, and in some parts of the state they run illegal logging or steal oil. But extortion is the bread and butter of these crews, and they fight over areas to shake down.

Raúl makes a pertinent point that gangsters shifted to extortion after they used to carry out more kidnapping. Following a government crackdown, many kidnappers were caught with hostages and got stiff sentences but it’s harder to convict extortionists, especially without witnesses.

Shakedowns have a devastating effect on the economy and public life. Back in Cuautla, Paco estimates that 800 to 1200 businesses have shut down because of the attacks. Even a Coca Cola affiliate paused operations in the town of Puente de Ixtla over extortion demands.

When a shop keeper is working to pay gangsters it makes life miserable. And sometimes, two or even more crews can demand payment from people.

“You turn into a slave,” says Paco. “You work for everybody but yourself.”

Both Paco and Raúl say there has been a certain improvement under the new governor, González Saravia, but there is still a long way to go. The federal government also sent a big contingent of soldiers and National Guard into Cuautla in August which calmed the killing. But Raúl fears the gangs could have just made territorial agreements to reduce murder while they still do shake downs.

The Mexican Cartel Wars vary massively from state to state. In Sinaloa, a powerful cartel earns vast wealth shifting drugs to the United States and commands paramilitary forces but has broken into two warring factions. In Morelos, fragmented crews have become more like gangs but drop a huge amount of bodies and inflict real pain creating a seething resentment in the population.

The different situations warrant different responses. In Morelos, a strong police force could drastically change things because the gangs are relatively weak, and to extort they have to expose themselves. And residents would love to rid themselves of piso if they had a chance.

But if the government fails to deal with the predatory crime, there is a chance of an uprising of self-defense militias to stop it. You have to wonder what Zapata would do if he were to rise out of the ground and see what was happening today in his beloved homeland.

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All photos by Ioan Grillo, except photo 2 by Paco Cedeño and photo of Cuauhtemoc Blanco from unnamed source in public domain.

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2025