Mexico's Cartel Map 2024

Who controls what turf at the dusk of AMLO's presidency?

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On front lines between Mexico’s warring cartels, gunmen can spray walls to claim territory like street gangs. I took this picture of a Jalisco New Generation Cartel marker on the bloodily-contested border of Michoacán and Jalisco state in 2022. A decade earlier, I had reported on the Gulf Cartel and Zetas fighting block by block over the city of Cadereyta and competing to paint “CDG” and “Z,” then conquering a few meters of turf to delete their rivals’ markers.

These crude tags are the exception rather than the rule however. Cartels are generally far bigger than street gangs and wield power over mayors, police forces and entire states. They don’t need to spray a wall for cowered residents to know they are in charge.

So which territories do they control? Below, I sketch a map of who, in my analysis, are the significant cartels and what turf they hold or contest as we begin 2024, the last year of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (and changes of Mexico’s presidents tend to lead to shifting cartel borders).

I don’t pretend this idea of a cartel map is original; strategic intel companies such as Strafor have long published them. But this is my take on what the divisions are and I add a level of nuance by classifying cartels onto three levels: major transnational cartels (I count two); powerful regional cartels (I have four); and local cartels (over a dozen). I also get into analysis on how the different cartels operate, how strong they are and who is running them.

I can hear some of your brains screaming about the problems with cartel maps, and I do throw in big caveats here. Cartels are not like top down companies, or tight armies, but are complex criminal networks. (I go into the debate about their nature here). They are made of up of semi-linked factions and plagued by infighting. Yet they wield real power and unleash painfully real violence that we are forced to make sense of.

Another nuance is that cartel control varies in its intensity. In extreme examples, such as in Comalapa, Chiapas, the cartel exerts brutal and visible control over many aspects of life. But in others places, such as Mexico City, cartels can be quietly operating to make deals with federal officials and launder money. I plan a more detailed graphic on the contrasting levels of violence to come, and have considered some of that here with a white area for “low intensity cartel activity.”

It’s not an exact science. Over the years, I have reported in every Mexican state, interviewed thousands of people, and scour all the sources I can. Yet the demarcation of territory I paint is shifting and open to debate - and that also goes for cartel maps by security companies or even by the DEA or Mexican army. There are complicating factors: a local cartel can have an alliance with a bigger cartel; a cartel can be dominant but there’s a small presence of another force.

With that in mind then, here is CrashOut’s “official” cartel map and list of significant cartels for 2024.

List of Cartels (Descriptions below)

Major Transnational Cartels

Sinaloa Cartel

Jalisco New Generation Cartel

Powerful Regional Cartels

Gulf Cartel

Northeast Cartel

Juárez Cartel / La Linea

La Familia

Local Cartels

Arellano Félix Organization (CAF)

Zetas factions (Zetas vieja escuela, Zetas nueva sangre)

Los Rojos

Guerreros Unidos

La Unión Tepito (La Unión CDMX)

Los Ardillos

Los Talibanes

Los Tlacos

Los Viagras (Part of Cárteles Unidos)

Cártel de Santa Rosa de Lima

Caballeros Templarios

Cártel Independiente de Acapulco (CIDA)

Cártel Chamula (CSJC)

The Big Two

Sinaloa Cartel

The U.S. Justice Department says, “the Sinaloa Cartel is one of the most powerful drug cartels in the world and is largely responsible for the manufacturing and importing of fentanyl for distribution in the United States.” It claims the most infamous mobsters, including El Chapo, and probably controls the most territory in Mexico.

Perched on the Pacific, Sinaloa has a history of drug production back to the nineteenth century when Chinese workers brought opium poppies and planted seeds. By the 1950s, when El Chapo was born, it had such thriving heroin production that its baseball team was nicknamed the gummers (meaning those who harvest opium gum).

Sinaloan traffickers were mobile and founded networks where they went, from Tijuana to Ciudad Juárez to Jalisco. What was arguably Mexico’s first cartel, the Guadalajara Cartel, was headed by a trio of Sinaloan kingpins in the 1980s. Sinaloan crime kings including El Chapo and his partner El Mayo became known as The Federation or the Pacific Cartel in the 1990s and then more commonly as the Sinaloa Cartel by the mid 2000s.

The Sinaloa Cartel works like a federation of gangsters operating across Mexico, the U.S.A. and the world. Its biggest players include the Chapitos, or sons of El Chapo, dominant in state capital Culiacán, and 76-year old Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who controls the central countryside. Fausto Isidro Meza, or “El Chapo Isidro,” is powerful on the Sinaloan coast, including Mazatlán and Mochis. (He was part of the breakaway Beltrán Leyva Cartel but likely moved back into the main Sinaloan network).

Sinaloan mobsters often sell themselves as the “good bad guys” who focus on selling drugs rather than predatory rackets like shakedowns. But that can be untrue, and parts of their empire such as Durango now include major extortion of the mining industry.

Jalisco New Generation Cartel

Mexico’s second cartel emerged suddenly as a paramilitary death squad carrying out major massacres of the Zetas in 2011 before it seemed to be appear in every battleground. By 2015, the CJNG was infamous for its displays of gunmen as above and even shooting down a Mexican army helicopter.

The speed of its ascent leads to rumors it’s a state op. But while it certainly buys official protection so do the other mobs and its success is likely owed to other factors.

First, it rose in the state of Jalisco, which is strategically placed at the heart of Mexico, and it secured footholds on both the Gulf and Pacific coasts. Secondly, it built on the old commercial networks of the Guadalajara Cartel while incorporating the paramilitary style of the Zetas it helped fell. And third, it had especially strong leadership in Nemesio Oseguera, or El Mencho.

Hailing from a drug town in the hills, Mencho was a heroin dealer in San Francisco in the 1980s before he became a Jalisco cop. He soon flipped back to the narcos and rose under the Sinaloan gangster Nacho Coronel before taking his empire when soldiers shot him dead.

Mencho has survived various attempts at arrests through bribes or the use of force, and is an expert at putting violent pressure on the government to back off. He’s said to be ill and needing dialysis and rumors often abound of his death, including one in December sparked by a corrido (ballad) entitled “Ya se fue,” or “Now he’s gone.” If its true, or whenever he does die, there is risk of instability over his succession.

Four Regional Powers

Gulf Cartel

The Gulf Cartel is sometimes credited as being the oldest for its roots in the bootlegging network of Juan Nepomuceno Guerra, a criminal tycoon from Matamoros over the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. But it didn’t likely become a significant drug trafficking force until the 1980s and only properly extended its dominion into the nearby Nuevo Laredo in the 2000s.

It infamously recruited the Zetas from the Mexican military, which would escalate the whole Mexican cartel war. This would also tear the cartel apart as the Zetas rebelled and became an upstart force rampaging across Mexico. While the Gulf Cartel rebounded to keep its key territory it has been caught in a circle of infighting since.

Still, the CDG remains important by controlling a chunk of turf into the Gulf of Mexico that is especially lucrative thanks to growth in Texas and the level of human smuggling.

The Juarez Cartel / La Linea

Built by the famed Lord of the Skies, the Juárez Cartel dominates the prized center of the Mexican border. Since the 2014 arrest of its boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes however it has lacked clear leadership and its factions such as the Barrio Azteca gang have focused on violent street drug selling.

Still, its armed wing La Linea has deepened its control across the state of Chihuahua. This brings it into renewed conflict with the Sinaloa Cartel, which led to the massacre of nine Mormon women and children in 2019.

Northeast Cartel

When the Zetas got attacked from all sides in the 2010s, they fragmented. Their core force, however, rebranded themselves as the Cártel del Noreste and held onto Nuevo Laredo, the busiest truck crossing point on the whole border. While this territory is limited in scale, it’s lucrative for trafficking and the CDN wields significant paramilitary forces.

La Familia

While La Familia formed in Michoacán, it now has its strongest base in Mexico State as well as creeping into Guerrero. Being in Mexico’s most populous state gives it a strong economic base, but its shakedowns led it into a violent confrontation with farmers in December.

The Dirty Dozen

It could be argued that the dozen plus groups I classify as “local” don’t deserve to be called cartels as they lack the scale. Yet they follow the same practices and structures as the big players and can each have thousands of operatives under their command. (There are also other groups that some would argue need to be on the list).

Some have gained an immense control of politicians and police forces on a local level, and a terrifying capacity for violence, such as the Guerreros Unidos behind the disappearance of 43 student teachers in 2014.

Many are fragments of once larger cartels. The Beltrán Leyva Cartel dominated Guerrero and Morelos before it shattered into many of the new groups. Remnants of the Zetas haunt corners of Puebla, Veracruz and Tamaulipas.

This fragmentation and its violent consequences underlines the failure of the kingpin strategy of cutting off the heads of the snakes. Unfortunately, nobody has come up with an alternative that works either. Mexico now has a varied criminal ecosystem of cartels large, medium and small.

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Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2024