On The Ground in Sinaloa's New War

I went on the crime beat in Culiacán amid the Chapitos-Mayos conflict

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The thugs took their time to arrange the five corpses, propping the bloody bodies up against a wall and placing big sombreros on their heads (with the store labels still attached) and little sombreros on their chests and bellies. They left them opposite a water park popular with families on a road out of Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, home to Mexico’s oldest and richest narco empire.

I arrive with local crime reporters early Sunday morning as a blazing sun rises and see the macabre sight over the police tape. The lifeless faces look eerily calm but the jokey decoration makes it more terrifying - and spreads even more fear among the residents of Culiacán.

Cartel killers often decorate victims in what could be called “body messaging.” The meaning of the messages are confusing, perhaps deliberately. “Sombreros” is a nickname for the Mayos, the faction of the Sinaloa Cartel loyal to kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was (allegedly) kidnapped and flown to near El Paso where he was handed to U.S. agents in July. But it’s unclear if the killers are Mayos leaving the sombreros as a calling card, or the victims are Mayos and the hats are to mock them.

A few days earlier in another case of body messaging, thugs left a severed head on a Culiacán street in a box of half-eaten pizza. “Pizzas” is a nickname for the other major faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Chapitos, or “Chapiza,” (Cha-pizza…) who are currently at war with the Mayos. Again, it’s unclear if this means the Chapitos were victims or victimizers.

I arrive at the sombrero bodies during three days of following the crime beat to better understand the Mayos-Chapitos conflict. The civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel erupted on Sept. 9 and is creating a surge in Mexico’s violence just as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is due to leave office and his ally Claudia Sheinbaum takes over on Oct. 1. The conflict has paralyzed Culiacán, a city of a million people, heaping on economic damage and trauma.

Mexico has a strong tradition of crime reporting, known as nota roja, or red news, which used to fill tabloids but now mostly goes online. I followed Sinaloa red-news reporters during a previous cartel war from 2008 to 2010, and some of the same faces are still there such as Ernesto “Pepis” Martínez, a lanky figure of almost two meters faithfully at every scene. A couple of younger reporters in their twenties have joined the crew. I ride with Fidel Durán, a veteran photographer with a thick beard in his early sixties who I get out of retirement for the trip.

We rush to crime-scene after crime-scene and it’s overwhelming. I find you switch off emotionally and it’s easy to forget the lumps of meat on the ground are real humans. But then we go to a home where gunmen sprayed 320 bullets and a grenade to kidnap three people - and shot dead a 19-year-old girl, leaving her corpse in the shower. Her sister has come to collect the body and she is teared up, in pain. And the death and suffering at last feel real.

This seems worse than the last Sinaloa war. There is a darker atmosphere and I’m more pumped with adrenaline. Contagious fear surges through the city, which the local Culichis call “social psychosis.”

Residents peer out of their homes at the tape and soldiers and bodies. A middle-aged woman tells me her nerves are so on edge her bowels are messed up. A retired insurance sales woman says she is so terrified that she is leaving in a few days to stay with her daughter in Canada.

People are devastated by the loss of income. A carpenter, 51, comes out his home to a corpse left naked on a dirt street. He says his jobs were canceled once the war began. “I’ve been relying on my sons for money. But this can’t go on. We need to work.”

The level of paralysis in Culiacán is unprecedented in Mexico’s decades of cartel conflict. Violence has before made people leave their homes, shut down cities for a day or two and killed night life. But after Sept. 9, most businesses and schools in Culiacán were shuttered for an entire week while most people cowered in their houses.

It’s reminiscent of the early Covid lock down, and was likely partly inspired by it. Social media also fuels fear. People watch videos of gunmen in camo storming into residential communities or abducting youths in broad daylight. There have been some 40 reported kidnappings in the city since Sept. 9 as well as dozens of murders.

There are also misleading videos of old incidents or false alarms of convoys of killers that stir terror. Yet while there is some “fake news,” there is a very real conflict taking place at the heart of Mexico’s organized crime structures and it could get even worse.

Who Is Winning The War?

While details of the Mayos-Chapitos conflict (and all of the narco war) are difficult to pin down, a broad picture has emerged. The first shots were fired before dawn on Sept. 9, when a convoy of Mayos gunmen stormed into the Campiña neighborhood, a stronghold of the Chapitos, and targeted the home of an operator known as…

The rest of this piece with more serious intel is behind a pay wall, I’m afraid. I was the first foreign journalist to hit Culiacán for this important story and while I do it guerrilla-style, it still costs money; if you sign up for just $5, cheaper than that last cappuccino, you are supporting a worthy cause and are the best informed in the room.