The Goshen Massacre and the Specter of Cartel Spillover Into the US

The atrocity breaks the California gang codes of not killing children

“What we have since learned through forensics is that it was clear that the shooters stood over the top of the 16-year old mother and fired rounds into her head. The ten-month year-old infant also suffered from the same attack. None of this was by accident. It was deliberate, intentional and horrific.”

Sheriff Mike Boudreaux slowed down his words and looked round the press conference as he revealed the details of the preliminary investigation into the murder of six people - three adult men, a 72-year-old woman, and the teenage girl and her baby. The massacre bore striking similarities to those that scar Mexico daily in which cartel gunmen hunt a target and wipe out their entire family. But this blood was shed in Goshen, a town of some 5,000 in the central California county of Tulare, rich in cattle, oranges and grapes.

“We don’t know if it is a gang affiliated shooting, a cartel affiliation, or if the two are combined, but what we can tell is that the manner in which this occurred is definitely one of the two if not combined,” Boudreaux said, in a slightly knotty statement.

The tragic Goshen massacre of Monday, January 16, revives a fear that has been haunting the southern U.S. border for two decades - the specter of the brutal cartel warfare that has ravaged Mexico spilling over the line. It’s a valid concern that the United States needs to be vigilant about as it could have catastrophic consequences. But it is one that has largely not come to pass, thanks in part to U.S. law enforcement cracking down hard on the few cartel murders north of the Rio Grande.

The Goshen case is fast developing and new facts will inevitably emerge in the coming days and weeks. The gunmen went in soon after 3 am and opened fire on the family. As well as the six who were killed, three family members survived. One was hiding very close by as the killers unloaded the bullets. “He was in such a state of fear that all he could do was hold the door, hoping he was not the next victim,” the sheriff said.

Police are hunting two suspected shooters and potentially a third in a getaway car. There were active drug and gang investigations involving the house. At least one of the victims, Eladio Parraz, 52, was on felony parole. After a Jan. 3 check, police got a search warrant for the house and caught Parraz with various guns as well as drugs. He was arrested but released on bail four days later.

The difference between “gang” and “cartel” violence might seem a question of syntax but it is very real and has huge consequences. “Cartels have different rules than street gangs have,” explains Morgan Chappell, a recently retired California homicide and gang detective.

California has a plethora of Latino street gangs, but they are almost all affiliated with one of the two prison gangs, the Mexican Mafia, known as La Eme, and Nuestra Familia, known as NF. Those who pay tribute to La Eme are more in the south of the state and are known as Sureños; those who pay tribute to NF are more in the centre and north and so are Norteños.

Motives for violence can be complicated and varied, including for revenge or enforcement and be within gangs or between them. However, these U.S. gangs police their violence and have avoided the large number of innocent casualties who lose their lives in Mexico.

“For many years, the Sureños would do drive-bys but in the nineties, the Mexican Mafia put out a policy that no Sureños anywhere were allowed to do drive-bys anymore, so they had to actually walk up and confront their victim before they shot them,” Chappell said.

The Norteños echoed the policy and this was a key factor in the reduction in murders in California in the 1990s and 2000s. Gangs operated and made money, especially in street-level drug selling, of which a percentage would be kicked up to the leaders in prison, but the level of bloodshed was controlled.

South of the border in Mexico, in contrast, cartel violence escalated from about 2004, and then shot up to critical levels from 2008. Cartels formed paramilitary death squads, battles with the security forces have lasted days, the biggest massacre claimed the lives of 72 victims and the biggest mass grave had almost 300 bodies.

During this period of historic bloodshed in Mexico however, there have only been a few dozen proven cartel killings in the United States. Most have been part of two biggest cases. The first was a string of murders in South Texas in the early to mid 2000s by the Zetas, a mob led by former Mexican soldiers who were upstarts challenging the older cartel bosses. The second was in Southern California around 2004 to 2007, in which some victims had their bodies dissolved in acid, by a breakaway group from the Tijuana Cartel known as Los Palillos.

In both cases, law enforcement hit the perpetrators hard, and this reinforced a message for the cartels that it did not pay to unleash violence in the United States; it only brought heat on their operations when they were making billions of dollars bringing in drugs for American users.

In Mexico, the police could be bought or outgunned, and so the cartels could traffic while they fought relentless open warfare. But in the United States, it was better to keep under the radar as much as possible, while shifting huge amounts of cocaine and heroin, and more recently crystal meth and fentanyl. This created a paradox that could be seen sharply on the border. In 2010, for example, Ciudad Juárez was the most murderous city in the world with over 3000 killings, but El Paso was one of the safest with just five homicides.

The cartels sell drugs to U.S. street gangs and at times the relationship has become stronger. Members of the Logan Heights gang in San Diego became hit men for the Tijuana Cartel in Mexico, and a Texas prison gang, the Barrio Azteca, developed a paramilitary wing of the Juarez Cartel south of the border.

Chappell said they believe the Sinaloa Cartel has a big presence in Central California, and there are also many drug traffickers from the state of Michoacán. The cartels usually sell drugs at the kilo level and above, he said, and the street gangs sell them “retail” to users. This relationship explains the sheriff’s comment that it could be a combination of gang and cartel killing.

If the gunmen were simply carrying out a gang hit they could be punished internally, even potentially executed, Chappell said. “The fact is that Norteño street soldiers and Sureño street soldiers they have people to answer to,” he said. “There are strict rules and codes of contact that were clearly broken in this situation…You don’t kill kids. Everybody knows that.”

The stakes then are high, and not just for this one family. This could be an atypical incident, a murder by gang members breaking their rules, or by wild strung out drug addicts, or a cartel break away. But the concern is if it becomes the norm and the rules change. “Nothing I have worked in the past 20 years comes close to this,” Chappell said. “When you kill a baby like that, that completely changes everything.”

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2023. Photos from Tulare Sheriff’s Department.