A cartel leader says that he is trying to understand how to protect his family in case the American army strikes inside Mexico. Another says he has already gone to hide, rarely leaving his house. Two young men who produce fentanyl for the cartel say they have closed all their drug laboratories.
A dam of arrests, drug crises and laboratory busts by the Mexican authorities in recent months has struck the Cartel of the giant Sinaloa, according to Mexican officials and interviews with six cartel agents, forcing at least some of its leaders to recover on the production of Fentanyl in the state of Sinaloa, their strong property.
Cartels sowed terror across Mexico and caused incalculable damage to the United States. But here in Culiacán, the capital of the State, the dynamics seem to change, at least for the moment. Cartel agents say they had to move laboratories to other regions of the country or temporarily close production.
“You can’t be calm, you can’t even sleep, because you don’t know when they catch you,” said a high -ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel who, like other cartel agents, spoke under the cover of anonymity for fear of capturing.
“The most important thing now is to survive,” he added, his trembling hands.
Government’s repression against organized crime has intensified after the Trump administration has threatened with remuneration unless Mexico hides fentanyl in the United States, producing high prices if the flow of migrants and drugs continued.
President Trump began to float the possibility of prices shortly after his election in November, and shortly after taking up his duties announced 25% samples from Mexican products if the country did not act on border security and drug trafficking. The president gave Mexico a month to provide results, threatening to implement the prices on March 4 if he was not satisfied.
Faced with economic chaos, the Mexican government went to the offensive. President Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 troops from the National Guard to the border and the hundreds of additional soldiers in the state of Sinaloa, a major hub for fentanyl trafficking where a cartel war caused trouble for months.
“Each day, there have been arrests and convulsions,” said Omar Harfuch, the Mexican Minister of Security, at a recent press conference after his several days in Sinaloa. The detentions led to “a constant weakening” of the cartel, he said.
The country’s police have grasped almost as much fentanyl in the past five months as the previous year. The administration of Ms. Sheinbaum says that she has carried out nearly 900 arrests in Sinaloa only since October.
Then, last week, the Mexican government said that it had started sending more than two dozen cartel agents wanted by the American authorities to the United States. It was a clear signal for the Trump administration that Mexico was impatient to fight the cartels, although Mr. Trump said the same day that he was still not satisfied with the government’s efforts and that the prices would come into force on Tuesday.
“The criminal groups have not felt this level of pressure for so long,” said Jaime López, security analyst based in Mexico City.
During the interviews, the cartel agents accepted. Some said they were selling goods and bound unprecedented personnel to compensate for the loss of revenue from the breach in fentanyl trade. Others said they were investing money in advanced equipment to detect US government drones, which the United States flew in Mexico during Biden and Obama administrations.
Criminal organizations in Mexico have a long history of surviving efforts to dismantle them, or simply collapse in new groups. But several agents said that for the first time in years, they really feared arrest or death in the hands of the authorities.
Experts noted that a drop in production in Culiacán would not necessarily affect the flow of northern fentanyl, as the drug is easy to make and the cartel can move its laboratories elsewhere. And it is not clear how long the disturbances of Culiacán will last. The cooks and experts said they expected the cartel to restart laboratories in the city if the pressure was lowering or if the group needed an influx of money.
But the repression had an immediate impact, they said, and some have cited Mr. Trump’s new pressure.
“Trump has established a deadline, and we see the results of everything we could have seen in the years in a month,” said López. “The government sends a message that when it really wishes, it can exercise this kind of pressure.”
But even before pricing threats are clear, Ms. Sheinbaum had shown her her desire to take the cartels as soon as she took office on October 1.
His predecessor and political ally, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had continued a strategy which he called “hugs and not bullets”, focusing on the deep causes of crime and generally avoiding violent confrontations with criminals.
As she promises an allegiance to the vision of her mentor, Ms. Sheinbaum made the headlines with a touch of battles between soldiers and armed men who left dozens of deaths earlier in her presidency.
Cartel members said they were making their own preparations for increased pressure under Mr. Trump. US officials say that the United States has recently started to extend drone flights to Mexico to detect drug laboratories, and the administration last week has appointed several cartels as terrorist organizations.
In interviews, cartel agents said they imported scanners to detect drones and hire more people with experience in operation and follow such planes. They also said they had increased weapons expeditions from the United States, the source of most illegal weapons used by criminals in Mexico.
Inside the Trump administration, there is still a division as to whether the United States should take unilateral military action in Mexico against cartels, or whether it should work more closely with the Mexican government in the fight against drug trade.
Mexico cartels are known to raise military quality weapons, including IED and land mines, but the agents recognized in the interviews they could barely compete with the American army arsenal. Despite this, a high -level agent said that the cartel would be ready to respond if raids or strikes were made.
“If a helicopter comes here and the soldiers abandon, 20 or 30 of them,” said the operator, “there is no way to sit here with our crossed arms.”
A cartel fentanyl cook, speaking of prison, said that he was in fact in favor of the application of the law by the Mexican government because he thought that the fight against the violence of the cartel could prevent the “death of innocent”.
Last week, the Mexican forces arrested two great players in the Sinaloa cartel who were associates close to the Archivaldo Iván Guzmán Salazar, the most powerful son of the drug lord known as El Chapo. After the news of the captures has spread, the Mexican army deployed a wave of soldiers throughout the city, installing control points and blocking whole blocks.
Despite arrests, violence in Culiacán continues to make lives. A recent Wednesday morning, a man’s body appeared in front of the earth in the middle of a street at an animated intersection, his hands attached and the blood flowing from his head.
The next day, the body of a different man was found in a nearby residential area, linked feet and a plastic bag above his head. Pleets said he seemed that the victim had been shot on the spot.
Ms. Sheinbaum defended her record for the fight against cartels and retaliated strongly against the accusation of Trump’s White House that the Mexican government “an intolerable alliance” with drug traffickers.
“We combine organized crime groups, there is no doubt about it,” she said at a press conference last month, adding: “We are looking for organized crime.”
But little dispute that corruption is seeve in Mexico. The last major repression against organized crime was led by a security chief who was subsequently sentenced to the United States Federal Court to have taken bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.
Cartel members said the only reason the government had not really fought them until recently was because they had bought enough civil servants. A Cartel cell manager said that he doubted that this new effort seriously damages the cartel because the group could ensure its survival by welding the main officials.
“There are always weak points,” he said, “there are always cowardly ends that we can reach.”
When they were asked how he feels like labeled terrorists, the responses of cartel agents went from apathetic to indignant.
The fentanyl cook in prison argued that real terrorists were users of the United States whose insatiable appetite for drugs fuels the profession. The other two young cooks agreed that the worst actors were north of the border: arms dealers who transform smuggling weapons to Mexico who kill so many people.
The high -level operator said he considered himself a businessman, not a terrorist.
“We are talking about supply and demand,” he said, “not AK-47, even less bombing.”
Even if the government bombes all drug laboratories in Mexico, he said, this will not make Americans less dependent on the drug, which is one of the most addictive synthetic opioids. He said that with the right ingredients, fentanyl can be synthesized almost anywhere – in tiny kitchens or rudimentary mountain laboratories – and that as long as the Americans want fentanyl, it will be made.
“The demand will never end, the product is still consumed,” said the operator. “Dependence means that demand never ends.”
