The Mexican Drug War is an ongoing armed conflict between the Mexican government and the country's powerful drug cartels, initiated in 2006 by President Felipe Calderon. The Mexican Federal Police, Mexican Army, and Mexican Navy launched a crackdown with the goal of dismantling the cartels and thus reducing drug-related violence, while the United States' DEA, FBI, CIA, and other governmental organizations fought against drug trafficking and demand in the USA.
The fragmentation of the Guadalajara Cartel in 1989 led to its former lieutenants forming four of the six major cartels active at the start of the Drug War: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, and the Gulf Cartel; Los Zetas broke away from the Gulf Cartel in 2010, while the sixth major cartel, La Familia Michoacana, became a powerful crime syndicate and religious cult in Michoacan. While the Mexican government launched the war with the goal of destroying the power of the entrenched cartels and reducing crime rates, crime skyrocketed as a result of the war, and, between 2007 and 2018, 115,000 were killed in organized crime homicides. Both the Mexican law enforcement and the drug cartels committed several atrocities during the conflict, and the conflict was prolonged by widespread corruption in the Mexican federal and state governments and by the drug cartels' popularity among several deprived communities (especially in Sinaloa), where drug lords such as Joaquin Guzman Loera (alias "El Chapo") and Ismael Zambada Garcia (alias "El Mayo") became popular for providing electricity, water, and other vital services to the neglected locals. On his election as President in 2018, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador declared that the "War on Drugs" was "over", but he resumed the fight against the cartels by forming the National Guard. By 2020, the Sinaloa Cartel had fragmented due to the 2008 break-off of the Beltran Leyva Cartel and infighting between the imprisoned El Chapo's family and Zambada Garcia's family from 2015 onwards; the Gulf Cartel had fragmented into Los Zetas and Los Pelones; Los Zetas itself had essentially broken up in 2018 due to the last of its "old guard" being arrested; La Familia Michoacana had broken up, while its successor the Knights Templar Cartel was defunct by 2017; the Tijuana Cartel had been reduced to a few cells by 2006 and was later revived as the New Generation Tijuana Cartel in 2016; and the Juarez Cartel had refounded itself as the "New Juarez Cartel" in 2011. The power vacuum caused by the decline of the six dominant original cartels opened the way for newer cartels such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel to rise to the top of the Mexican underworld.
The drug war also impacted Mexican politics, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came to be seen as the epitome of corruption due to its toleration of cartel activities during the late 20th century, several corruption scandals involving PRI politicians allying with cartel leaders, and even the Guadalajara Cartel's rigging of the 1988 presidential election. In Michoacan, the Knights Templar Cartel established ties with the Party of the Democratic Revolution, while the Jalisco New Generation Cartel established links with MORENA in some municipalities. In Tamaulipas, the Gulf Cartel had close relationships with the traditional PRI, while Los Zetas colluded with local politicians regardless of party affiliation. In Guerrero, the Sinaloa Cartel cultivated ties with the PRD. In Chihuahua, the Juarez Cartel was linked to the PRI, while MORENA was also accused of connections with criminal groups in certain municipalities.
By 2016, the war had left an estimated 2,887 security personnel (including 552 federal police and 1,822 municipal and state police) dead and 197 missing and allegedly over 80,000 cartel gunmen dead (with Enrique Peña Nieto's administration claiming to have killed 20,000) and over 121,199 detained. By March 2015, The Guardian estimated that the conflict had cost 200,000 lives, left 30,000 Mexicans missing, and failed to improve policing, implement the rule of law, or stop human rights abuses.
Background[]
Decline of Mexico[]
During the 1970s, regional underdevelopment, technological shortages, lack of foreign competition, uneven distribution of wealth, ubiquitous poverty, overevaluation of the peso, the decline of tourism, and a series of corrupt PRI governments led to the rapid decline of Mexico's economy. At the same time, the Juarez Cartel, founded in Ciudad Juarez in 1970, emerged as a powerful crime syndicate in the country's north due to the efforts of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was nicknamed "The Lord of the Skies" for using the "Mexican trampoline" to transport Colombian cocaine shipments into the United States via aircraft. The drug boom of the early 1980s led to the formation of several new Mexican drug cartels, predominant among them Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo's Guadalajara Cartel.
Rise of the cartels[]
The 1980s saw a massive increase in the drug trade due to skyrocketing demand in the United States, and corruption in Mexico's PRI governments worsened as local and federal politicians, state governors, and even generals such as Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo collaborated with the cartels in exchange for hefty bribes. In 1984, journalist Manuel Buendia was murdered by Federal Security Directorate agents while investigating possible ties between drug cartels, the CIA, and the FSD itself. The United States began to take an active interest in the growth of the Mexican drug cartels, as American cities such as Miami, Los Angeles, and New York City began to suffer from worsening murder rates and drug-related violence as a result of the cocaine boom in Latin America. The USA, which had already become involved in the Colombian government's war against the Medellin and Cali Cartels during the 1980s, also focused on disrupting their distribution networks in Mexico, which were controlled by the Guadalajara Cartel; Felix Gallardo took 50% of the Cali Cartel's cocaine income in return for providing Cali with drug smuggling bases in Mexico.
Fall of Guadalajara[]
In 1984, undercover DEA agent Kiki Camarena was murdered while infiltrating the Guadalajara Cartel, and it was suggested by many that the CIA had a role in his murder, as he came dangerously close to discovering their drug trafficking operations in Mexico, which were used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Camarena's death drew worldwide attention to the power of Mexico's drug syndicates, and, in 1989, Guadalajara and Juarez bosses Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Amado Carrillo Fuentes were arrested for their roles in Camarena's murder.
Divide and conquer[]
The 1989 Guadalajara safehouse bombing
By then, the Mexican government had decided that the best strategy for dealing with the drug cartels would be to "divide and conquer"; General Eugenio Blanco called a meeting of Mexico's leading narcotraffickers and oversaw the partitioning of the Guadalajara Cartel's territories. Chihuahua, Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Juarez went to Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, Sinaloa went to Ismael Zambada Garcia, Tijuana went to Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix, Nogales and Hermosillo went to Emilio Quintero Payan, San Luis Rio Colorado went to Hector Luis Palma Salazar, Mexicali went to Rafael Chao, and Tecate went to Joaquin Guzman Loera. In 1989, Guzman Loera - nicknamed "El Chapo" - went to war with the Arellano Felix brothers' Tijuana Cartel, resulting in a series of tit-for-tat shootouts, kidnappings, murders, and assassination attempts.
Rising crime[]
Amado Carrillo Fuentes succeeded in negotiating a temporary truce, but El Chapo allied with Palma Salazar and Zambada Garcia against the Tijuana Cartel, forming the Sinaloa Cartel. At the same time, the other remnants of the Guadalajara Cartel formed the Gulf Cartel and the Juarez Cartel. In 1993, hoping to put an end to the recent spate of gangland violence, General Blanco leveraged Carrillo Fuentes into organizing the double-murder of El Chapo and anti-government bishop Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo at the Guadalajara International Airport, and, while the bishop was murdered by the Tijuana and Logan Heights Gang hitmen, El Chapo - who was framed for the shootout - fled the country. He was captured in 1993, but he escaped from Altiplano prison in 2001, leading to a renewal of hostilities between the cartels. In 2002, Ramon Arellano Felix was murdered by El Chapo's hitmen in Mazatlan, while his brother Benjamin Arellano Felix was captured by the Mexican Army in Puebla; by 2006, the Sinaloa Cartel had reduced the Tijuana Cartel to a few cells after taking over Baja California.
Rise of Sinaloa and Los Zetas[]
The downfall of the Tijuana Cartel led to El Chapo - with the backing of the US government and the DEA - forming a federation with the Beltran Leyva Cartel and the Juarez Cartel, but the Gulf Cartel of Osiel Cardenas Guillen refused to join in, leading to a new war. The Sinaloa Cartel and its allies in the Mexican Army launched a series of raids against the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Leon in 2003, but these raids failed to destroy the cartel as planned, leading to a new round of gang warfare. In the ensuing conflict, Osiel Cardenas Guillen created a paramilitary army known as "Los Zetas" with the objective of winning the war against Sinaloa, and it was composed of former military personnel such as Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, its leader. Lazcano warned Cardenas Guillen that the military should always be given full control during times of war, and Los Zetas soon slipped out of Cardenas Guillen's control and began to drift away from its mother organization.
Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes and his wife being shot
Disillusioned with El Chapo's leadership, Juarez Cartel co-leader Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes insulted one of El Chapo's paramilitary bodyguards and later shot him dead, leading to his 2004 murder in the parking lot of a cinema complex. This led to his brother Vicente Carrillo Fuentes going to war with him, and Sinaloa was now caught up in wars with both the Gulf and Juarez Cartels. From January to August 2005, 110 people were murdered in Nuevo Laredo during the fighting between the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels, and drug-related violence surged in Michoacan as Nazario Moreno Gonzalez's La Familia Michoacana organization splintered from the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas.
War[]
Calderon administration[]
Felipe Calderon meeting with George W. Bush
In 2006, conservative PAN presidential candidate Felipe Calderon narrowly defeated the populist socialist PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a highly-controversial election, with Lopez Obrador being smeared as a puppet of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and his campaign being derailed by a 2004 bribery scandal involving Lopez Obrador's private secretary Rene Bejarano and wealthy businessman Carlos Ahumada. Calderon defeated "AMLO" 35.9% to 35.3%, leading to populist mass demonstrations on the streets of Mexico City and several other cities, coinciding with anti-governmental protests in Oaxaca in the aftermath of the suppression of a teachers' strike. Eager to divert public attention away from the allegedly fradulent presidential election, President Calderon and his Secretary of Public Security Conrado Higuera Sol decided to inaugurate a Mexican theatre of the global "War on Drugs" with the help of the United States government, whose President George W. Bush was simultaneously waging a global "War on Terror" against Islamist terrorist organizations, among them the Taliban, whose opium production played a crucial role in the international drug trafficking nexus.
Start of the war[]
On 11 December 2006, President Calderon dispatched 6,500 Mexican Army soldiers to his home state of Michoacan to end drug violence there. Calderon went on to escalate his war on drugs by deploying 45,000 troops to join state and federal police forces in destroying the powerful drug cartels, but cartel bosses such as El Chapo and Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano took advantage of rampant corruption in the government, military, and law enforcement to bribe poorly-paid soldiers into becoming cartel enforcers; El Chapo succeeded in obtaining contacts and allies in all three areas, with Secretary of Public Security Conrado Higuera Sol working with him to destroy his rivals as part of the government's "divide-and-conquer" stratagem. El Chapo also agreed to work as a DEA informant in order to bring down his rivals, occasionally offering up small-time Sinaloa henchmen as consolation prizes.
Beltran-Leyva - Sinaloa war[]
In January 2008, El Chapo reluctantly informed on his lieutenant Alfredo Beltran Leyva, leading to his arrest in an Army raid on Culiacan, Sinaloa. His brother Arturo Beltran Leyva proceeded to split from the Sinaloa Cartel to form the rival Beltran Leyva Cartel, which went to war with the Sinaloa Cartel. The Beltran-Leyva Cartel retaliated by attempting to murder Ismael's son Vicente Zambada Niebla and murdering El Chapo's son Edgar Guzman Lopez on 8 May 2008. El Chapo retaliated with a wave of gang violence, leading to 128 deaths in June 2008 and 143 deaths in July. The Beltran Leyva Cartel allied itself with the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, and all-out warfare continued over the next two years. In 2009, with the help of El Chapo, the Mexican Army captured Beltran-Leyva lieutenant Edgar Valdez Villarreal, who was then taken to El Chapo. El Chapo offered to give him an honorable death as a loyal man, or to let him betray his boss and keep all of his territories. Valdez Villarreal agreed to the latter offer in exchange for receiving Acapulco as well, and his information helped the Mexican Army plan Antonio Cardenas Guillen's takedown.
Sinaloa victory[]
Vicente Carrillo Fuentes being arrested
The DEA, which supported the Mexican government's divide-and-conquer stratagem, leveraged the imprisoned Osiel Cardenas Guillen into convincing his brother Antonio Cardenas Guillen to cooperate with El Chapo in a multi-pronged offensive against Sinaloa's rivals. Ismael Zambada Garcia and Antonio Cardenas Guillen were sent to take over the key border city of Nuevo Laredo from Los Zetas and kill Lazcano; El Chapo led the Sinaloa takeover of Ciudad Juarez to threaten Vicente Carrillo Fuentes; and the Mexican Army led a raid on Cuernavaca, Morelos to target Arturo Beltran Leyva. On 16 December 2009, the multi-pronged offensive was carried out. The Sinaloa Cartel took over Nuevo Laredo after an intense gun battle with Los Zetas, but Lazcano escaped in a body bag. El Chapo also succeeded in his takeover of Juarez, and "El Chente" was captured by the Mexican Army. In Cuernavaca, Arturo Beltran Leyva was killed in a shootout with the Mexican Marines. Meanwhile, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez had been kidnapped from his church by Sinaloa, and he agreed to cooperate with them. 2009 saw 9,600 murders, and 2010 saw 15,000 further murders as Los Zetas broke away from the Gulf Cartel, whose leader Antonio Cardenas Guillen was killed by the Mexican Marines in the November 2010 Matamoros raid. Up to 100+ people were killed in the shootout in Matamoros, which destroyed the Gulf Cartel's presence in the city's downtown area.
Disintegration[]
By the end of 2010, the Juarez Cartel's main leaders were dead or in prison, the Gulf Cartel lost the vast majority of its territory as the result of wars with Sinaloa, Los Zetas, and the Mexican government, and the Sinaloa Cartel now had control of the cross-border smuggling routes and an international drug trafficking network presided over by Vicente Zambada Niebla. La Familia Michoacana offered to surrender to the government in exchange for the federal government promising to protect Michoacan, but President Calderon refused to make a deal with the declining cartel. Also in 2010, Miguel Trevino Morales seized control of Los Zetas from Lazcano, leading to infighting within the cartel. Los Zetas became known for its unstable and brutal violence, with Edgar Huerta Montiel's Zetas massacring 72 migrants at San Fernando, Tamaulipas on 24 August 2010 to prevent them from joining the Gulf Cartel. This was followed by a second massacre at San Fernando from 6 April to 7 June 2011, when 193 civilians were kidnapped from passenger buses, executed, and buried in the desert. Lazcano was worried about rumors that the Gulf Cartel was bussing in reinforcements from other states, and Los Zetas may have also sought to hold their victims for ransom before extorting them. On 25 August 2011, Monterrey - which had become a violent city due to the Zetas-Gulf war, was the site of a Los Zetas attack on a casino which left 52 dead and 10 captured. On 4 January 2012, 31 Gulf Cartel inmates were killed in a prison brawl at Altamira prison, followed by the 19 February 2012 Apodaca prison riot, during which 44 Gulf Cartel inmates were killed and 37 Zetas escaped from prison. By the end of Calderon's presidency in 2012, more than 120,000 murders had occurred as a result of his militaristic anti-drug policy.
2012 election[]
By 2011, President Calderon had intensified efforts to capture El Chapo in order to secure a much-needed public relations boost ahead of next year's presidential elections, in which PAN candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota faced popular PRI governor Enrique Peña Nieto. Calderon had also been warned by the DEA that the United States would cut off Merida Plan funding to the Mexican government if it was unable to apprehend El Chapo, who had been at large for almost as long as Higuera Sol was Secretary of Public Security. Calderon was able to send in the Mexican Federal Police, Mexican Navy, and Mexican Army to pursue El Chapo, but El Chapo continued to evade the law with the help of the corrupt PAN Governor of Sinaloa Mario Lopez Valdez and Higuera Sol, who bought him time. By that point, Sinaloa was facing increasing heat from the government, as well as continued hostilities with the Beltran Leyva Cartel, now led by Fausto Isidro Meza Flores, who took over Nuevo Leon and Nogales from Sinaloa. El Chapo retaliated with an attack on Los Mochis, attempting to kill Meza Flores, but Meza Flores escaped.
Election fraud[]
Peña Nieto campaigning with Sinaloa governor Mario Lopez Valdez
Ahead of the 2012 election, Higuera Sol resigned as Secretary of Public Security to return to his original PRI party, heading Peña Nieto's presidential campaign. He convinced Calderon and the PAN to back Peña Nieto rather than risk splitting the anti-AMLO vote, and he also convinced Calderon to block any vote-buying investigations against the PRI, to lift campaign finance restrictions, and to temporarily suspend the hunt for El Chapo. Higuera Sol then convinced El Chapo to triple the PRI vote in the "Golden Triangle", doing so with the help of municipal president Angel Robles Bañuelos. Finally, Higuera Sol and fellow PRI powerbroker Claudia Ruiz Massieu succeeded in convincing major businesses to provide the PRI with gift cards which it could use to bribe union members into voting for Peña Nieto. On election day, 1 July 2012, Sinaloa gunmen led by Manuel Alejandro Aponte Gomez ensured that Golden Triangle voters voted for PRI, local PAN party headquarters campaigned for Peña Nieto, and union members leaving the polls used their newly-obtained gift cards to bring home microwaves, televisions, and other home goods, having voted for Peña Nieto. Ultimately, Peña Nieto won with 38.2% of the vote to AMLO's 31.6% and Mota's 25.4%, marking the return of the PRI to power after a 12-year break.
Peña Nieto administration[]
Enrique Peña Nieto in February 2014
In the few months before Peña Nieto took office, several major developments occurred. Higuera Sol was appointed Peña Nieto's Secretary of State, and he was given charge of coordinating the Mexican Drug War along with the heads of the Police, Army, and Navy. On 7 October 2012, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano died in a shootout with the Mexican Navy in Progreso, Coahuila, and his body was stolen from the funeral home by his gang members. In the first 14 months of Peña Nieto's administration, from December 2012 to January 2014, 23,640 people died in the conflict, and worsening corruption under the PRI administration led to the formation of local "Autodefensas" paramilitaries to take the place of the corrupt police in combatting drug cartels at the local level. Peña Nieto initially supported the Autodefensas, but they were soon torn apart by internal disputes, disputes with the government, and criminal infiltration, and Peña Nieto distanced himself from them, as he was soon unable to distinguished armed-civilian convoys from drug-cartel convoys.
El Chapo's downfall[]
El Chapo's arrest in 2014
The DEA kept up its pressure on the government to take down El Chapo, forcing Higuera Sol to betray his former business partner. On 22 February 2014, El Chapo was captured in a raid on the Miramar Hotel in Mazatlan, resulting in infighting within his cartel as his son Ivan Archivaldo Guzman, his bodyguard Manuel Alejandro Aponte Gomez, and his co-leader Ismael Zambada Garcia jockeyed for control. At the same time, Peña Nieto's popularity collapsed after Meza Flores' Beltran-Leyva Cartel kidnapped Governor Mario Lopez Valdez's bodyguard and forced him to make a taped confession about Lopez Valdez's strong alliance and affiliation with El Chapo. Peña Nieto - who was close friends with Lopez Valdez - was now implicated in cartel corruption, damaging his credibility. On 26 September 2014, 43 male students were forcibly abducted by the Guerreros Unidos cartel and corrupt police in Iguala, Guerrero before they could protest the Tlatelolco massacre, leading to international protests, social unrest, the resignation of Governor Angel Aguirre Rivero, and the further decline of Peña Nieto's approval ratings. The final nail in his coffin was El Chapo's escape from prison on 11 July 2015. El Chapo briefly resumed control of his cartel before being recaptured in Los Mochis on 8 January 2016, and he was extradited to the United States on 19 January 2017 and sentenced to life in a US supermax prison on 17 July 2019.
Fallen order[]
As the Sinaloa Cartel was collapsing, the other cartels also began to disintegrate. Nazario Moreno Gonzalez - once believed to have been killed in a gunfight at his home in Apatzingan, Michoacan on 9 December 2010 - was killed during a two-day gunfight with the Federales in Tumbiscatio, Michoacan on 9 March 2014. La Familia Michoacana splintered into the Knights Templar Cartel, the Cartel del Abuelo, Los Viagras, and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel after Gonzalez's two reported deaths, and LFM went defunct by 2020. In 2015, Knights Templar leader Servando Gomez Martinez was captured by the police, and the last of the cartel's leaders, Pablo Toscano Padilla and Ezequiel Castaneda, were killed by LFM remnants in September 2017. The Gulf Cartel underwent serious infighting which resulted in its demise by 2020, with Los Pelones being the largest splintergroup to emerge after this new split. By 2018, Los Zetas had broken up after factional infighting between the "Old School Zetas" and other rival factions. The Beltran-Leyva Cartel had been declared "disbanded and extinct" in 2014 after Hector Beltran Leyva's capture, and Fausto Isidro Meza Flores continued to lead a Beltran-Leyva splintergroup, Los Mazatlecos, during the following years. In 2016, the Tijuana Cartel's remnants formed the New Generation Tijuana Cartel (CTNG), imitating the Jalisco New Generation Cartel remnant of LFM. By 2018, the CJNG had become the second most powerful cartel in Mexico after the Sinaloa Cartel, which was weakened by infighting between its Guzman and Zambada factions.
Lopez Obrador administration[]
In the 1 July 2018 Mexican general election, the PRI suffered its worst electoral defeat in its history as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador finally won the presidency with the democratic socialist MORENA party, defeating PAN candidate Ricardo Anaya's 22.28% of the vote, PRI candidate Jose Antonio Meade's 16.41%, and independent candidate Jaime Rodriguez Calderon's 5.23% with an outright majority of 53.19%. Lopez Obrador pledged to end the deadly drug war with his "strategy for peace", which would amnesty all Mexicans involved in drug production and trafficking. However, this "amnesty" was ill-defined, and Lopez Obrador's actions signified that he was not ending the war on drugs, but sustaining it. He merged the military police with the Federales to form the National Guard of Mexico in 2019, hoping to crack down on corruption within law enforcement. On 30 January 2019, he declared an end to the Mexican Drug War, instead focusing on combatting oil theft. Lopez Obrador hoped to avoid armed confrontations with the drug cartels as they fought amongst themselves, and, on 17 October 2019, the Mexican military was forced to release the captured drug lord Ovidio Guzman Lopez after 700 cartel members took hostages and blocked the roads in Culiacan. Shortly after, 8,000 soldiers and policemen were deployed to Culiacan to pacify the city, and Lopez Obrador justified his actions by stating that he wished to avoid another massacre, that he valued the lives of innocent civilians over one drug dealer, and that the criminal process against Ovidio would continue despite the government's underestimation of his manpower.
The New Generation[]
Map of the war in 2020
By 2020, the United States government designated the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as the most dangerous cartel in Mexico due to the demise of several of the older cartels. In northern Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel continued to control the Golden Triangle in Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua, with Ismael Zambada Garcia feuding with El Chapo's sons over the leadership of Sinaloa. The CJNG lacked any real influence in the region, but, in Tijuana, the CJNG and Sinaloa Cartel became the main providers of synthetic drugs such as fentanyln. The CJNG allied with the weakened Tijuana Cartel against Sinaloa, hoping to wrest control of the city. However, the Sinaloa Cartel's considerable membership and intelligence network in the city ensured that it would remain in power, as it had strong ties to local officials and institutions. In Ciudad Juarez, the CJNG allied itself with the New Juarez Cartelagainst the Los Salazar cell of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel's La Linea faction, and numerous smaller microtrafficking street gangs. In Tamaulipas, the local drug scene was divided between the Northeast Cartel, the New Blood Zetas, the remnants of the Gulf Cartel (including Los Metros), and the CJNG, which allied with Los Metros in attempts to take over Torreon and Monterrey. In the Tierra Caliente regions of Michoacan, Guerrero, and the State of Mexico, 20 distinct criminal groups fought for control of synthetic drug production and extorted the avocado industry. The CJNG was the largest and most well-funded group in the region, but it faced entrenched groups such as the Cartel del Abuelo of Juan Jose Farias Alvarez and Los Viagras, which were allied with the local communities. In Guerrero, the heartland of Mexico's heroin industry, the CJNG fought for control of the region with 40 other groups. In Mexico City, La Union Tepito controlled the city center, but smaller groups such as the Cartel de Tlahuac, the CJNG, and other gangs contested control of the capital. In Morelos and Mexico, Los Rojos, Beltran-Leyva dissidents, LFM splintergroups, and gangs from the capital fought for control of the human trafficking, kidnapping, microtrafficking, and drug trafficking rackets. In the Yucatan, the CJNG attempted to dominate the area, but continued to face the Sinaloa Carterl, remnants of Los Zetas, and the Gulf splintergroup Los Pelones (which was dedicated to extorting tourist businesses by shooting up bars and clubs). The CJNG consolidated its position in its heartland of Jalisco (especially around the capital of Guadalajara and in the vital port of Puerto Vallarta), and also had control of municipalities in Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, Colima, and Michoacan. In 2017, a CJNG splintergroup, the Nueva Plaza Cartel, began to fight against the larger group over turf. The CJNG's main rival since 2018 was the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, which banded together with several other gangs to stop the CJNG's incursions into Guanajuato, Queretaro, and Hidalgo. The CJNG won the war by 2020, executing the last soldiers of the CSRL in 2020. In Veracruz, the weakening of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas allowed for the CJNG to seize control of the city from the Old School Zetas after several massacres, controlling the trans-Atlantic drug routes and human trafficking.
Gallery[]
