Inside world’s most powerful cartel- Their Activities
Inside world’s most powerful cartel – boiling bodies, child soldiers and lethal fentanyl
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT. Much of Mexico’s people, territory and economy is run by the Sinaloa Cartel, a huge criminal organisation that’s infiltrated into businesses, fisheries and even schools
Considered the world’s most powerful and largest drug trafficking organisation, the Sinaloa Cartel is an organised crime syndicate that has ruled large segments of Mexico’s people, territory and economy since the 1980s.
From barbarically boiling human bodies in barrels of acid to recruiting child soldiers to fight in rival wars, and transporting fentanyl across the States, the infamous cartel is known for its brutal attacks and jailed drug lords.
On Wednesday, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, was shot dead at a political rally in the capital, days after he revealed he had received multiple death threats from people linked to the Sinaloa Cartel.
In a fearless statement, he said: “Here I am showing my face. I’m not scared of them.” Six Columbians have since been arrested, and President Guillermo Lasso has suggested his death could be linked to organised crime.
It comes as three high-ranking members of the Sinaloa Cartel were sanctioned for trafficking illegal drugs into America on the same day as Villavicencio’s killing. Here we take a look at some of the group’s most horrific crimes.
Lethal fentanyl trafficking
Fentanyl is a synthetic pain-relieving drug that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine – and it’s responsible for over 150 deaths in the US every single day. While the former Sinaloa Cartel leader, Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, is serving his life sentence, his three sons, known as the little Chapos, continue to traffic fentanyl across borders in exchange for cash.
“They know that they’re poisoning and killing Americans. They just don’t care because they make billions of dollars doing it,” Anne Milgram, chief of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, said of Guzman’s sons. “Their greed is shocking and without bounds.” The cartel is based primarily in the city of Culiacan, Sinaloa, whilst operating in the Mexican states of Baja California, Durango, Sonora and Chihuahua, and also the United States.
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This week, the US Treasury Department sanctioned three cartel members for alleged involvement in the production and trafficking of fentanyl into the US. Officials said two of the men, Alfonso Arzate Garcia, and his brother Rene Arzate Garcia, acted as “plaza bosses” in Tijuana. The siblings are involved in carrying out kidnappings and executions for the cartel. The third, Rafael Guadalupe Feliz Nuñez, or ‘The Anthrax Monkey’ has been part of a gang of hitmen for the last 20 years.
Mass grave of boiled bodies
Santiago Meza Lopez, who was nicknamed ‘El Pozero’ – or ‘the Stew Maker’ – was first captured in 2009 and confessed to his role in helping the cartel dispose of human bodies. Following his arrest, he revealed that he was working on a farm in 1996 when they first experimented with acid.
Gang members combined water and acid in a barrel before dropping a leg of meat in it to sit for two hours. After the leg of meat successfully dissolved, the cartel later returned with a human body. “They called me again and told me that now they were going to experiment with human flesh,” Lopez said. Despite telling cartel bosses that he didn’t want to be involved, Lopez continued to dissolve bodies and even trained others to do the same.
( Image: AFP)
Since being locked up, family members of the victims have banded together to encourage police to identify the remains left over at the grave site at La Gallera, which is known as ‘the Chicken Coop’. According to reports, between 170 and 200 kilograms of human bodies have been retrieved from the site since its discovery. It is feared that the remains of up to 650 victims could be discovered at the site in Tijuana.
In a 2019 interview with YouTuber Shaun Attwood, an ex-cartel weapons officer explained how they got rid of the victims with little trace. “This guy got to the point where he dissolved 300 bodies – that’s his estimate,” he said. “They [officials] were going through the backyard, it says in a lot of files, looking for people and they just find the fillings of a tooth which wouldn’t dissolve in acid.
“They’d kill people in another location and transport the bodies. This guy would put them in 55-gallon drums, which are like oil barrels that you’d see on adverts. He’d then stir them every so often so the bodies would start dissolving. This guy just had a house full of barrels.” He claimed the acid attacks took place in a normal house on a residential street.
Using jellyfish to fund drug wars
In recent times, it has been reported that the cartel is threatening its way into the country’s multi-million-pound jellyfish industry and demanding that fishermen work “exclusively” for them to help fund drug wars. Exporting the ‘cannonball jellyfish’ from Mexico to Asia generates roughly $10 million (£7.74m) over a three-month fishing period.
But this summer has seen little revenue for local fishermen around the Santa Clara gulf, as heavily-armed cartel members are making sure no one goes out to fish. One worker, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Daily Beast: “They want us to work for them exclusively, but we are afraid, we really don’t know what to do.”
A month prior, alleged gang members burned several trucks belonging to two different processing companies, as a threat to stop buying directly from the fisherman and instead go through the cartel. “They threatened the drivers too, to stop coming to the coast to buy jellyfish, and now the whole industry is stalled,” the fisherman said.
( Image: AFP via Getty Images)
As well as fishing industries, the dominating cartel has infiltrated various legal and illegal businesses and institutions outside of the narcotics trade, in an attempt to earn more money. These include human trafficking, flogging pirated DVDs and logging, as well as demanding extortion from local Mexican businesses and homes.
But for some citizens, paying the Sinaloa Cartel is much easier and less dangerous than paying numerous other cartels and smaller criminal groups, that ruled before they took over. One businessman in Baja California Sur told journalist Vanda Felbab-Brown in 2021: “Most of the big hotels in Cabo [San Lucas] pay Sinaloa. But it’s much better than before [2015-2018] when CJNG [their rival] was fighting Sinaloa over the control of Baja Sur. The payments now are very predictable and the collectors [from the Sinaloa Cartel] polite and calm. It’s very respectful dealing with them. And you don’t have to pay once a week and unbilivable sums, just every few months at a reasonable rate.”
Recruiting child soldiers
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
The cartel was reported using children in their fight against the Mexican Army earlier this year, When drug lord Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of El Chapo, was arrested. It’s regular for the organisation to recruit kids as young as 11 years old to do their murderous bidding.
In 2013, the International Crisis Group (ICG) a non-government organisation that seeks to prevent conflict, reported the Sinaloa Cartel had “recruited thousands of street gang members, school drop-outs and unskilled workers”. They spoke to military personnel who said, “cartel bosses will treat the young killers as cannon fodder, throwing them into suicidal attacks on security forces”.
It is believed the youngsters are manipulated into joining gangs and given basic weapon training at camps, ranging from AR-15 rifles to 9-mm caliber pistols, then put into cells led by experienced cartel soldiers. Another officer told the ICG: “We will go on patrol and face an ambush by these young kids who don’t even know how to shoot.”
But schoolchildren often have no other option. Juan Pablo Garcia, a social worker from Monterrey, told the group: “The schools are closed, and there is no work and no opportunity. On the other side, the criminals, they say, ‘Come here. There is a job for you.'”