Culiacán Dispatch: The Mexican City Torn Apart By the Sinaloa Cartel’s Bloody Civil War

It is morning in Culiacán, and Rosa Lidia Félix Camacho is struggling to set up the white tent where she protests each day, at the foot of the city's cathedral. She staggers as she fumbles with the makeshift shelter as the heat of the day rises. Her speech is weak. 

The 56-year-old mother has been on hunger strike for almost a month in a desperate bid to draw attention to the disappearance of her 28-year-old son, Jesús Tomás Félix Félix. Now, it is late November and the lack of nutrition is taking its toll.

More than 500 people have died, according to official figures from the state prosecutor, and at least 600 more have gone missing across the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa since September 9, when clashes broke out between rival factions of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel — one of the largest criminal organizations in the world. 

Culiacán, Sinaloa’s capital, which is home to around 1 million people, has borne the brunt of the wave of terrifying violence as supporters of the sons of the now-jailed cartel leader El Chapo, known as Los Chapitos, do battle with those backing the son of rival leader El Mayo, who are called Los Mayitos, in the aftermath of El Mayo’s arrest this summer. 

The city has been paralyzed by gun battles between the two sides, as well as shootouts with Mexican government soldiers brought in to impose order. Many businesses are shuttered, schools are frequently closed, and few residents venture out after dark.  

In the midst of this chaos, Jesús Tomás vanished. 

His mother says she doesn’t understand what happened. She describes her son as an athlete, a hard worker, and a family man. She has tried to piece together clues about the night he went missing to try to track him down, with little success.

All she knows is that the night Jesús Tomás disappeared, he had been at a friend's house. The friend told Rosa Lidia that they’d had a good evening taking pictures, filming videos, and chatting, before Jesús Tomás departed at 1:45 a.m. on November 1. 

Jesús Tomás drove away in his gray Nissan. He was never seen again. 

Rosa Lidia went house to house in the neighborhood where he was last seen, asking if anyone had footage from security cameras. She managed to obtain a few images confirming that her son really had left his friend’s house behind the wheel of his car, but she could only trace him for a few blocks. Neither the banks nor restaurants in the area agreed to give her copies of their recordings, she said.

As she hit a wall with her own investigations, she began her hunger strike on November 4, demanding that the Sinaloa state governor take action and provide more support for her search. Rosa Lidia said that although state prosecutors had started looking into her son’s case, she thought they were slow and ineffective, leading her to take matters into her own hands.

Next to her tent outside the cathedral is a cooler with honey, nutritional supplements and intravenous drips, which doctor friends have recommended she take to keep her strength up.

“Please have mercy on us for the pain we’re in. I ask you with a broken heart. I can't take it any more. Give me back my son. It's been too many days,” Rosa Lidia begs her son’s captors, the government — or whoever else will listen. 

Shortly after reporters spoke with Rosa Lidia, she ended her hunger strike on December 1, after finally managing to speak to the governor directly about her plight.

But her son was still missing at the time this article was published. And Rosa Lidia is far from alone. Her frustration, confusion and grief are being played out across the city as residents search for missing loved ones, with some accusing state authorities of looking the other way. 

Reporters from OCCRP partner El Universal went to Culiacán to speak to residents about life under siege.

An Accusation of Betrayal

The Sinaloa Cartel is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico. Its origins date back more than half a century, to what was then called the Guadalajara Cartel. 

Amid a crackdown in the 1980s, the Guadalajara Cartel splintered into various groups, including one based in Sinaloa, where locals who had been powerful within the Guadalajara Cartel took over. By the 1990s, law enforcement had identified Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada García, known as El Mayo, as the Sinaloa Cartel’s top leaders. The two cartel chiefs had maintained an alliance for decades. 

El Chapo was sentenced to life in prison in the United States in 2019, but his partner El Mayo remained free.

Then, on July 25 this year, the U.S. announced the stunning arrest of El Mayo in Texas, alongside El Chapo’s son Joaquín Guzmán López.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened, but in a statement released on August 10 through his lawyer, El Mayo accused El Chapo’s son of betraying him by luring him to a supposed meeting with Sinaloa’s governor and another official, where he expected to be called upon to mediate a political dispute.

Instead, he says he was assaulted, tied up, handcuffed, and kidnapped, then driven to a landing strip and forced onto a private plane, which took off for El Paso, Texas. Guzmán López was also on board and bound El Mayo to the seat with zip ties, the cartel leader said in his statement.

Once there, U.S. authorities detained both El Mayo and Guzmán López.

El Mayo, who has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges in the U.S., called for peace in his August statement, saying: "Nothing can be solved with violence. We’ve gone down that road before and everyone loses."

But within six weeks of his detention, the state of Sinaloa was engulfed in internecine clashes as the faction behind El Chapo’s remaining sons, known as Los Chapitos, and the faction backing El Mayo’s son, known as Los Mayitos, apparently sought to annihilate each other. 

With El Chapo, 67, jailed and El Mayo, 76, in detention, the future of the cartel they co-founded is up for grabs in what looks to be a battle of succession. 

In October, a lawyer for Joaquín Guzmán López and another of El Chapo’s sons Ovidio, who was already in custody in the U.S., said they were negotiating for a plea deal with the U.S. government, sparking speculation that the two “Chapitos” might become cooperating witnesses in the case against El Mayo. 

Both Joaquín and Ovidio have pleaded not guilty to drug charges at previous hearings. A lawyer for Joaquín has also denied El Mayo’s accusation of kidnapping, according to media reports.

As the rift between the warring factions of the Sinaloa Cartel widens, the death toll rises. 

The unpredictability of what will happen as the power balance shifts within the cartel is a recipe for chaos, says Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an expert on organized crime at the Center for Mexican-American Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

“The uncertainty generated by these changes also generates other opportunities for violence. In other words, it seems incorrect to assume that all the violence we see in the state is the result of an instruction or directed by criminal groups. It is possible that there is also ‘disorganized’ violence,” she said. 

Most of the brutality has been concentrated in Culiacán, where both factions have their strongest  presence.

This is not the first time that Sinaloa’s capital has been the epicenter of a cartel battle: in 2019 the so-called “Battle of Culiacán” saw a massive backlash from cartel gunmen that briefly turned the city into what looked like a warzone after Mexican security forces captured El Chapo’s son Ovidio. 

Oscar Loza Ochoa, a prominent human rights defender for a civil group called the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights of Sinaloa, said that while insecurity brought by organized crime had long been a feature in the state, the current crisis was having the most severe impact on the local population he had ever seen. 

“It’s damaging us on an emotional and psychological level,” he said. “This is leaving an indelible mark on us.”

A Chilling Message: “Welcome to Culiacán” 

As violence took hold once more in September, Culiacán began experiencing chilling daily reminders of just how weak state control was in Sinaloa, compared to the power of the cartels: A state policeman was kidnapped, convoys of armed men patrolled the streets, and highways were blockaded by cartel factions. As the bodies and disappearances mounted, schools were closed and hotel reservations were canceled.

By the end of the month, the violence had also spread to the south of Sinaloa, reaching the coastal city Mazatlán, where an armed group of men brought their wounded into a local hospital and demanded immediate medical treatment for them. 

“If they die, you die,” they told the hospital workers, according to local media.

Bodies were dumped around the outskirts of Sinaloa’s capital, including five corpses found in an abandoned white van with a message scrawled on its side in black spray paint: “Welcome to Culiacán.”

Battles between the cartel factions and the army also added to the chaos. One confrontation in Culiacán’s commercial district forced a shopping mall to be evacuated.

At the end of September, around 1,000 citizens marched through Culiacán demanding peace, but the violence has shown no sign of abating.

Fear of explosives, armed drones, and car bombs run through conversations between residents, and anonymous WhatsApp channels have become a main source of information — and disinformation.

By early October, authorities said they had arrested more than 180 people and seized hundreds of weapons and vehicles, including some that had been reinforced with homemade armor. 

More than a thousand vehicles have been stolen in three months – stolen cars are often used by the cartels for criminal activity.

Thousands of Mexican government troops remain in the state. At the end of November, the army converted a primary school in Culiacán into a military barracks. Often when  a shooting is reported in the city, schools in the area shut down and switch to the virtual classes common during the Covid pandemic. 

Meanwhile, anger has grown among the relatives of people who have disappeared since the wave of violence began. At the end of November, a group of women who have missing family members demonstrated in front of the Sinaloa Government Palace.

“Find the guilty alive and punish them, now!” they chanted. 

The women demanded an audience with Sinaloa’s governor, Rubén Rocha Moya, whom they accused of closing his door to dialogue. 

Holding up a poster of her father, who worked as a police officer, protester Carolina Verástica said her family had not heard from him since the previous day, November 26, when he contacted her aunt to say he was heading home from his shift. 

She visited the station where her father, Francisco Javier Verástica Muñoz, worked, and confirmed that his car was not there. His colleagues told her that a search operation was already underway, took her details, and told her to go home. 

Carolina made announcements on social media and local radio stations, then in groups set up to search for the missing, including the Culiacán-based Sabuesos Guerreras, a group of women trying to track down those who have disappeared.

“I’m no longer asking for the guilty to pay, the only thing I ask is that they return him safely home, with us. His entire family is together waiting for him. We know that he’s a good person, we don’t understand what happened,” she told reporters at the time.

Carolina said she had inquired about accessing the city’s video surveillance recordings, but was told that groups of criminals had shot many of them, which made the search for her father complicated. 

On November 28, two days after his last contact with his family, Francisco was found dead.

"I found you daddy, not the way I wanted but I found you," Carolina wrote in a social media post, according to local media reports.

A City With a Survival Instinct 

Before the recent chaos, Sinaloa had actually seen a comparative lull in violence, with homicide figures below the national average in the past few years.

Culiacán itself had a vibrant nightlife, with lively open-air bars and restaurants. Now the streets are almost empty after 7:00 p.m. as the majority of residents are not comfortable venturing outside when the sun is down. Major events, including the year’s most important cattle fair, have been cancelled. 

According to Mexican business organization Coparmex , the conflict has led to  losses of at least 18 billion Mexican pesos(about US$890 million) and 25,000 formal jobs.

Marco Iván Torres Sandoval, co-owner of cocktail bar and restaurant Canario in Culiacán, said sales had dropped 70 percent since September.

“It’s been pretty exhausting and difficult,” he says. “When there’s violence at night, the flow of customers drops from 20 to one.” 

However, like other small businesses in the besieged city, his restaurant is trying to adapt. Since Culiacán residents are more willing to go outside in the morning, Canario is emphasizing its breakfasts rather than late-night drinks. 

“Our concept has been totally modified to focus on breakfasts,” he says. “People are learning to live with this.”

José Ambrosio Valenzuela García, the head of a civil society group that works with local businesses to revitalize historic parts of Sinaloa, is also refusing to give up. He is working on a new initiative with hotels in downtown Culiacán — which are struggling with high vacancy rates — that would allow people who stay out after dark at bars and restaurants to book rooms at a discount.

Promoters of Paseo del Ángel, a commercial district with cobblestone streets and colonial architecture, have also added more outdoor lighting, strengthened coordination with the police and are trying to think up new cultural events and shows to encourage people to go out. 

“We are doubling down,” said Valenzuela.

The citizens of Culiacán, known as the culichis, have become adept at finding ways to ease the pressure.

In the center of Culiacán, next to businesses that are either closing down or adapting, and just a few blocks from where Rosa Lidia held her hunger strike, Catherine Quiñónez Morales slowly paints her first mural.

She is part of the Bachia Collective, a group of nine female artists who are seeking to beautify the city’s downtown area and boost the morale of local residents. 

The theme of Catherine's mural is mental health.

“It’s a message of hope. I want this painting to speak of getting out of depression, of getting out of the hole that many people are in right now,” says the 24-year-old.

Her mural depicts a woman blooming thanks to water dropped on her from above by the hand of God.

“You see, if she’s blooming then you can also bloom, you can also feel good, you can also be well.”