Fear and loathing in Culiacan, Sinaloa

At around two in the morning on Monday, November 25 – just hours after my arrival in the city of Culiacan in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, home of the eponymous drug cartel – I was awakened by gunfire in the street that lasted approximately 20 minutes.

Later in the day, media reports of the night’s casualties began rolling in. According to the newspaper El Pais, at least seven people had been killed in various shootouts across Culiacan and two had been disappeared. A house had been set on fire, and 80 security cameras had been shot up, along with an assortment of shops, restaurants, and homes.

The following day, November 26, five bodies bearing signs of torture were dumped outside the faculty of agriculture of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. Two more corpses then materialised elsewhere in the city, the latest victims of an internecine cartel war that has been ravaging this Mexican state since September 9. Culiacan is the epicentre of the conflict that, as of November 28, had killed at least 425 people statewide and disappeared more than 500.

This particular spate of violence was triggered by the capture in July of Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was subsequently hauled off to a court in none other than New York City to face trial. Never mind that the United States itself has been a key participant in the international drug trade since forever – or that the simultaneous US demand for and criminalisation of drugs is what makes their trafficking so lucrative, thereby enabling cartels.

In theory, then, the US should be categorically ineligible to inflict “justice” on El Mayo or anyone else from the narco-world. But the US is an old pro at trafficking in hypocrisy – not to mention fuelling violence and brutality in Mexico, as in the case of the US-backed “war on drugs” which quickly proved to be more of a war on people. As the US Council on Foreign Relations noted in August, shortly after El Mayo’s detention, Mexico “has seen more than 431,000 homicides since 2006, when the government declared war on the cartels” with US support.

Predictably, El Mayo’s arrest kicked off a power struggle within the Sinaloa cartel, pitting his followers against “Los Chapitos,” the sons of the mythical cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is presently serving a life sentence in the US state of Colorado. Just as predictably, US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar has managed to put a positive spin on the bloody panorama, stating: “We should be celebrating what happened in Sinaloa” – and so what if decapitated heads are turning up in ice coolers and folks are often too afraid to leave their homes.

I had not visited Culiacan since 2021, and the change this time around was palpable. Streets are empty after dark, shops and restaurants close early, classes are intermittently suspended, and everyone keeps a running tally of the cartel war victims, as well as the geographic coordinates of the latest shootouts, burned buildings, and car thefts. The consensus among all the people I spoke to was that “it’s really bad” – not an assessment to be taken lightly in a city that has experienced its fair share of spectacular violence over the years.

My first order of business in Culiacan was an excursion to the so-called “narco-cemetery”, Jardines del Humaya, which hosts the remains of El Chapo’s brother and other celebrities of the underworld in ostentatious, air-conditioned mausoleums. While the place is generally known to enjoy a continuous flow of visitors and exude an almost festive atmosphere, on this day it was dead in every sense of the word, and many of the cemetery workers had been sent home because of “the situation”.

The remaining workers were waiting to see whether the cadaver of a woman scheduled for burial that day would indeed show up or whether “the situation” would affect her interment, as well. My quest for reassurance that I was safe in the cemetery was met with shrugs and the casual announcement that, obviously, in times like these, anything could happen at any minute. Faced with the realisation that not even the illusion of security is currently an option in Culiacan, I suffered a mini-nervous breakdown accordingly and begged one of the undertakers to accompany me on a quick spin through the cemetery grounds, after which I fled back into other realms of non-safety.

My next destination was the chapel dedicated to Jesus Malverde, the legendary moustachioed Robin Hood-type figure who has been adopted as the unofficial patron saint of the narcos. The shrine is awash in photographs and plaques thanking Malverde for favours granted; on one of the snazzier plaques I saw, a Culiacan resident expressed his gratitude to the pseudo-saint for springing him from jail. One-dollar bills are tacked onto every surface, many of them signed with family names and some altered such that Malverde’s face replaces George Washington’s.

Here “the situation” had not entirely put a damper on entertainment, and a four-man band, complete with accordion, showed up to play at the chapel entrance. As one of the keepers of the shrine informed me, the musicians had been summoned by two women – the only other visitors that morning – as thanks to Malverde for a “miracle” performed on their behalf.

As irony would have it, parked just in front of the chapel was a vehicle bearing one of those old bumper stickers from the anti-drug campaign in the US, emblazoned with the slogan in English: “D.A.R.E. TO RESIST DRUGS AND VIOLENCE.” To be sure, it might be easier to avoid violence in places like Sinaloa if the US were to refrain from, I dunno, inundating Mexico with guns. But that would be far too mean to the arms industry – a pillar of the same capitalist order that drugs and violence help sustain.

Just behind the Malverde shrine, meanwhile, is the railway along which runs La Bestia – the notorious “train of death” utilised by US-bound refuge seekers, many of whom have met their demise by falling onto the tracks. As if the physical danger weren’t enough, La Bestia’s passengers additionally serve as continuous prey for cartels and other assailants. Like the US war on drugs, the US war on migrants is pretty violent business, too.

I spent five full days in Culiacan, and five times I went to the ecological park and botanical garden, normally a popular oasis in the middle of the city. Sparsely trafficked these days, on each visit I found just a handful of joggers and dog walkers, one or two young women in extravagant ballgowns being photographed amid the flora, and several apocalyptically equipped contingents of the Mexican army and National Guard. A prominently displayed sign offered instructions on what to do in the event of an armed attack: hit the floor.

And yet the descent upon Sinaloa of thousands of federal Mexican security forces no doubt does little to assuage public anxiety given these forces’ extensive track record of killing and disappearing people and of generating violence rather than stanching it. Of course, the Mexican state is not personally responsible for committing all forced disappearances in the country, which as of 2023 officially numbered nearly 112,000, though the true figure is likely quite a bit higher.

The state is, however, responsible for perpetuating the near-total impunity that surrounds the phenomenon of enforced disappearance – and for endeavouring to definitively disappear the issue of the disappeared, which amounts to a form of societal violence in itself. Next to the cathedral in Culiacan’s historic centre, families of the missing have hung names and photographs of their loved ones on a “tree of hope”, while the space in front of the cathedral is adorned with more names and portraits, some of the people disappeared in this latest cartel war.

Sinaloa governor Ruben Rocha Moya, a member of the Morena party to which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum belongs, has sought to downplay the violence in Culiacan – although he did get his panties into a bunch over the destruction of the security cameras. But for those inhabiting reality, “the situation” merits far more panic and terror. As the proprietor of a used bookstore on a Culiacan side street remarked to me: “We are suffering a mental health epidemic here.”

I was the sole customer in the shop; having wandered in looking for a certain book, I ended up with three I hadn’t been looking for but that the owner reckoned I needed. One of these was a text by Javier Valdez Cardenas, the Mexican journalist assassinated in 2017 in Culiacan, incidentally during a previous intra-cartel feud. Lamenting the fact that children in the city were now having to grow up seeing mutilated corpses and the like, the shop owner wondered what this meant for Culiacan’s collective psychological future.

During my visit in 2021, when nocturnal social activity was still a possibility, I was invited out for far too many beers by a young woman who was the colleague of an old acquaintance of mine. Over the raucous din at one of the city’s traditional watering holes, she offered an auto-diagnosis of the behavioural tendencies of Culiacan natives: “We are violent.” For example, a simple altercation in a parking lot was liable to turn into a shootout – and you definitely didn’t want to mess with the girlfriend of a narco. On the other hand, she said, even the narcos would stop to let an iguana cross the street.

This sort of public internalisation of violence no doubt comes in handy in terms of justifying further militarisation by the state, which already exploits the manufactured image of the super-evil cartel bogeyman to validate its own violent excesses. Now, with an incoming administration in the United States presided over by the man who once proposed firing missiles at Mexico to combat the drug cartels, it remains to be seen just how much worse “really bad” can get.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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