The Sinaloa Cartel are probably the richest and most powerful criminal organization on Earth.
In 2019 the mexican drug lord joaquin el chapo guzman was sentenced to life in prison after a decades-long effort to extradite him to the u.s to stand trial the long road that led chapo guzman from the mountains of sinaloa to the courthouse behind us today was paved with death drugs and destruction convicted mexican drug lord el chapo a federal judge right here
In new york city today sentencing joaquin guzman to life in prison plus 30 years the capture of el chapo was hailed as the biggest apparent victory in the war on drugs since the fall of pablo escobar in 1993 because man had risen to power as the figurehead of the sinaloa cartel thought to be mexico’s and perhaps the world’s biggest drug trafficking network but what
Actually is the sinaloa organized crime group aliyah this is how the biggest drug trafficking empire in the world operates and why despite all the millions of dollars spent capturing him its power has only continued to grow since the fall of el chapo drug smuggling in mexico’s sinaloa state goes right back to the roots of the war on drugs itself when the us first
Banned cocaine and heroin in 1914 it was farmers in sinaloa who first spotted the new black market opportunity and began growing opium a trade that continues to today is but it was america’s cocaine explosion of the 1980s that fundamentally changed the mexican drug trafficking business this is crack cocaine it’s as innocent looking as candy but it’s turning
Our cities into battle zones in 1985 the giant guadalajara cartel was broken up into three smaller operations based in tijuana juarez and sinaloa who immediately began violently competing for control of mexico’s drug trade the sinaloa cartel came under the broad control of el chapo guzman and ismail el mayo zambada but the sinaloa groups always operated less as
A rigidly organized command structure and more as a loose network of drug traffickers who can work together and collaborate as the situation demands their structure is more complicated and perhaps more reusable for adaptation than the structure of other criminal groups so the structure is one that on the one hand has clear lines of commands but at the same time
There is enough flatness to it that losing a particular branch or particular segment of the network doesn’t bring the whole organization under cineloa were able to use this highly adaptable entrepreneurial structure to out-compete and outlast rival criminal groups who challenged them perhaps the best example of this was when in 2010 a new cartel called los ettas
Challenged the established trafficking groups bringing almost paramilitary levels of violence to the mexican drug war los zetas is a powerful and violent criminal syndicate in mexico the cliche is plata o plomo that is silver take the money or plomo take the lead the group was formed by soldiers who defected from the mexican army’s elite air mobile special forces
The zetas military-style approach of seizing and holding territory allowed them to grow extremely fast and for a time they even appeared to challenge sinaloa’s dominance but the sinaloa federation had more established networks in international drug trafficking and in the world of organized crime nothing can compete with the profits from drugs these are members of
The sinaloa cartel they’re picking up packages of chemicals that have been left floating at sea these are the raw ingredients to cook fentanyl and other drugs they find the floating packages then haul them ashore by 2017 even as el chapo was being extradited to the us the zetas were already falling apart while the sinaloa cartel was using its adaptability
And capacity for innovation to increase its criminal power yes the sinaloa federation was also helped by the fact that authorities in the u.s seem to misunderstand the loose network style of their organization this is made clear by the staggering resources and attention poured into the decades-long hunt for el chapo we need to have the conservative effort of
Both the mexican government and the u.s government in recapturing mr guzman there’s no doubt that el chapo is a fascinating figure born into a poor family in sinaloa he rose to control a drug trafficking empire estimated to turn over upwards of three billion dollars a year but it was a series of dramatic prison escapes one involving a mile-long tunnel dug straight
Into a cell that turned chapo into a sort of mexican folk hero and the most important target for international narco enforcement this morning a massive international manhunt for one of the world’s most powerful and deadly drug trafficking kingpins is underway this is the opening of the tunnel from which authorities say joaquin chapel guzman managed to escape from
The altiplano federal prison our chapel became perhaps the world’s most famous criminal the fact that he twice escaped from prison including maximum security prison in mexico clearly with the help of corrupt government officials he was very purposeful in cultivating the robin hood image of bringing drugs to the gringos and bringing resources to poor communities
But of course it is very rare that toppling arresting or killing the leader of a criminal group will bring down the drug trafficking network in fact el chapo’s imprisonment changed almost nothing for one thing the sinaloa cartel’s co-founder ismail zambada who always kept a much lower profile than el chapo remains at large and while there have been power struggles
Between various factions within the cartel these don’t seem to have affected their ability to traffic thousands of tons of drugs across the u.s border in 2019 when the mexican army tried to arrest one of el chapo’s sons the sinaloa cartel took to the streets with military-grade equipment effectively taking over the state capital kuliakan until the army backed
Down and released it violence paralyzed the streets of a mexican city yesterday as security forces traded gunfire with heavily armed members of a drug cartel the son of the notorious drug kingpin el chapo was taken into custody then let go the ability to calibrate violence to apply it when necessary but not go over the top in the style of the zetas is also central
To how the sinaloa maintain their cash flow and the similar cartel uh and under el chapo’s leadership from the late 1980s made the choice to rule through having support among local people that yes you will kill your idols but you are not going to shoot up a disco full of people in doing so people will prefer brutality that’s predictable and restrained to brutality
That doesn’t give anything back the crucial skill that set the sinaloa federation apart from other cartels is that while some were buying heavy weaponry the sinaloa cartel were buying politicians did the police ever come by here but the current mass bloodshed in the mexican drug war originates in 2006 when the government launched an all-out war on the cartels the
Man largely responsible for organizing that offensive was gennaro garcia luna mexico’s secretary of public security in 2019 garcia luna was arrested in the u.s accused of taking tens of millions of dollars in bribes directly from el chapo specifically to protect the sinaloa cartel and target other traffickers luna is accused of taking bribes from especially drug
Kingpin juan el chapo guzman while providing protection for him u.s prosecutors say the bribes could be in the tens of millions of dollars so what does the immediate future look like for the sinaloa cartel they’re incredibly effective at capitalizing on the opioid crisis in the u.s expanding the supply of fentanyl brought over from china at the same time they’re
Rumored to be expanding meth export and production in both europe and asia since the transition post chapel and innovate their in-building networks relations in east asia with the triads uh and now in competition with the triads in places like new zealand and australia as well foreign though they do face new competition in mexico particularly from the jalisco
New generation cartel it does look like that for all the fanfare around the capture of el chapo the sinaloa cartel have adapted and will simply go on making billions we’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs
Transcribed from video
How Sinaloa Became Mexico’s Biggest Cartel | The War on Drugs By VICE