The capture last year of Joaquín Guzmán barely seems to have affected the Sinaloa cartel’s core business, but behind the scenes trouble may be brewing
The fortune-teller smiled as she gazed out towards the distant peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range.
“The mountains are glowing red and it will be a good harvest,” she predicted. The forecast was not based on second sight, however, but on conversations with local farmers looking forward to a bumper crop of marijuana – and the cash bonanza it will bring.
This is Mexico’s own golden triangle. Straddling the northern states
of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, the Sierra has been a stronghold of
the country’s drug trade for as long as anyone can remember. Its deep
canyons and dense pine forests have harboured narcos
and hidden plantations of marijuana and opium poppies for decades.
It’s a world the fortune-teller knows well: over the years, she said she had often used her gift to help local people – locating a lost kilo of opium
paste or comforting the girlfriends of slain traffickers.
The arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán on 22 February 2014 was hailed
by the Mexican and US authorities as the one of the biggest blows to
the drug trade in decades. But a year on, the core business of
Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel seems hardly affected. “As long as there are people who want the drugs this will never stop, whoever goes to prison,” the seer said.
Overall, seizures of drugs from Mexico heading into the US remain much
as they were before Guzmán’s arrest. The Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) has reported only small changes in the way the cartel operates. And after a brief burst of triumphalism in the days
after Guzmán’s arrest, the Mexican government now rarely mentions the
Sinaloa cartel at all.
At a press conference on Thursday, Sgt Ken Lattin of Kennewick police, the spokesman for the special investigative unit (SIU) of neighboring forces investigating the incident, conceded for the first time that all three officers involved in the shooting had opened fire. He would not reveal how many rounds were discharged, arguing the medical examiner’s office would disclose the tally at a later date.
