Sinaloa Cartel

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sinaloa Cartel lost two of its senior figures on the 25th of July 2024, when United States authorities arrested Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López in El Paso, Texas. Guzmán López is a son of the better-known Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The organization they served is based in Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. It has been Mexico's dominant drug cartel since the 1990s. The United States Intelligence Community regards it as the largest trafficking organization on earth, perhaps more influential than Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel of Colombia at its peak. It began as something much smaller. How did a regional smuggling ring become a network that stretches across continents? Why does it keep operating after its bosses are arrested or killed? And what do its rivals, its partners and its alleged protectors reveal about how it really works?

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• 2. Pilots and Plazas

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  Pedro Avilés Pérez was a pioneer drug lord in Sinaloa in the late 1960s. He smuggled cannabis into the United States and is credited with pioneering the use of aircraft for the job. His organization became a school for the generation that followed. Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Ismael Zambada García all later claimed they learned the trade under him. So did his nephew, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Avilés died in a shootout with federal police in Sinaloa in September 1978.

  Félix Gallardo co-founded the Guadalajara Cartel between 1978 and 1980. Through the 1980s it controlled much of Mexico's trafficking corridors along the United States border. Only the Gulf Cartel rivaled it, holding part of the drug trade in the east of the country. In 1985, DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar was captured and murdered, and the threat from American law enforcement became far more urgent. By 1987, Félix Gallardo had divided his "Federation" into territories run as separate cartels, each with its own boss. They were called plazas. The arrangement made it less likely that the whole organization could be brought down at once.

  One of the plazas was Sinaloa, with Culiacán as its headquarters. By the late 1980s the DEA believed it was the largest trafficking organization operating in Mexico. Félix Gallardo was arrested in 1989, yet he stayed a major trafficker from jail, keeping in touch with his network by mobile phone. That ended in the early 1990s, when he was moved to a new maximum security prison. His nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers, then left to build what became the Tijuana Cartel. Sinaloa carried on under former lieutenants Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, Juan José Esparragoza and Joaquín Guzmán Loera. Much of its product now had to pass through the Tijuana corridor, which put it on a collision course with the Arellanos.

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• 3. The Tijuana War

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  Ramón Arellano Félix killed two of Guzmán's associates, and the friction over the Tijuana corridor became a full-fledged war. The fighting is described as most severe from 1992 to 2000. Zambada's wife at the time said family members of the leaders lived "everyday like it was their last."

  On the 8th of November 1992, Palma struck back at a disco club in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco. Eight Tijuana Cartel members died in the shootout. The Arellano Félix brothers escaped with help from David Barron Corona, a member of the Logan Heights Gang. The Tijuana side tried to ambush Guzmán at Guadalajara airport on the 24th of May 1993. Hired gunmen from Logan Heights opened fire, and six civilians were killed. Among them was Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.

  Church leaders first believed Cardinal Posadas had been targeted for his strong stance against the drug trade. Mexican officials believe he simply stood in the crossfire. He arrived at the airport in a white Mercury Grand Marquis town car, a model popular among drug barons. Barron had been told that Guzmán would arrive in one. Other evidence points away from a mistake. Posadas looked nothing like Guzmán, wore a long black cassock and a large pectoral cross, and was shot from only two feet away.

  Ismael Zambada García, known as El Mayo, began as a farmer, freelancer and small-time trafficker. He sold mere kilograms of cannabis and heroin before he met Mexico's more elite trafficking circles. In the early 1990s Guzmán brought him in, valuing his exceptional skill at working with other traffickers. Through much of that decade, Zambada helped grow the cartel while Guzmán and Palma sat in prison. He also helped Amado Carrillo Fuentes expand the Juárez Cartel in the state of Chihuahua. After Carrillo died in 1997, Zambada helped fold some of its remnants into Sinaloa.

  By around the year 2000, Zambada was recognized as one of the most powerful drug lords in Mexico. The Mexican government had cracked down mainly on the Tijuana Cartel, and he used the weakening of his rivals to push Sinaloa forward. He had built distribution networks from Colombia to the United States. His traditional hubs were allegedly Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Denver. As of 2014, the Tijuana Cartel, or at least most of it, was believed to be absorbed by the Sinaloa Federation or forced into alliance. A former senior Tijuana figure, Eduardo Teodoro Garcia Simental, known as "El Teo" or "Tres Letras," had himself allied with the Federation.

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• 4. The Chapo Years

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  Joaquín Guzmán Loera was captured in Guatemala on the 9th of June 1993 and sent back to Mexico, where he was jailed in a maximum security prison. The Mexican Army arrested his partner Palma on the 23rd of June 1995, and Guzmán took leadership of the cartel. On the 19th of January 2001 he escaped from Puente Grande prison and resumed command in person. Zambada reportedly sent a private helicopter to collect him.

  Zambada and Ignacio Coronel Villareal were Guzmán's two close associates. In 2003, Guzmán and Zambada became Mexico's top drug kingpins after the arrest of their rival Osiel Cárdenas Guillén of the Gulf Cartel. Another associate, Javier Torres Félix, was extradited to the United States in December 2006. Coronel was killed in a shootout with the Mexican military in Zapopan, Jalisco, on the 29th of July 2010.

  In 2013 the Chicago Crime Commission named Guzmán "Public Enemy No. 1" of Chicago, a city he has never set foot in. He is the only person to receive the title since Al Capone.

  On the 22nd of February 2014, American and Mexican authorities captured Guzmán overnight. Calls for his extradition to the United States began within hours, and a fight over where he should be tried followed. He faced federal indictments in several places, including San Diego, New York and Texas. On the 11th of July 2015 he escaped from the Federal Social Readaption Center No. 1, a maximum-security prison in the State of Mexico. He went out through a tunnel in his cell. It was his second successful jailbreak from a maximum security facility in 14 years. He resumed command, but was captured again during a raid on a home in Los Mochis, in Sinaloa, on the 8th of January 2016.

  With Guzmán gone, Zambada took on most of the leadership. On the 24th of June 2020 he was revealed to be sick with diabetes, which reportedly gave El Chapo's sons more influence. That ended an attempt to recruit Rafael and Miguel Caro Quintero, because the sons refused to give them leadership status. Under Zambada, the cartel had been willing to negotiate a role for the brothers, given their history as bosses in the predecessor organization. Even so, the real top leader was believed to be Zambada. He allegedly mediated power between Guzmán's relatives and friends, who scrambled for marginal positions, and let them work under his umbrella with relative autonomy.

  As of November 2022, the Chapitos and Zambada factions were rumored to have reconciled so they could fight the Jalisco New Generation Cartel together. Ovidio Guzmán, believed to lead the Chapitos faction, was arrested on the 5th of January 2023 and extradited to the United States on the 15th of September 2023. The split between the two camps even has a map. Within Sinaloa, Los Chapitos reportedly control El Fuerte, Badiraguato, Mocorito, Angostura, Navolato, Concordia, Rosario, Escuinapa and half of Culiacán. Mayo's side reportedly holds San Ignacio, Elota and the other half of Culiacán. Cosala and Mazatlán are said to have more than one group in charge, and the Beltrán-Leyva Organization reportedly holds part of the north. Zambada's fall in 2024 was allegedly caused by his former partners in Los Chapitos, and an internal dispute followed.

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• 5. Tunnels Under the Border

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  In 1989 the Sinaloa Cartel dug its first drug tunnel, a 300 ft passage from a house in Agua Prieta, Sonora, to a warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. U.S. Customs and Mexican Federal Police discovered it in May 1990. The cartel then turned its smuggling attention toward Tijuana and Otay Mesa, in San Diego, where it acquired a warehouse in 1992.

  After the shooting at Guadalajara airport on the 24th of May 1993, the gunmen boarded a commercial jet. It landed at the Tijuana airport, where neither police nor military units cordoned off the aircraft, and the gunmen escaped. On the 31st of May 1993, Mexican federal agents hunting for them found a partly finished tunnel, 1500 ft long, beside that same airport. It crossed under the border to a warehouse on Otay Mesa.

  The DEA in San Diego called that passage the "Taj Mahal" of drug tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border. It was linked to Guzmán and was five times longer than the Agua Prieta tunnel. It became the first of a series of "super tunnels" in Otay Mesa, fitted with power, ventilation and rail tracks to move large loads efficiently. Its discovery came just as Mexican and San Diego officials were discussing a cross-border airport that would have undermined such operations.

  The land beside the Tijuana airport carried a grievance dating to 1970. That year Mexico expropriated 320 ha of the Ejido Tampico to build a new runway and passenger terminal. The government agreed to pay the displaced communal farmers, the ejidatarios, 1.4 million pesos, about 112,000 U.S. dollars at the time. It failed to compensate them. The farmers reoccupied 79 ha of the airport and threatened armed conflict.

  In 1999 the airport was privatized as part of a 12-airport network called Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico. The government valued the expropriated land at 1.2 million pesos, about 125,560 U.S. dollars. The ejidatarios counted rising property values and the privatization, and put the figure at 2.8 billion pesos, about 294 million U.S. dollars. President Vicente Fox promised to resolve the dispute, but in 2002 he failed too. The farmers went on to develop the 79 ha, leasing buildings and parcels to trucking and storage companies.

  In 2006, that unpermitted development allowed a 2400 ft super tunnel to run from the former Ejido Tampico, beside the airport's runway, to a warehouse on Otay Mesa. It could move multi-ton loads and was traced back to the Sinaloa Cartel. More followed. In 2011 officials found an 1800 ft tunnel dug under the airport's runway 10/28. It began in a warehouse 980 ft from Mexico's 12th Military Air Base and 330 ft from a Federal Police station. It had an elevator and electric rail cars.

  In December 2016, one month before Guzmán's extradition to the United States, Mexican agents found two more super tunnels beside the airport and the Otay Mesa border crossing. One was operating and the other was under construction. Both were associated with the cartel. On the 21st of June 2017, Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López was arrested at the airport's Cross Border Xpress as she crossed into the United States. She was a former Sinaloa legislator described as Guzmán's girlfriend. She was charged with drug conspiracy and money laundering, and had been with him when he escaped capture in 2014.

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• 6. A Network Without a Pyramid

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  The Sinaloa Cartel used to be known as La Alianza de Sangre, the "Blood Alliance." One description calls it "a confederation of criminal organizations based on regional culture, and deep, shared blood ties." Those ties were forged over decades. The Cipher Brief credited the cartel's international success to a horizontal system, unlike the top-down hierarchy of many rivals. Decentralizing helped it expand abroad. It also let the cartel "survive brutal attacks by rival cartels and the capture of its most prominent leader, Chapo Guzman." The report likened the structure to semi-autonomous franchise branches and put it this way: "Authority for decision-making flows across various components rather than moving downward in a formal chain of command."

  By 2006 the cartel had eliminated all competition across the 528 km of the Arizona border. The Beltrán-Leyva brothers, once aligned with Sinaloa, had dominated that crossing in 2005. The Milenio, Jalisco, Sonora and Colima cartels were now its branches. At the time the organization laundered money on a global scale, mainly through the British bank HSBC. In January 2008 the cartel allegedly split into warring factions, and the Beltrán-Leyva brothers broke away that year. Drug violence in Mexico surged. Killings often involved beheadings or bodies dissolved in acid, and some were filmed and posted online as warnings to rival gangs.

  As of 2013, the cartel dominated the Sonora-Arizona corridor, which extends nearly 375 mi. Eight "plaza" bosses, each in charge of a region, coordinated the flow of narcotics north. Key places included Mexicali, San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonoyta, Nogales and Agua Prieta. Tucson and Phoenix were major points for trans-shipment and distribution. Atlanta emerged as a distribution center and accounting hub for the southeast, and violence followed.

  Chicago's Little Village neighborhood is the focal point of the cartel's operations in that city. From there it distributes at wholesale level to dozens of local street gangs, as much as 2 metric tons a month. The city has over 117,000 documented gang members. The Gangster Disciples are among the gangs most actively working with the cartel. Its push for control brought conflict with the Black P. Stones, Vice Lords and Black Disciples, and violence rose.

  A raid on a ranch in Lipa, Batangas, in 2013 revealed the cartel's presence in the Philippines, according to Arthur Cacdac, director general of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. President Rodrigo Duterte confirmed it, saying the cartel uses the country as a trans-shipment point for drugs bound for the United States. In December 2013, three suspected members were arrested in Lipa with 84 kg of methamphetamine. Prices for methamphetamine and cocaine tend to run higher in the Pacific than in the United States, which has drawn the cartel toward New Zealand and Australia.

  In the late 2000s and early 2010s the Gulf Cartel was a Sinaloa ally. By 2021 the alliance had reportedly fizzled, and the two fought in Zacatecas, with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel siding with the Gulf. Public reporting lists a long roster of sub-groups and partners. Los Ántrax act as an enforcer unit, and Los Salazares as a trafficking cell in Sonora. International partners are thought to include the Crips, the Mexican Mafia, the Kinahan Organised Crime Group, Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta. The Hells Angels are also listed, though the club denies it. Alliances with two Chinese triads, Sun Yee On and the 14K Triad, reportedly secure the precursor chemicals for synthetic drugs. Chinese groups also launder money at scale for the cartel.

  José Rodrigo Aréchiga Gamboa, known as "Chino Antrax," was a founding member of Los Ántrax, formed to protect Zambada. He was arrested on the 30th of December 2013 at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. On the 25th of February 2009, U.S. authorities had announced Operation Xcellerator, with 750 arrests of cartel members across the country and more than $59 million in cash seized. Yet seizure reports suggest the loss of partners in Mexico did not dent its smuggling, and it appears to be the most active cocaine smuggler. It can set up operations as far south as Peru, Paraguay and Argentina. Rather than rely on U.S. consumers alone, it has worked to supply distributors in Latin America and Europe.

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• 7. Products and Margins

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  A 2019 DEA report estimated that each counterfeit fentanyl pill costs only $1 to produce and can be resold in the United States for at least ten times as much. Fentanyl is entirely synthetic, so unlike cannabis, opium or coca it needs no farming, sunlight or irrigation. Most precursors come from China and are processed into fentanyl by criminal groups in Mexico. In Mazatlán, it reportedly takes as little as eight days for precursors to travel from a Pacific delivery to hidden labs and then north across the border.

  Crackdowns on opium farms in the Golden Triangle, a region overlapping Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, pushed the market toward synthetics that can be made more covertly. In San Diego County, fentanyl intercepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection rose from 1,599 lb in 2019 to more than 6,700 lb in 2021. Local news reports called San Diego the epicenter of fentanyl trafficking in America by mid-2022. The cartel is also known to use "blind mules," often American citizens who do not know what they carry. They are typically paid several thousand dollars to move what is usually millions of dollars' worth of drugs.

  Multicolored "rainbow" fentanyl drew public alarm because the DEA originally claimed the colors were meant to attract children. Cartel operatives denied this, according to Business Insider and other sources. They said the colors were meant to show buyers that the pills were counterfeit rather than real oxycodone. The colored powder was meant to stop dealers mixing fentanyl into white powders such as cocaine. The earlier blue lookalike pills had led to tens of thousands of accidental overdose deaths in the United States each year.

  Vicente Zambada Niebla, known as "El Vicentillo" and a son of El Mayo, coordinated multi-ton cocaine shipments from Central and South America through Mexico into the United States. He used Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, narco-submarines, container ships, go-fast boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor-trailers and automobiles. The Mexican Army arrested him on the 18th of March 2009. He was extradited to Chicago on the 18th of February 2010. On the 8th of November 2018 he filed a guilty plea agreement and agreed to cooperate with the government.

  In Colombia, the cartel is said to finance paramilitary drug groups such as the National Liberation Army, FARC dissidents and the Clan del Golfo, and to take part directly in coca cultivation. Nearly 85 percent of Colombia's coca grows in just five departments. In Ecuador, the cartel has a reported partnership with the Choneros, a prison gang from Manta. A single multi-ton cocaine shipment seized off Ecuador in August 2021 set off a string of killings. The Choneros leader, Jorge Luis Zambrano González, known as Rasquiña, was assassinated in a shopping mall cafeteria in Manta on the 28th of December 2020. Ecuador's spiral into drug violence is supposedly traced back to that killing. In August 2025, Zambada acknowledged that the cartel built relationships with Colombian cocaine producers and oversaw cocaine imports to Mexico by boat and plane.

  Los Angeles County's largest cannabis bust in its history came in the summer of 2021, when officers dismantled 70 to 80 hoop house greenhouses in the open desert. They recovered thousands of pounds of cannabis grown with water diverted from nearby alfalfa, carrot and potato farms. Mexican cartels have reportedly stolen millions of gallons of water for such grows in California's remote forests and deserts, which can yield three to five harvests a year. In 2010, the RAND Corporation said it was not unrealistic to assume at least 50 percent of U.S. cannabis came from Mexico. Legalization in many states and better American-grown product then cut into cartel profits. Factions like the Chapitos have moved into branding. Culiacán's best-known brand is Star Kush, whose logo shows an astronaut eating a slice of pizza. The pizza refers to "La Chapisa," the people working for Guzmán and his sons. The astronaut sits on a huge tomato because Culiacán is Mexico's biggest tomato exporter.

  In Guanajuato, crystal meth went from about 2 percent of drug users in 2010 to almost 50 percent at the end of 2020, while cannabis use among users fell. Around 2005, Mexican cartels took almost complete control of the U.S. methamphetamine market. This followed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which limited over-the-counter cold medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. The Centers for Disease Control recorded 16,167 methamphetamine overdose deaths in 2019, up from 3,627 in 2013. The U.S. market may have been worth upwards of $50 billion as of 2021, against a reported $13 billion in 2010. Around 2015, when Mexican cartels moved into the Netherlands, they convinced many groups to switch from MDMA to methamphetamine for higher profits. Federal Highway 15 runs from Mazatlán through Sinaloa and carries precursor chemicals and finished product north, with passenger vehicles the most common way through the ports of entry.

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• 8. Bribes and Bargains

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  In May 2009, the U.S. National Public Radio aired reports alleging that Mexican federal police and military were working in collusion with the Sinaloa Cartel. Its reporters interviewed dozens of officials and ordinary people. One report quoted a former Juarez police commander who claimed his entire department worked for the cartel and that it had bribed the military. Another source was the U.S. trial of Manuel Fierro-Mendez, an ex-Juarez police captain who admitted working for Sinaloa. A DEA agent at that trial alleged he had contacts with a Mexican military officer. An anthropologist who studies trafficking said the cartel's low arrest rate compared with other groups showed favoritism. A Mexican official denied it, and a DEA agent and a political scientist offered other explanations.

  A witness at Guzmán's 2019 U.S. trial testified that former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto took a $100 million bribe from him. In early 2023, Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico's Secretary of Public Security from 2006 to 2012, was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in cash bribes from the cartel. During his guilty plea in a federal court in Brooklyn in August 2025, Zambada described the cartel's long history of paying Mexican police and military commanders, back to its earliest days. Prosecutors in Manhattan accuse Gerardo Mérida Sánchez, a former public security official in Sinaloa, of taking more than $100,000 a month from Los Chapitos to protect smuggling routes. He was arrested in Arizona on the 11th of May and transferred to New York.

  In 2012, Newsweek reported allegations that Humberto Loya-Castro, Guzmán's legal adviser, had become a key DEA informant. He became an official informant in 2005 but had supplied information on rivals since the 1990s. That intelligence was reportedly instrumental in the takedown of the Tijuana Cartel and the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva. It allegedly kept Loya-Castro immune from prosecution and kept the DEA focused away from Sinaloa's leadership. El Universal obtained court documents that were said to confirm these claims. According to those documents, the DEA struck agreements with the cartel's leadership, promising immunity from extradition and prosecution in exchange for intelligence on other cartels.

  Leaked emails from the 2012 Stratfor leak included statements from a Mexican diplomat that appeared to imply Mexican officials believed U.S. officials were helping the cartel's smuggling. In that view, Washington protected Sinaloa while attacking its rivals to lower violence between cartels. A Mexican foreign agent codenamed MX1 backed this up, and Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, a former spokesman of the State of Chihuahua, corroborated it. In March 2015, the BBC program This World aired an episode called "Secrets of Mexico's Drug War." It reported on Operation Fast and Furious, run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That operation had allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal buyers acting for cartel leaders, in particular the Sinaloa Cartel. The episode also covered Vicente Zambada Niebla's claims of immunity under a deal between the Mexican and U.S. governments. The U.S. Justice Department invoked national security to keep Humberto Loya Castro, the lawyer of the Sinaloa Syndicate, from being summoned as a witness at his trial.

  In February 2026, the U.S. State Department said it would pay up to $10 million for information leading to the arrests or convictions of two brothers identified as Sinaloa Cartel leaders in the state of Baja California.

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