In northwestern Mexico lies a beast with a thousand heads. At times, calm; sometimes angry; but if confronted by mistake, it destroys everything in its path. It’s lethal. It’s the Sinaloa Cartel. An organisation that despite the arrests and murders of its main leaders, is still in force and is perhaps the most powerful criminal structure in the underworld. Independent en Español traveled to Culiacán to shed light in a territory that lives under the tyranny of the criminal enterprise led, to a greater extent, by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and some of the children of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Among them, Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús and Ovidio Guzmán López. Independent en Español spoke with different protagonists of the political and public life of the Aztec land, and entered the most remote places of a city where no one kills, no one rapes, no one steals; where nobody does anything without the knowledge of “those above”. They have the power. They are in control.
“Apparently, nothing is going on here,” says the taxi driver as he cautiously enters Avenida de los Insurgentes, stops at Paseo Niños Héroes before reaching the University Stadium and adding: “The best thing to do is to wait and not honk your horn.” The traffic light stays green and no driver flinches. "You don’t know who’s coming in front of you," he says. This is how you live in the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa. In a tense calm. Organised crime has injected a kind of ‘civility of fear’ into the so-called “culichis”.
