Sinaloa Cartel

The oldest and most durable of the Mexican trafficking organisations, which grew into the dominant one when the Colombian route closed. Sinaloa on the Pacific coast has a long history of opium and cannabis cultivation in its mountains, and the network that emerged there in the 1980s inherited a business that Colombian destruction and American interdiction in the Caribbean had pushed overland through Mexico - which turned Mexican groups from couriers into principals. The organisation is less a hierarchy than a federation of allied families with unusual durability, and its long-time leader Joaquin Guzman, known as El Chapo, escaped from Mexican maximum-security prisons twice, once in a laundry cart and once through a mile-long tunnel dug to the shower floor of his cell. Tunnelling under the border is a signature technique and dozens of such tunnels have been found. The Mexican government's decision in 2006 to deploy the army against the cartels fragmented the larger groups without reducing the trade, and the violence that followed has killed well over 400 thousand people and left more than 100 thousand missing. The organisation moved into fentanyl, which is synthesised from precursor chemicals rather than grown and is far cheaper to produce. Guzman was extradited and sentenced to life in the United States in 2019. His sons took over parts of the network. Internal war broke out among its factions in 2024. The organisation has operated since the late 1980s and is based in Sinaloa state on Mexico's Pacific coast. Culiacan is its principal city. Mexico shares a border with the United States of around 3,145 kilometres. Guzman was 61 at his sentencing. Fentanyl is roughly fifty times more potent than heroin by weight.

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