Fear, death and hope in a city under the shadows of a Mexican cartel war

A mule grazed on a recent Thursday afternoon at the end of a quiet dirt road near the entrance of a gated and walled ranch house on the outskirts of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state in northwestern Mexico.

Notices attached to the gates indicated that the property had been seized and sealed by the Mexican Attorney General’s office. 

This is where a fratricidal war within one of the world’s most powerful transnational criminal organizations began.

Not far from here, down a secondary highway, headed east toward Culiacán, federal police agents unfurled yellow tape across a driveway leading to a home where a man in his early 20s was found dead on the floor by his bed. He was shot once in the head and once in the chest.

Later, on this same Thursday, Dec. 11, in a cornfield south of Culiacán, the chief nurse from a local health-care centre was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head. 

As the man’s body was loaded into the back of a forensics van for transport to the morgue, smoke billowed on the horizon. A car was burning in a nearby village after an armed attack that left one man dead near a municipal office.

The multiple deaths are another round of suspected salvos from the war within the Sinaloa cartel, one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine, methamphetamines and fentanyl in the world that is consumed by a crisis coursing through its heartland.

This internecine war has brought fear and violence to Culiacán and its surrounding area. The sun-seared Sinaloan capital, with a population of slightly more than one million, is also known as the cradle of the Sinaloa cartel. 

Control of the city means control of the sprawling criminal organization that has tendrils stretching from South America to Canada to Europe. 

The Humaya and Tamazula rivers meet to form the Culiacán River near the centre of this picturesque city, flanked on its east by the rolling Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. Roughly 50 kilometres to its west, as the crow flies, lies the Pacific Ocean. 

On the surface, life flows to a regular rhythm here. Traffic snarls during the morning commutes, the malls are full of Christmas shoppers, local restaurants, famed for their Sinaloan flavours, bustle. 

But at any moment, in a muzzle flash, violence can burst through the fibres of the city.

It vanishes with the same velocity, on the back of a motorcycle or a speeding car, leaving a tight pattern of eight bullet holes through the passenger side window of a silver SUV, a body slumped inside, on a Tuesday morning in front of a convenience store. 

“This is an everyday thing, it happens all the time,” said Miguel Ángel Vega, an independent journalist from Culiacán who often works as a fixer for international journalists who travel here.