https://news.yahoo.com/twenty-four-hours-terror-cartel-211809436.html
The Guardian
Twenty-four hours of terror as cartel violence engulfs Mexican city
130
Tom Phillips and Analy Nuño in Guadalajara
Fri, January 6, 2023 at 1:18 PM PST
Photograph: Juan Carlos Cruz/EPA
Álvaro Arandas was approaching the check-in counter at Culiacán
international airport when the pandemonium began.
“You could hear the shooting – huge blasts, so much noise,” said the
Mexican businessman, who had planned to board a flight to the eastern
city of San Luis Potosí.
Instead, Arandas found himself scrambling for cover as security forces
and cartel gunmen fought for control of an airfield that had become the
latest frontline of a Latin American drug conflict that claims tens of
thousands of lives every year.
“There was panic … people ditched their bags and their phones, they
ditched everything, in order to take shelter,” the 32-year-old
remembered of the clashes at just after 8am on Thursday.
Twenty-four hours later, Arandas remained stranded inside the airport,
as Mexican troops battled to regain full control of Sinaloa’s state
capital after the arrest of one of the country’s most wanted men, Ovidio
Guzmán, sparked a day of bloodshed and chaos.
At least 29 people lay dead, including 10 members of the military and 19
alleged cartel shooters, while 35 soldiers were wounded.
And Guzmán, the 32-year-old son of former Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán, was behind bars in Mexico City after the latest
bloody chapter in the history of his family’s north-western domain.
Interactive
“Nobody is above the law,” Mexico’s security chief, Rosa Icela
Rodríguez, declared on Friday as she celebrated Guzmán’s detention on
the eve of next week’s visit by Joe Biden.
Culiacán’s day of drama began at about 4.40am on Thursday, according to
the local newspaper Noroeste.
Thirty-five miles north of the capital, near a rural fishing community
called Jesús María, security forces claimed they had spotted a convoy of
around 25 cartel vehicles in which their target – AKA “El Ratón” (The
Mouse) – was believed to be traveling.
Seven soldiers were killed in the ensuing gun battle between troops and
gangsters with .50 caliber machine guns desperate to avoid the arrest of
Guzmán, an alleged cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine trafficker for
whose arrest the US had offered a $5m reward.
A Black Hawk gunship pummeled one target with a 3,000-shots-per-minute,
six-barrel machine gun similar to those US troops used in Vietnam.
Eventually, Guzmán was arrested – but worse was still to come, as cartel
gunslingers marauded across Sinaloa state, torching vehicles, blocking
roads and trying to seize control of Culiacán’s airport to stop
authorities extracting their leader.
“We are asking citizens not to go out,” Sinaloa’s security secretary,
Cristóbal Castañeda, tweeted as the mayhem spread. “We will give you
more information when we can.”
Related: As Mexico’s epidemic of violence rages on, authorities seem
powerless to stop it
The former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chief Mike Vigil said Mexican
authorities were partly responsible for the cartel’s response to
Guzmán’s arrest.
When the drug boss was briefly detained in October 2019, president
Andrés Manuel López Obrador controversially ordered troops to free him
after gangsters brought the city to a standstill in a day remembered as
Culiacán’s “Black Thursday”.
Soldiers stand guard near burning vehicles on a street during the
operation to arrest Guzmán. Photograph: Juan Carlos Cruz/AFP/Getty Images
“We do not want war,” López Obrador, who is best known as Amlo, said at
the time.
Vigil said Amlo’s decision had sent a clear message to the leaders of
Mexico’s two most feared organized crime groups, the Sinaloa and Jalisco
New Generation cartels, “that if a leading member of the cartel was
captured and you generated wholesale violence, there was a good
possibility that they would be released”.
So it was that on Thursday morning, Sinaloa gunmen decided to raise hell.
“Obviously, they have developed a plan to seal off the entire city if
they need it,” Vigil said. “The reaction is equivalent to any
well-trained military. They know exactly what they need to do. Everybody
has responsibilities.”
Part of their plan appears to have been commandeering Culiacán’s airport
and preventing military aircraft from landing there to fly their
high-profile prisoner out.
As Arandas arrived at check-in, gangsters opened fire on both military
and civilian planes – some still in flight – as well as airport
buildings, Mexico’s defense secretary, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, told
reporters on Friday.
“Two airforce planes … had to make emergency landings,” after being hit
by “a considerable number” of cartel bullets, Sandoval admitted in a
breathtaking official account of the war-like violence.
The targeted planes included Aeroméxico’s 8.24am flight to Mexico City,
whose bewildered passengers were filmed crouching for cover between its
dark blue seats as the assault unfolded around them. “Why?” one
frightened child can be heard asking a parent.
Some analysts believe Guzmán’s arrest was intended as a gesture to
Biden, whom Amlo is scheduled to meet in Mexico City on Monday to
discuss issues such as migration and security, including Mexico’s role
in the US fentanyl crisis.
“Right out of the Amlo playbook,” one former senior US law enforcement
official in Mexico told Vice. “Plays us like a fiddle.”
Security expert Óscar Balderas said the capture would allow Amlo to
signal to the US that Mexico was capable of dealing effective blows to
organized crime. Guzmán was also a domestic “trophy” Amlo could use to
claim that his “abrazos no balazos” (hugs not bullets) security policy –
which puts fighting the social roots of crime above violent
confrontation – was working. “It’s a demonstration that his hugs, not
bullets strategy isn’t a strategy that means impunity.”
Calderón sends in the army
Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the
time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in
response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of
Michoacán.
Calderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized
onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a
catastrophic human toll. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the
body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced
from their homes, disappeared or killed.
Kingpin strategy
Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin
strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by
targeting their leaders.
That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo
Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also
did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe such tactics served
only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more
violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of
the pie.
Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s
rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as
the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups.
But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting
prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged:
“Mission accomplished”. But the violence went on. By the time Peña Nieto
left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders,
with nearly 36,000 people slain.
"Hugs not bullets"
The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in
December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo
as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering
vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people
at risk of being ensnared by the cartels.
“It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and
[social] welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an
average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine.
Amlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a
60,000 strong "National Guard". But those measures have yet to pay off,
with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants.
Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly
29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.
Vigil called the capture of Guzmán – who was spirited to Mexico City by
helicopter – “a victory for justice and the rule of law”.
But he said the Sinaloa cartel was such a vast, horizontally run
organization that his arrest was unlikely to make a major difference to
its illegal operations.
Related: Revealed: how Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel has created a global
network to rule the fentanyl trade
“They operate in six of the seven continents. The only continent they
don’t operate in is Antarctica because penguins don’t have money to buy
drugs,” Vigil joked, adding: “[This is] not going to have any impact on
the violence in Mexico or the drugs coming into the US, especially
fentanyl, which is the major crisis that we have.”
By Friday afternoon, the violence appeared to have subsided in Culiacán.
The city’s ghostly streets began to fill as cartel roadblocks were
dismantled, although the state security secretary told locals to drive
with their windows down if they were tinted.
Few expect the calm will last long. Some fear a power struggle between a
weakened Sinaloa cartel and its Jalisco rivals. Others suspect a
showdown is brewing between El Chapo’s four sons, who are known as Los
Chapitos, and gangsters loyal to the legendary cartel leader Ismael “El
Mayo” Zambada.
Vigil warned that while normality may have returned to Culiacán’s
streets, cartel bosses would soon order their “army of assassins” to
take revenge on military officials and their families for Guzmán’s arrest.
“They will not let this stand,” he said.
