MEXICO DRUG WAR PRIMER: Sinaloa Cartel/Guadalajara Cartel

The relation between the United States and Mexico is one of the most complicated and multifaceted of any in the contemporary world. It would take many dozen books all written by people much smarter than I, some of which have been written and which I’ll recommend at the end, and hundreds of life-times to truly “understand” it. The current drug war, and by current I mean the last 50 years (though, we’ll see that it has roots the stretch back much, much further and deeper) are a good window into seeing how these two nations intertwine and shape one another, as well as offer one of the best examples for someone seeking to understand how the American empire, in its current interaction, functions. To look into this, let's narrow it down and investigate perhaps the largest and most lucrative group in the past decade, and one of the largest and most lucrative criminal organizations in the world, the Sinaloa cartel. Over 60,000 people have died in Mexico as a direct result of this war since 2006, literal billions in aid has been sent from the US to Mexico in the last few years, some insight into this situation would be helpful in thinking about America and its allies.

The relationship between the United States and Mexico is older than either country and is woven deeply into the fabric of both nations. In the popular imagination, the cartels are highly-organized criminal gangs that traffic drugs, murder, extort and terrorize. They are thought of as purely evil groups who stand in opposition to the governments of both Mexico and the United States. But, like with the Russian or American Mafias, or the Yukuza in Japan, the history and allegiances are much more complicated and fluid. Both America and Mexico often shape and use these groups to further their own ends. In some cases, their very existence is the result of American and/or Mexican government policy. This might seem conspiratorial or cynical, despite being widely believed in Mexico itself (when I lived in Mexico a decade ago, you would be hard pressed to find a single person who didn’t believe the Sinaloa was an arm of the Mexican government and supported by the Yankees) but it becomes quite clear when you look at some of the groups individually.

Where to start with the Sinaloa cartel? One could begin with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which highlighted the United State’s insistence that the Western Hemisphere, and Mexico most of all, was their territory, not any of the European powers. This attitude continues well into today, and woe towards a country in this hemisphere that seeks to chart a different course (ask Cuba). Or, one could put a starting point at the Mexican American war, which, among other things, stole large pieces of territory from Mexico, including the land that is today’s contested border. And that border is the crux of the issue surrounding these cartels. The basic premise is simple: the United States started outlawing drugs (and, for a while, alcohol) in the early 20th century, which, since people want to get high regardless of any law, any good free-market economist could have told you would increase the profitability of illegal drugs. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, under Nixon, the modern war on drugs emerged, as a domestic conter-insurgency strategy. Nixon’s aide on domestic affairs, John Erlichman put it most clearly in his book, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

One must never forget the vast, vast amounts of money that are involved in drug smuggling, the Sinaloa cartel is estimated to bring in between $3 and $40 Billion dollars a year, to give the figures for just one organization, which attracts a lot of attention. First, from international banks and financial institutions, who are eager to get their grubby little paws on some of that money. According to a UN advisor, drug money helped several financial institutions stave off bankruptcy during the 2008 crisis. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said cartel money was "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse during the crisis. By his estimate the global economic system absorbed $352 billion of drug profits during this time.

The other groups who are very interested in and involved with this giant pool of blood money are the world’s intelligence agencies. There are many, many books on the links between CIA and other intelligence agencies and drug trafficking. Again, too much to get into now, let us focus on Mexico, Central, and South America. Besides the boatloads of untraceable money available, money the CIA can use for programs they don’t want to ask congress to fund, the drug-underworld also provides ways to move around mercenaries and death-squads, facilitate bribery and blackmail, and generally keep Communism and leftism at bay in the Americas. This works in two directions, on a simple level, the United States can protect the drug operations of groups they support, and the most obvious example of this is the Contras, who moved thousands of tons of cocaine, cocaine that helped spur the crack explosion in the 80’s, into the United States to finance their war on Nicaragua's leftist government. Additionally, they can engage in counter-insurgencies against leftists under the guise of anti-narcotics work, as with Colombia’s USA-financed war on the FARC (who are primarily depicted as drug dealers in American media), or, to take a Mexican example, the long history of Mexico’s “National Security” agencies being used to crush leftists movements.

This requires some detailing, given that these organizations have changed names several times. The original group was known as the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) was created in 1947 under Mexican president Miguel Alemán Valdés, with the assistance of various U.S. intelligence agencies, with the duty of "preserving the internal stability of Mexico against all forms subversion and terrorist threats" which was dissolved thanks to scandals discussed below and replaced, in 1989, with the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), which was itself replaced with the National Intelligence Center (CNI) in 2018.

We’ll focus on the DFS for the first part of this short history though it is important to keep in mind that, in 2019 AMLO, the Mexican president, opened the archives of the DFS so more is being learned everyday about exactly how the corruption in Mexico functioned. But as far as what we know now it’s quite clear that the DFS received substantial support and training from the CIA and CIA cut-outs in exchange for working on curbing leftism in Mexico and Latin America more broadly.

For example, Arturo “El Negro” Durazo (the Chief of Police in Mexico City for six years, from 1976 to 1982) and Miguel Nazar Haro (the head of Mexico's DFS from 1978 to 1982) ran, at least, 2 paramilitary death-squads during their time in their respective offices, La Brigada Blanca and El Grupo Jaguar, which were responsible for the killing of, at least, 3,000 members of leftist organizations. The CIA’s involvement with the DFS was long suspected, especially in Mexico, but first came out into the open in ‘81 when Miguel Nazar Haro was indicted in San Diego on charges of involvement in a massive cross-border car-theft ring. The FBI office at the U.S. Embassy immediately registered strong protests, calling Nazar Haro an "essential contact for CIA station Mexico City." San Diego U.S. Attorney William Kennedy disclosed in 1982 that the CIA was trying to block the case against Nazar Haro on grounds that he was a vital intelligence source in Mexico and Central America. Kennedy was subsequently fired by Reagan. Multiple witnesses at the trial testified that Nazar Haro was deeply involved with drug-trafficking as well.

It was during this period, beginning around ‘76, that an arrangement known as “El Sistema,” was put into place. Under El Sistema, groups of traffickers paid bribes to the DFS in exchange for the rights to control certain zones and trafficking routes in the country, colloquially known as “Plazas.” It is this system that fosters the birth of giant cartels, which are easier for groups like the CIA and DFS to deal with and control.

Around this time, the most powerful of these groups was known as the Guadalajara cartel. Ran, at the time, by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero. Besides paying the customary bribes to the DFS the Guadalajara cartel was also protected by the Americans in exchange for supporting the Contras. Rafael Caro Quintero had a ranch in Veracruz that was used as a training camp and drug money, smuggling routes and weapons sales were all diverted from the cartel to the Contras. Operation Leyenda, a major DEA operation that ran from ‘85 until ‘89, breaks up the Guadaljara cartel and leads to splintering from which emerge the modern cartels, including the Sinaloa cartel, Juarez cartel, and Tijuana cartel. But if the Guadalajara cartel was so useful to the Americans, why was it broken up? The answer to that has to do with the brutal 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena Salazar.

Camarena came to Mexico as part of Operation Condor in ‘81. In an insane twist, there was actually another, more famous Operation Condor overseen by the US, that ran between ‘68-’88 and involved various governments in South America, concentrated in the Southern Cone region but stretching across the continent, that coordinated a campaign of anti-leftist repression that culminated in between half a million and a million violent deaths. The Mexican Operation Condor was a joint program between the DEA and Mexican state to disrupt drug trafficking and growing, especially in the so-called “golden triangle” region between Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa. However, in keeping with the pattern we are tracing, the Guadalajara cartel was being protected and allowed to operate, in exchange for helping with the Contras and various other, off-the-books projects of US interest as well as feeding the authorities information on their rivals. Camarena and his DEA boss, James "Jaime" Kuykendall, become frustrated at the corruption apparent in their Mexican counterparts and higher-ups at the DEA in their refusal to go after the Guadalara group. Camerena posed as a day-laborer and eventually discovered Rafael Caro Quintero's 2,500-acre marijuana plantation, "Rancho Bufalo." He also helped identify Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo as the boss of the organization, and, in 1984, he and Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar took aerial photos of the ranch.The Rancho Bufalo raid of November 1984 destroyed 5,000 tons of marijuana (worth $8 billion).

Obviously, the cartel was pissed. They paid a lot of money, played along with the CIA/DFS various schemes and thus demanded to know the agent who caused the raid. We may never know who exactly leaked his name but Camarena was abducted in broad daylight on February 7, 1985. Camarena was taken to a residence located at 881 Lope de Vega in the neighborhood of Jardines del Bosque, in the western section of the city of Guadalajara, owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, where he was tortured and interrogated over a 30-hour period and then murdered.

What happened in the murder-house, and who, exactly, was present for the torture and murder is a matter of some debate and speculation. Our best source is a man named Jorge Godoy Lopez, the first eyewitness from the house where Camarena was murdered. Godoy was a police officer in Jalisco, then a bodyguard for a drug-trafficker named Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, also called Don Neto. Much of what Godoy testified to was confirmed by his boss in the state police force, Rene Lopez Romero, who also moon-lighted as a cartel enforcer and has a substantial criminal history, which includes assisting in the rape and murder of 4 missionaires, who were mistaken for DEA agents, in Guadalajara. Godoy lists some pretty interestint people present at the torture-house, including, Bartlett Díaz (cabinet secretary at the time), General Arévalo Gardoqui (secretary of defense), Miguel Aldana (the head of Interpol), Félix Rodriguez, Sergio Espino Verdin (head of DFS). There’s also Juan Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran trafficker and CIA link through his airline company called SETCO, which is supplying the contra rebels in Nicaragua. All of these people are fascinating characters, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, for instance, went on to rig the 1988 presidential election that gave Carlos Salinas the presidency, a post that Bartlett Díaz seemed destined for until the Camarena case made him too controversial. Because of an outstanding warrant to appear before a Los Angeles grand jury, he has not been willing to enter the U.S. for decades. He continued to serve in the Mexican senate. After Obrador's election as Mexican president in 2018, he appointed Bartlett to become the CEO of Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), the state-owned electric utility of Mexico, the country's second most powerful state-owned company, after PEMEX.

However, for our purpose, the most intriguing is Félix Rodriguez, a major figure in CIA history. Rodriguez is too complex a figure to fully get into in this article, he’s something of a Forrest Gump figure in terms of evil CIA activities. He was involved in the Bay of Pigs, he was present at Che’s execution (and, according to him, owns Guevara’s Rolex as trophy), he participated in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and was heavily involved in Iran/Contra, and was good friends/co-workers with Cuban terrorist/mass-murderer, Luis Posada Carriles, the list goes on. Rodriguez was apparently using his “Max Gomez” alias and interrogated Kiki w/r/t what he knew about the Guadalala cartel/Contra connection. A DEA official named Hector Berrellez as well as Phil Jordan, former DEA Intelligence Director, who were investigating the Camarena murder also say Rodriguez was in the room during the torture. Berrellez is DEA supervisor of Operation Leyenda, which runs from ‘85-’89, to investigate the Camarena murder. It was not until late in 2013, when the Mexican government prematurely released trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero—a main figure in Camarena’s torture and murder — that Berrellez decided to speak out. Quintero was recaptured in 2022.

The web of connections and threads swirling around the Camarena murder continues to be explored and understood, we may never get the whole picture. It’s one of those “deep events” like the JFK murder, or 9/11, or Epstien’s suicide that the more you look into them the more the event spirals out, connects to other people and occurrences and provides a true but blurry map of how power really functions in our world. But to get back to our major subject, the Sinaloa Cartel, the major importance of Kiki’s brutal murder is the destruction of the Guadalajara cartel. In 1989, when Guadalajara leader Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was arrested, his organization split into two opposing factions: the Tijuana Cartel whose leadership was inherited by his nephews and heirs, the Arellano Félix brothers, and the Sinaloa Cartel. Sinaloa, whose leadership fell to former lieutenants Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, Adrián Gómez González, Ismael Zambada García, Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, and Joaquín Guzmán Loera (El Chapo). The Sinaloa Cartel, which used to be known as La Alianza de Sangre ("Blood Alliance"), was originally active in the states of Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Nayarit, and has since gone on to become perhaps the largest criminal organization in the world. The Sinaloa Cartel went on to become what it is today, by aligning itself with various legitimate power structures in both the United States and Mexico. The list of allegations of collusion is long. And possible there from before the group was even founded.

Ismael Mario Zambada García, also known as El Mayo, who is the only founding Sinaloa figure who is still at large, who, in fact, has managed to never get arrested, despite continuing to live in Sinaloa itself and is the only member of the famous list of the 37 largest Drug Kingpins published by the Mexican government at the start of this phase of the Narco Wars, back in 2009. Everyone else on that list has been killed or captured. El Mayo’s entry into drug-smuggling is shrouded in mystery but from what we do know, it involves Antonio Cruz Vazquez, the man who ended up marrying his sister who has a very suspicious background. Cruz was born in Cuba before the revolution. After Castro took power he briefly worked as a police officer before leaving Cuba and showing up in Nicaragua where the rumors began that he was CIA connected. He eventually ran into trouble in both the US and Mexico before moving to Sinaloa, marrying El Mayo’s sister and setting up a smuggling operation that El Mayo was able to work in. Even after his 1978 arrest in the US he refused to discuss his time in Nicaragua. It was at this time that El Mayo took over his operation and connections in Mexico

In 2012, Newsweek reported about allegations from an anonymous former Sinaloa member turned informant that alleged that Joaquín Guzmán's legal adviser, Humberto Loya-Castro, had also become a key informant for the DEA. Officially, Loya-Castro became an informant of the DEA in 2005 but, in reality, he had already been providing vital information on rival cartels since the 1990s. This intel was instrumental to the takedown of the Tijuana Cartel, the Sinaloa cartel's main rival. These allegations were confirmed by court documents obtained by El Universal. According to court documents, the DEA had struck agreements with the cartel's leadership that would ensure that they would be immune from extradition and prosecution in the US and would avoid disrupting the cartel's drug operations in exchange for intelligence which could be used against other drug cartels. Jesus Manuel Fierro Mendez, a member of the Sinaloa Cartel and ex-captain in the Ciudad Juarez police, testified in El Paso that he had been the “spokesman” of Chapo Guzman in numerous telephone conversations and some face-to-face meetings with agents from ICE “There were two of us that were, so to speak, like spokesmen”, Fierro Mendez said. “ We passed on all the information. But this information we received, obviously, from the highest levels.” He also said that Chapo had authorized him to meet with the ICE and inform them of the activities of enemy cartels.

During the PAN terms, Fox and Calderon, 2000-2012, Prosecutor Steve Fraga, as well as DEA agents Manuel Castanon, David Herrod, Carlos Mitchem, met with Sinaloa reps, including Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of El Mayo, to discuss arrangements to allow Sinaloa to continue to operate, according to El Universal. During the Chapo trial, Alex Cifuentes Villa, a Colombian assistant to the Cartel, claimed Guzman gave Enrique Peña Nieto a $100 million bribe in 2012. This particular bribe has another strange angle to it, which was reported by Villa at the Chapo trail in NYC.

In unsealed documents Alex Cifuentes Villa said that Guzmán was a prolific rapist, particularly of underage girls. According to Cifuentes, a woman known only as “Comadre Maria'' regularly sent Chapo photographs of girls as young as 13 as a sort of perverse menu. Chapo was on the run at the time and was allegedly paying a $5,000 fee per girl to have the victims brought to him in his mountain stronghold. While disgusting, that part seems unsurprising, given what sort of person El Chapo is. However, what Cifuentes told the jurors about “Comrade Maria” on Jan 15, 2019 is quite shocking. Apparently, “Comadre Maria” had also served as the kingpin’s intermediary when he allegedly paid that $100 million bribe to Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. Who is this woman? What does it mean that someone is both a pimp of underage girls, as well as someone who knows both the President of Mexico and the then-most-wanted-man-in-the-world, El Chapo? The implications of this despite having clear Maxwell/Epstein overtones, remains uninvestigated by the authorities or media of either country.

The allegations go deeper than just snitching and coordination to remove smaller cartels, there are also credible allegations that the US Government provided material support for the Sinaloa cartel. To understand this angle, it’s important to take a step back and look at one of the other illegal trade dynamics at play in the US/Mexico relationship, namely, the movement of guns. While drug trafficking, from Mexico into the US, gets most of the media attention, Cartels and other criminal groups are also trying to move weapons in the opposite direction. Firearms are much more restricted and hard to get in Mexico and obviously essential to any large scale criminal enterprise. Between 2006 and 2011, the ATF let guns “walk” or stood by while purchases were made by “straw-buyers” in Arizona that they knew were going to cartels in Mexico.The two most notorious “gun walking” programs were Operation Wide Receiver (2006–2007) and Operation Fast and Furious (2009–2010). Between the two programs, at least 1,856 guns were allowed to walk, whereupon the ATF “lost track” of these weapons. Other U.S. agencies, federal, state and local, recovered nearly 270 of these guns at crime scenes in the U.S. and 195 of these guns were recovered by Mexican police at Mexican crime scenes. In 2010, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in a shootout in Arizona with drug cartel members. Cartel member Manuel Osorio-Arellanes pleaded guilty in 2012 to first-degree murder in the case and was sentenced in 2014 to 30 years in prison. Two rifles from the "Fast and Furious" operation were found at the scene of the crime, but there is no evidence proving that Terry was killed with either of those guns. When El Chapo was arrested in 2016, he had a Fast and Furious gun with him. Eric Holder and Obama paint these facts as a mistake and fuck-up, though there are others that suggest something more sinister.

During his trial in Chicago for trafficking, Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, alleged that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the cartel in exchange for information used to take down its rivals. Keep in mind that during this same trail it was revealed that Zambada-Niebla was in contact with the DEA. DEA agent Manuel Castanon said on the stand, “On March 17, 2009, I met for approximately 30 minutes in a hotel room in Mexico City with Vincente Zambada-Niebla and two other individuals — DEA agent David Herrod and a cooperating source [Sinaloa lawyer Loya Castro] with whom I had worked since 2005. … I did all of the talking on behalf of [the] DEA.” During this same trial, the US Justice Department invoked national security to prevent Humberto Loya Castro, the lawyer of the Sinaloa cartel, from being summoned as a witness to the trial against Vicente Zambada Niebla. Why does a Sinaloa cartel lawyer have information so damaging to national security? Or, let’s look at another situation where government equipment ends up in cartel hands. In 2007 a Gulfstream jet, filled with Sinaloa cocaine crashed in the Yucatan. The plane, tail number N987SA, had been used to shuttle people from Washington to Guantanamo Bay and seems to have also been involved in some extraordinary renditions. In other words, it was a CIA plane. Is it possible that it’s a coincidence, sure. But when one looks at the preponderance of coincidences, strange happenings and connections a picture becomes clear.

The situation is on-going. Currently, in Brookly, Genaro García Luna, a man who was for many years the leading security chief in Mexico, is being charged with corruption and working with the Sinaloa cartel. Edgar Veytia, a former attorney general in the state of Nayarit, testified that he was told by Felipe Calderón, along with other prosecutors, in 2011, to support Sinaloa and only persecute and pursue their rivals. García Luna, the highest-ranking Mexican official to be tried in the United States for drug trafficking and corruption charges, has been accused, during his trial, of numerous offenses, including getting a suitcase full of cash from El Chapo, alerting Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a major trafficker, of his imminent arrest and sending men to help him get away by disguising him as a federal police officer. In 2012, two CIA officers in Mexico were shot and wounded by Mexican Federal authorities. American officials, including Eric Holder himself, attempted to get footage of the shooting from Luna, who staunchly refused. Eventually the FBI obtained the tape through other means. Luna’s defense partially rests on showing the jury numerous pictures of him with various top US officials, including Holder, Obama, Clinton and others. If he was so corrupt and compromised, why were these Americans meeting with him and not denouncing them, surely they would have known if he was dirty, right? Everyone in Mexico seemed to. We’ll see what happens with the rest of this trial, if the US prosecutors can thread the needle of convicting Luna without implicating anyone on the US side of the border.

Another person who would be in position to know about any possible deeper situation around the relation between the Sinaola group and the CIA was revealed by WikiLeaks, when they published 2,878 out of what it says is a cache of 5 million internal Stratfor emails (dated between July 2004 and December 2011) obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous). Stratfor, which is officially known as Strategic Forecasting Inc. is a consulting company founded in 1996. They provide intelligence gathering and geopolitical analysis for corporate clients (Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, etc.) and have been referred to, by Barron's, as "The Shadow CIA." Wikileaks published an email, sent to vice president of intelligence Fred Burton on April 19, 2010 by a source they list as MX1. It reads:

“I think the US sent a signal that could be construed as follows:

"To the [Juárez] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the Juárez cartel]. Also note that [Ciudad Juárez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either [the Juárez cartel] gets in line or we will mess you up."

In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner, and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis.”

Bill Conroy, of Narco News, reports that MX1's description matches the publicly available information on Fernando de la Mora Salcedo — a Mexican foreign service officer who studied law at the University of New Mexico and served at the Mexican Consulates in El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix.

Piecing together these pieces and anecdotes and weird stories and coincidences we get a better picture of what is actually going on in Mexico and the United States. It’s frustrating and confusing, we’ll probably never find a document that implicated the American intelligence community in purposefully setting up and assisting the Sinaloa or Guadalajara cartels, we only get these glimpses and insinuations. As long as there is prohibition, there will be money to be made selling drugs, and, more specifically, money to be made moving drugs across the border. Various state actors in Mexico and the United States want access to that money, and they want some control over the actions of the traffickers, typically to support larger geo-political goals. Therefore, it is in their interest to have one large cartel that they can deal with. This was the Guadalajara group, and, until quite recently, it was the Sinaloa organization. Perhaps Sinaloa has gotten too big and too famous to be useful any longer, which is why we’re seeing the arrests of Luna and Chapo, perhaps they are merely trimming the organization to placate a public tired of the corruption and killing. What is clear is that this is more complicated and intertwined than 2 governments fighting against criminals.

OPEN TABS

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/americas-drug-war-is-devastating-mexico/

https://amp.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

https://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion-mexico/2014/impreso/la-guerra-secreta-de-la-dea-en-mexico-212050.html

https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/world/americas/mexico-president-sinaloa-cartel.amp.html?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQIKAGwASCAAgM%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16758171382543&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%2F02%2F07%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fmexico-president-sinaloa-cartel.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/americas/corruption-genaro-garcia-luna-mexico.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/william-barr-mexico-cartels-cienfuegos-case

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html

https://www.thedope.co.uk/blog/who-is-el-mayo-frederick-venables

BLOOD ON THE CORN: https://medium.com/matter/blood-on-the-corn-52ac13f7e643

Books

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion - Gary Webb

The CIA as Organized Crime - Douglas Valentine

Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture - Oswaldo Zavala