The drug war bleeding Sinaloa

One dead: Carrizalejo

No one approaches the body. Everyone is hovering, but from a prudent distance, an adjective that is tied to an indefinable criterion: why 50 meters and not 10 or 100? “It’s in case someone passes by,” says one of the police reporters, leaning on one of the group’s trucks. “Someone,” the epitome of euphemisms for the world at war that is Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. Someone from organized crime, someone who thinks it’s not right for them — reporters, funeral home workers — to approach a corpse stuffed in a sack, abandoned at the doors of a cemetery. Because there is no peace after death in these dusty streets of northwestern Mexico. There is none for the dead, nor for anyone else.

The cartel war in Sinaloa, the result of a novel chain of betrayals in the underworld, has been going on for three months. On each of the last 90 days, Culiacán has woken up to dead bodies. Bodies bagged, burned, shot, mutilated. As have the surrounding towns, the roads. It’s nothing that doesn’t also happen in other parts of a country that records more than 30,000 murders a year, but it is a rarity in the city, the gateway for the Sinaloa Cartel, a place for criminal royalty to walk and relax, home of some of the bosses, a city where they build their luxurious pantheons. Since August, murders have increased by almost 300% in the region. But it’s not just the dead, it’s also the people who disappear — between 340 and 600, depending on who’s keeping count — and the general feeling of fear that has taken hold in the area.

An inconsequential pronoun, “someone” becomes one of the most complex words of all those heard this Sunday morning in Carrizalejo, on the eastern outskirts of the city. Home to a million inhabitants, the war in Culiacán is the product, mainly, of the clashes between two groups, two formerly brotherly factions of the cartel, the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, on the one hand, and the followers of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, on the other. There are more factions; some support the former, others the latter, and some neither. In the end, as a veteran local politician, interviewed in Culiacán, says “the Sinaloa Cartel is a conglomerate of companies,” each with its businesses and interests, sometimes allied and sometimes not so much. So, in the end, the Sinaloa Cartel is nothing more than a cultural convention. A lazy idea.

The dead man is still there. And between the dead man and the reporters and the people from the funeral homes, there is a distance. In case someone passes by. The matter is somewhat disconcerting, because there is no way of knowing who the victim was or who left him there. Over these months, the bodies have sometimes appeared with hats, a mockery on the part of the sons of El Chapo, known in Mexico as Los Chapitos — or La Chapiza in Culiacán — against the other side, identified with the rural world, the hallmark of the boss, El Mayo, who is nicknamed El Ranchero in the corridos dedicated to him. On other occasions, the corpses have appeared surrounded by pizza boxes, another mockery, this one quite obvious. In Culiacán, anyone with 500 pesos in their pocket, $25, can buy a cap with a slice of pizza engraved on the front — La Chapizza — a tribute to El Chapo’s boys.

But there are no pizza boxes or hats this morning in Carrizalejo. And even if there were, they are not objects that guarantee any security. But they are pieces of information, and they are reassuring. It is likely that no one would have approached anyway, no matter how many pizza boxes or hats there were, because no one knows if the murderers want the dead man to stay where he is for a while, for everyone to see. Because the spot where he was left matters. It is not a random place in the middle of nowhere, it is the main exit from the city on this side and cars, trucks, and motorcycles pass by all the time. In fact, there is a gas station right here, with its shop. A soft drinks truck has just arrived, with its driver and clipboard, and a milk truck arrived a while ago. Meanwhile, the dead man lies there, alone.

Several hours have passed, more than five since the first alert, and no one has arrived. Wait, no. A while ago, two National Guard trucks passed by. The agents stopped next to the body and looked at it — they looked at the bag that contained the body — then they turned around and left. The funeral home workers, bored, have also left. Without information, there is no way to find the families and offer them a wake and funeral plan. Some reporters have also chosen to leave. The city is smoking. Criminals have burned houses and businesses in recent days with militant persistence. They have also shot at public security cameras by the dozens. Reporters can’t keep up and run from one place to another. Five hundred meters from here, towards the center of town, there is a military checkpoint, but no one has thought to go and warn them.

A single reporter remains with the dead man. He wants to leave, too, but he can’t. He needs the police for the photo; his newspaper won’t accept a picture of just the corpse. So he calls a prosecutor, a contact of his. “What’s up?” he says, “are you working on one?” He asks if he’s operational. The other person says yes. “I’m here, with the little dead guy,” says the reporter, ironic to the core, the norm of the profession — in reality, a way of getting through the days. “I’m going to bury him, I’m going to take him home!” he adds. The prosecutor explains that those in charge of collecting the corpse can’t come until some preventive authority — the local or state police, or the National Guard — gives the green light. The journalist already knows all that. In reality, his call is a complaint about how bad everything has become, for a dead man to spend hours like this, in the sun, without anyone caring.

70 ‘culiacanazos’ but nobody leaves

There are only crows on the tables at Mrs. Irma’s restaurant in Altata. The birds are hopping around, as if waiting for something, scraps of shrimp, perhaps, anything to take with them. But there is nothing, because no one in Culiacán has come to Altata — the natural beach for the state capital’s inhabitants — since the war began. “On a Sunday I had 70 or even 80 tables,” says the woman, whose real name is not appearing here for security reasons. “This last Sunday, there were two.” The sadness of places like this, set up to satisfy hungry crowds, when not a soul is seen... “Before I had 15 people working, now two come on the weekends,” she says, melancholically.

The situation is serious. In Altata alone there are 45 restaurants like Irma’s, which now have no customers other than crows. Then there are the fishermen, the street vendors, a whole medium-sized economy that feeds hundreds of families and that is now reeling between fear and bullets. The battle between Mayos and Chapitos began at the beginning of September, with clashes and blockades throughout Culiacán, the first massive round of skirmishes in the city, which left tourism at the bottom of the list of local priorities. “It’s an injustice what they are doing,” says the woman. “We thought it would last 15 days, like other times, but no. They are like cockroaches,” she adds, referring to the criminals, “they let them grow, and look...”

Those battles are reproduced every day in Culiacán and its surroundings. Like a plague. And with every burned house, every massacre, every shootout in the streets, people remember the great betrayal of the summer, when one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, handed over El Mayo, his godfather and his father’s old partner, to the United States government. That took place at the end of July. Details of the handover aside — and a few corrupt deals in between, which even targeted the state governor, Rubén Rocha — the war had been brewing in the ensuing weeks, with murders here and there, but it was not until the beginning of September that the volcano erupted in Culiacán.

Mrs. Irma says that, as has happened in other wars — the one between Los Chapitos and the faction of Dámaso López, an old ally of El Chapo, in 2016, or the original split in the cartel, the battle between El Chapo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers, back in 2008 — people in Culiacán have mobilized to help them. Clients of the restaurants in Altata have formed convoys to travel together to the coast, 40 minutes from the city, one car after another, like the European pioneers in the United States in the 19th century, a way of protecting each other. They did so last Sunday, but a shootout in La Bandera, a small town halfway there, scared them off and they turned back.

In Culiacán, the economy is also suffering. Chef Miguel Taniyama is one of the few who has raised his voice, demanding a solution from the authorities. With 38 years of experience in the hospitality sector in the capital, the events of these weeks and, in general, over the last five years, have affected his business. Before, he had four restaurants in Culiacán, now he has only one, and without night shifts. “People don’t come after 7:00 p.m.,” he explains. In statements to the press, businesspeople from Sinaloa have calculated the economic damage of these months of war at 18,000 million pesos, some $845 million, in addition to the loss of thousands of jobs.

These have not been easy times for the region. In 2019, Mexico was mesmerized by the failed attempt to capture another of El Chapo’s sons, Ovidio Guzmán, in Culiacán. Soldiers arrived at his home and tried to arrest him, but the savage reaction of his henchmen, who blockaded roads and attacked soldiers in different parts of the city, forced the government to back down. The videos of that day, which people took with their cell phones, are staggering: dozens of trucks full of armed people driving through the city in broad daylight, shooting at soldiers, prisoners escaping en masse from jail... an operation worthy of a regular army. Ovidio Guzmán was released and the local residents were traumatized. So much so that El Chapo’s son ordered a corrido to be composed, asking for forgiveness for the culiacanazo, the name under which the event was fixed in the collective memory.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Although the Mexican government did not force the population into confinement, activity dwindled like water in dams in summer, reduced to a minimum. And just when everything seemed to be returning to normal, a military operation carried out in January of last year turned Culiacán upside down again. In police terms, the operation was a success: Ovidio Guzmán, this time, was arrested. The government later extradited him to the United States, but the reaction of his loyalists and his brothers on the day of his capture besieged the city again, with more blockades and shootings. The population had not yet recovered from the shock of that when the new war arrived this year.

“This is like 70 culiacanazos,” says Taniyama, who a few days ago prepared a huge aguachile in the center of Culiacán to try to lift the spirits of the city and make visible the tragedy of the rich scene of local musical bands, now unemployed, without parties to perform at, installed on corners and street intersections, asking for the generosity of motorists. “Those who have money have left and those who stay do not have an economy...” The chef does not finish his sentence. A couple of tears appear in his eyes, as if he had opened a door and saw all the horror, concentrated, suddenly. “Seeing so much negativity knocks you down,” he adds.

All this is happening — the conversations with Taniyama, with Mrs. Irma — while crime continues to spread death in the city. Thousands of Culiacán residents have subscribed to WhatsApp channels where administrators post information and propaganda about what is (supposedly) happening. While Taniyama is talking, for example, the image of a half-burned body arrives, found five minutes from his restaurant, on Isla Musala, on the banks of the Tamazula River, a wealthy, expanding area. It is the same place where the governor, Rubén Rocha, went for a walk at the beginning of September, in the first days of the war, a walk that he shared on his networks.

The governor’s video, barely 10 seconds long, seemed to be a way of showing that the shootouts of the previous day, which left two soldiers wounded, the narco-blockades in several areas, the suspension of classes in schools and a general feeling of terror were temporary issues. Requests to interview Governor Rocha, or state Secretary of Security Gerardo Mérida, have received a polite and constant refusal. In the end, neither of them have sat down to talk with this newspaper.

Police officers

Only some feet were saved them from the fire. Two feet, to be exact. Reinalda Pulido, head of one of the groups of relatives of missing persons in central Sinaloa, is guarding them. “Before my son disappeared, I bought him some sandals just like those,” she says, looking at the remains of the bonfire. Neto, her son, has been missing for four years. “He went to buy tortillas, a municipal patrol came and took him away. I got 10 security cameras that prove it and also a witness appeared who recognized his photo and said that the state police had also participated. But the prosecutor’s office has erased all that information,” she explains.

Everyone involved, state police, municipal police, prosecutors… The Pulido case illuminates the knots of criminal complicity in Sinaloa. Police who work with, for, or as criminals. Her story reflects others heard during these days of conflict, always with agents involved. But the problem is bigger. Attacks against police have also been a constant in this cartel war. Last Friday, for example, criminals attacked two state patrol cars in the capital. Political authorities are trying to find immediate solutions, to impose the perception that they maintain control and that the situation will improve. But as with any issue, things are not that straightforward.

“I had been with the police for more than 20 years,” says the agent. The conversation takes place in the courtyard of his house. On the TV, a muted preacher speaks with confident gestures about heavenly matters. On the dirt street, lonely dogs pass from time to time, and occasionally some children. “I had a vocation. The thing is that promotions, almost all the time, are through acquaintances. In other words, the call for promotion is made, but it works as I tell you,” he says. The agent, who asks to keep his identity under wraps, protests against his dismissal from the Culiacán police, which he considers unfair. In mid-November, when he was approaching retirement, he was discharged for “not passing the confidence checks.” The agent concludes: “It seems to me that the boss had to come up with some numbers. Should we fire 150, 200? Then fire them.”

It was one of the biggest news stories in the first weeks of the war. In late September, the National Defense Secretariat (Sedena) intervened in the Culiacán police. It disarmed its more than 1,000 officers under the pretext of checking pistols and rifles, fuelling suspicions of corruption. As the weeks went by, the state government announced that the agents would be subjected to “confidence checks” between late November and early December, at the Sedena facilities in Mexico City. It also said that around 100 agents had chosen not to submit to the checks. The obvious suggestion was that those who refused were probably hiding something and therefore it was better for them to leave the force.

After displaying his credentials, his firearms license and his record, the anonymous policeman claims that he was forced into this group of 100 and that he never refused to undergo the confidence checks — “I had even submitted my papers” — and that if he was dismissed it was to save money on his retirement payment. The situation, he explains, favored such moves by the local police. His experience is not unique. After a while, a colleague in a similar situation arrives at the house. The latter had been in the police for just under 20 years, but as of four years ago he had spent a lot of time on sick leave. “It’s because of some threats I received,” he explains, without giving further details. Since then, the agent has needed to take tranquilizers every day. And now he has been fired for the same reason as his colleague: the confidence checks. More than corruption, both fit perfectly into the image of a broken toy, with their war wounds, physical and mental.

One of the problems of this cartel war is the climate of suspicion instilled on everything and everyone. It is not that there are no corrupt policemen in Culiacán; there are. It is even possible that the two agents are. But it is a problem that transcends the local police and affects the state police and the prosecutor’s office. The suspicions of corruption also overshadow other parts of the issue, the number of attacks that are recorded against officers of all stripes, in this war and in previous ones. In November, the deputy director of the local police, Benjamín Villarreal, was shot to death in a cafeteria in Culiacán. Days later, the family of a state police commander, Francisco Verástica, reported his disappearance. The body of the agent was found shortly after. A cardboard sign had been stuck in his chest with a knife. On it was a message that read: “Stop bringing two boxes and if you catch a pig, don’t let it go. Everything comes out, there are more to come.”

The message claimed that the commander had been receiving money from the two warring factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, an accusation that has not been proven. Whatever the case, organized crime views the police as part of the war game, beyond the peculiarities of each agent. Although in some instances, suspicions are confirmed. The most obvious case points to the great betrayal of July, when Joaquín Guzmán López kidnapped El Mayo Zambada in Culiacán and took him to the United States in a small aircraft. The events caused confusion, but as the days went by it became clear that the State Attorney’s Office had tried to conceal part of what happened that day, such as the circumstances surrounding the murder of an influential local politician, Héctor Cuén.

The authorites said that Cuén, the former mayor of the city and a federal deputy, had been killed the night before the El Mayo kidnapping, at a gas station during an attempted robbery. But El Mayo, first, in a letter issued from prison in the U.S., and subsequently the federal prosecutor’s office, said that Cuén had been killed in the same place where Guzmán López had summoned Zambada, in Huertos del Pedregal, from where the drug lord was kidnapped. In his letter, Zambada also mentioned two members of his personal escort who had accompanied him that day: one was an active agent of the local prosecutor’s office and the other had been one previously. Both remain missing.

The obvious involvement of the Attorney General’s Office in the matter reflects similar cases in other police departments, some more obvious than others. In recent days, WhatsApp channels have repeatedly mentioned an alleged group operating within the local police, Fuerzas Especiales Julieta, which supposedly worked for Los Chapitos. An agent of the local prosecutor’s investigative police, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, says that groups like this exist, just as they exist in the prosecutor’s office itself or in the state police. “You try to do things the right way, but sometimes you come across a commander who doesn’t do that and then you don’t it either. Other times, it’s the same police officer who comes and looks for ways to get money,” he says.

19 dead: Plan de Oriente

The sun sets over the Plan de Oriente ejido, an agricultural settlement east of Culiacán, not far from Carrizalejo. People walk along the roadside with apparent normality, as if everything had always been so peaceful. But that hasn’t been the case. On the night of Monday, October 21, soldiers killed 19 people in one of these houses, alleged members of a criminal group, and arrested their leader, Edwin Antonio Rubio, alias “El Max” or “El Oso.” There were no wounded. The government reported what happened as if it were an everyday operation, as if the press hadn’t released, around the same time, a video of an event in Culiacán in which soldiers seemed to spare the life of a young man, in the middle of the street, just because one of the uniformed men realized they were being recorded.

The flood of news about the war soon buried what had happened in Plan de Oriente. No one questioned it. Claudia Sheinbaum’s government had just taken office, a new security team was at the helm, and the situation in Culiacán did not lend itself to serious reflections. But the operation revealed several things. On the one hand, it suggested a change in the dynamics of military operations and the security strategy in general, reoriented, it seemed, to hypotheses of a heavy hand. And on the other, it demanded an explanation for the enormous disproportion between the number of dead and wounded — 19 to 0 — a result that any academic who has studied military performance in police tasks would be placing at the top of their list of examples to analyze.

The war in Culiacán has this kind of effect. The boundaries between the acceptable and the execrable are blurred. Hierarchies collapse, routines are pulverized. People suddenly get information through WhatsApp channels and consume content of dead people like Tiktok videos, always waiting for another, one more, the next. Things have happened in the city in these months that, under other conditions, would have generated at least some debate, a little commotion. But the war swallows up, in a constant circus exercise, more burned restaurants, more vandalized houses, more bodies thrown into public spaces. With 30 or 40 updates a day, what happened yesterday morning is already a distant past.

So, in the middle of all the mental cumbia, the man with the cap appears, on one of the streets of the ejido. There are trees around him, houses too, and a dirt sidewalk. His face has shape, his eyes, color. But any detail that abounds in his identity could cause him problems, so he remains as the man with the cap. Because of where he comes from, because of the signs that the residents have shared, he could know something about what happened that day. A dog barks at him and he freaks out. “I’m going to have to kill him,” he says in an almost inaudible whisper. “Look,” he says in response to the avalanche of questions, “they got rat-tat-tat!.” And then he raises his hands and pretends to shoot with a rifle.

The man in the cap lives and works near the house where the 19 were killed, the boundary between the streets of the ejido and a large area of cultivated fields. “Suddenly the boludos arrived,” he explains, referring to the army helicopters. He says he saw and heard them from his place of work on the night of October 21, and that at the same time he saw soldiers on the street. He says he ran to get home but when he saw that there were soldiers aiming at him, he started shouting for them not to shoot. The man in the cap managed to get back home. On the way, he says, he saw at least one soldier with a “minimi,” a machine gun capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute, shooting at the criminal group over the wall of the house where they were hiding, without looking.

“The others also fired shots, but only a few,” the witness adds. He also says that, in reality, his son saved him, because when he started shouting at the soldiers not to shoot, he said that he had a child with him. One of the soldiers then asked him for proof: “Take the child out.” He produced him and thus, he believes, he was saved. The dog barks at him again and he freaks out again and pretends to grab a stone from the ground. “I’m already tangled up, I’ve already talked too much. I can’t talk,” he says, with the dog in the corner of his eye. And no sooner than he arrived, he leaves.

Five weeks later, there are still soldiers guarding the street that leads to the front door of the house. When they see outsiders, they block the way and say that they cannot enter. The lieutenant in charge says that to do so, if they can, they must first ask the Ninth Military Zone, the Mexican army headquarters in Sinaloa. That night, the zone’s communications officer says that the army has not guarded any street in the Plan de Oriente ejido and that passage is free. The following day, to avoid problems, the chosen route goes around the back of the scene.

The remains of the massacre can still be seen through the holes in the perimeter wall at the back. There are two main areas with bullet holes, two walls, one closer to the entrance and another more hidden. On the floor there are blankets, pieces of clothing, and an empty dog cage. Contrary to what the man with the cap said yesterday — the story of the minimi shooting over the compound — the holes in the walls suggest that the shots were fired from the front, and not from above the main wall, which would have forced the soldiers to shoot diagonally. The lack of official explanations about what happened fuels the uncertainty and the man with the cap is nowhere to be seen.

Back in the moonlit night of Culiacán, so strange and silent, the agent of the local prosecutor’s office mentioned earlier, who spoke of corruption in the security forces, reveals what he knows about this case. The local prosecutor’s office only intervened in support of the federal police, but even so… “They shot them,” he says without a doubt. “But they also shot,” he adds, referring to the criminal group, which the government has linked to El Mayo Zambada. “It was like this, the guachos,” he says, referring to the military, “arrived by land, after an anonymous call, and when they saw what they were up against, they asked for air support. Then the boludo arrived. Max’s guys shot at the boludo, but then they surrendered and then they were shot,” he explains.

It is difficult to understand what is happening, how each of the events described — the death of the 19, the shooting at La Bandera, the murdered policemen, the bodies found here and there — fit into the movement, the logic, and the dynamics of the opposing sides, including the authorities. The veteran local politician mentioned in the first part of this story points out that the El Mayo faction has been surrounding Culiacán during these months. “All the fighting has been in the area of Los Chapitos. When the Culiacán riots took place, the Mayo group was able to figure out where their support came from. Now, what they have done is isolate those spaces, El Dorado, Cosalá, San Ignacio, Elota, Mazatlán,” all towns in the southern zone. “The objective is to prevent reinforcements from reaching Culiacán.”

Both he and the prosecutor, as well as several journalists consulted, broadly agree on the diagnosis. The prosecutor says that “Los Chapitos no longer have gun leaders,” after the death of Raúl Carrasco, alias “Chore,” in another confrontation with the army, south of Culiacán in June, and the capture a year ago of Los Chapitos’ head of security, Néstor Pérez, alias “El Nini.” “What happened to Max was not so important for Los Mayos, however. They have 20 of them, one for each town,” he concludes.

Five dead: agronomy

Mrs. Irma has started checking her Instagram in Altata. In her stories, a text has appeared that one of her waitresses wrote. She lives in La Bandera, where there were shootings when a convoy of Culiacán residents tried to reach the coast to eat. “Having to evacuate your house due to the narco pandemic,” she writes. “I am afraid […] It is no longer just the gunshots, they are coming to our houses to check that there are no people who are not family members, they check cell phones and they are asking us to remain normal. How can we remain normal in this situation? […] The Army only enters the ranch for a few hours and leaves, while at night it is chaos, a nightmare,” she concludes.

It makes you think. About this regime of terror imposed by the war, about the evident inability of the authorities to change things or to not make them worse… In a recent report by the state government’s System for the Comprehensive Protection of the Rights of Girls, Boys and Adolescents, the authors collect statements from children aged under 15, some of them as young as nine or 10, after the second culiacanazo, when the military arrested Ovidio Guzmán in Jesús María, a community half an hour north of Culiacán. It was an operation in the purest Hollywood style, with armed helicopters and soldiers in an assault column. Here are some of the statements: “I would like them to repair my house because the helicopter made holes in the roof”; “I would like there to be more police, more security, and for everything bad to disappear”; “Let Ovidio Guzmán and the criminals go away”; “Let the military go away because the children see them and start crying.”

Mrs. Irma’s Instagram comes back into the conversation hours later, because of another of the images she has shown, the photo of a missing poster for a man who disappeared the night before. There were not many details, just his name, Kevin Horacio Acosta, 31, a photo, and a telephone number with an area code for Navolato, between the city and the beach. The number is answered by a man who introduces himself as Horacio Acosta, the father of the missing man. He says that he is at the headquarters of the Prosecutor’s Office and that yes, we can go and talk to him. Half an hour later, in response to a second call, the man explains that he has moved to the offices of the Forensic Medical Service (Semefo), two blocks away, all on the outskirts of Culiacán.

There are a lot of people at Semefo this afternoon, including relatives of deceased people, officials, and funeral home workers. Horacio Acosta is not part of any of the groups, at least for the moment. He is sitting on a bench with the funeral home workers, although he does not speak to them. He then says that he has been a teacher for 35 years, that he has four children, Kevin being the eldest, that he is part of Alcoholics Anonymous and that he attends meetings of his group every day, in Navolato. “Last night I arrived home at about 9:15 p.m., after the meeting,” he says. “My wife told me that Kevin had just left. Almost every day he came,” he adds. The man wanted to talk to his son and ask him to recommend a mechanic. His car, he says, “was failing.”

He was wondering whether to call him or leave it for the next day when his daughter-in-law, Pamela, arrived. “My other son opened the door. She ran in and started shouting, ‘Father-in-law, father-in-law, they took Kevin!’” Pamela said that minutes earlier, five hooded, armed men had arrived at her house, jumped over the wall and started breaking the bars and windows, demanding to come in. Thinking that this would calm them down, they opened the door. The men entered and subdued them. The couple had their four-month-old baby with them. “They were searching everything,” Pamela explained, “looking for weapons.” The attackers took the car keys to look for weapons there as well, but as they didn’t find any, they threw them back inside the house. It would take Pamela hours to find them, in the midst of so much disorder.

Minutes later, the men left and took Kevin with them. After hearing all this, Horacio Acosta called the emergency services and told them what had happened. The operator urged him to go to the Prosecutor’s Office the next day to file a formal complaint. Meanwhile, the family posted the search form on their social media accounts. In the morning, the plan was to go to the Prosecutor’s Office, but at around 9:00 a.m. they received a call from a funeral home, asking if their son might not be one of the five bodies that had appeared hours earlier outside the School of Agronomy of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa in the city. Acosta and his wife ran to the Semefo, with the funeral home staff. They looked at the photos they were shown. “I didn’t know if it was or not... my wife said no,” says Horacio.

The photos. Five bodies lying there, some with their pants down, their dignity stripped away. That’s what Horacio Acosta and his wife saw. Shocked, they forgot to go to the Prosecutor’s Office and returned to Navolato. They didn’t stay home long. “We came back at 1 p.m. to ask about those bodies, but they told us it would take a while to identify them.” So they decided to wait back at the Semefo.

Before Horacio could begin to narrate the events, his wife had entered the morgue to see if the young man was one of the five. And, just then, the woman came out of the door of the center and stared at her husband, her gaze lost. Acosta suddenly fell silent and looked back at her; it took him a few seconds to react. He walked towards her and, before they said anything to each other, they both burst into tears. What could be heard were howls, something so intimate and at the same time so terrible, so definitive, that no one said anything else, no more questions were asked; no more answers were needed.

“What do we call this?” the man shouts, a building collapsing in the middle. “How am I going to live like this? With hate!” he spits. “This war is going to kill us all, many families, it is leaving many orphans,” he sobs. Then there are only hugs, frayed words, a silent farewell. After a while, outside the Semefo, the WhatsApp channels vomit their own informational paraphernalia. On several a video has been posted where another of the five dead appears, a boy with a blue shirt, beaten, forcibly disguised with a hat and the letters “MF” painted on his face, in reference to Mayito Flaco, one of the sons of El Mayo Zambada and spearhead of his faction. His captors ask the boy about the murder of some policemen from Navolato. He gives names, but none of the ones he provides is Kevin.

The second part of this criminal indoctrination video shows some bodies in the dark. They seem to be lying on the ground, but they are still moving. Someone on the side of those filming starts shooting. The glare of the explosions allows the iron bars of the wall of the School of Agronomy to be seen. The final scene of the film changes tone again and focuses on a poster with a message: “For those who continue trying to get into Culiacán. Sincerely: La Chapiza.”

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