The damned normality in Sinaloa

It’s Monday, near the end of June. Juan Ignacio wakes up and the first thing he does is grab his phone, check his notifications, and then go to WhatsApp. But before he can answer the pending message his mother left, he goes to the Communities section. He’s in five different ones: the one from his favorite real-time news site, the one from the Ministry of Public Security, and three others that emerged in September as citizen chat groups, although after nine months, he knows they’re nothing more than propaganda for criminal groups. That’s why he’s in three different ones: the one he knows is from Los Chapitos because they have a pizza as a logo; another one that he thinks is from Los Mayitos because they feature a sombrero; and one more that, he thinks, could be somewhere in between, although it’s the fourth or fifth one after all this time, since the others have been shut down by their administrators after receiving threats.

He checks everything, no longer out of curiosity, but simply to decide whether or not to leave his house today, whether he’ll take the children to their grandmother’s or their aunt’s. They’ve been helping care for the kids since September, when the public school decided to close its doors and cancel in-person classes due to the “lack of conditions.” Juan Ignacio understood exactly what they meant, because even on the days when he does go out to work, he still sees men’s bodies lying on the ground. Luckily, they are wrapped in plastic bags and so he has been spared the spectacle of blood. He’s probably already seen the severed heads scattered around like watermelons dropped from a fruit truck and preferred to pretend it wouldn’t affect him. Except it did.

On this particular Monday he wakes up and follows his usual routine. He reads that 20 men had been murdered, that four of them had been decapitated and hung by their legs from a bridge on the Mexico 15 highway, and that another 16 bodies lay inside a van like the ones he uses at work to deliver packages, although these don’t have any logos, only a message on a hanging tarp, looking just as grotesque as the first time all this began: September 9, 2024.

His stomach churns. A week earlier, a brother of his was threatened as he was leaving work at the cafe he opened a little less than a year ago. A woman had taken the business’s phone by force and called him to demand payment for an unpaid debt—a fabricated one, for 230,000 pesos (about $12,000). The threat included the warning: “The Chapitos need it urgently to continue the war.”

It comes back to him and eats away at him, because his brother was so scared when he told him. It was the second time this had happened to him in this conflict, the same one in which local entrepreneurs have been murdered and their businesses burned down after going through the same thing. He prays, and as he remembers his mother’s message, his blood races, and he calls desperately. She answers and asks if he’s okay. He asks to know about his brother, but the latter is still asleep, snoring from exhaustion after the dinner that he skipped so he wouldn’t have to drive at night from the other side of town, where the most brutal events in Culiacán have been taking place. A part of him rests easy. He says goodbye to his mother, but first he promises he’ll go and drop the children off before 10 a.m., and then gets ready for the afternoon shift, which now starts earlier after the constant spate of robberies on the streets and highways. The company can no longer promise that orders will arrive on time.

He leaves the house with a backpack ready for the children, and drops off his wife with his stomach in knots from the fear. It’s not the first time he’s been through something like this, but he still feels the same way. He turns on the car radio and listens to Feliciano Castro Meléndrez, the spokesperson for the Sinaloa state government. He’s standing in for Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, who’s gone to an event with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. That doesn’t matter to him. Instead, what he notices is that the official avoids talking about the 20 people killed and left on a bridge north of the city. Instead, the official says: “Surely we’re all happy because June brought us rain. We need more rain and we want more rain.”

He doesn’t know if it’s a joke, a way to avoid giving the criminal groups more headlines, or if what’s happening is—or should be— considered the new normal. The answer is provided later, when Governor Rocha Moya tells a reporter that “that (the violence) is no longer news,” despite the fact that June ended with 208 murders and 80 disappearances, the highest figures since the armed conflict between the two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel began in September, and the third most violent in the state’s history since the Attorney General’s Office began keeping records.

Juan Ignacio, a fictitious name used for this story for security reasons, had just been to Villa Juárez, a population center in the south where the violence has been even worse than in Culiacán. There, people stopped holding parties in the public stadium, drinking with friends on the sidewalk, or keeping grocery stores open past 8 p.m. This place is important for Sinaloa; it was founded and created by migrants from other states who came to this state to work in the fields. It has grown so much that it has a bigger population than the municipal seat of Navolato, to which it belongs administratively. Between August and May, the population typically doubles; it is the most important agricultural season not only for the region but for the entire country, when a third of the corn produced in all of Mexico is planted, as well as the highest-quality and most widely exported tomatoes.

This year the migrants left in March; they didn’t want to stay to find out if there would be more violence.

Juan Ignacio arrives at work and gets ready to start the truck, take inventory, and start delivering packages, but he gets a call from human resources informing him that sales aren’t going well and that they have to make a new round of cuts, and that he is being let go. But not to worry because his severance pay will be legally paid, and he will be rehired as soon as possible. He accepts, thinking that he owes money on two credit cards and another department store card. The vacation he’d planned is not going to happen. He sighs and signs his name.

He turns on the radio again, and now it’s no longer a government official, but Martha Reyes, president of the Mexican Chamber of Employers (Coparmex), reading the Social Security jobs report. Juan Ignacio learns that he’s one of the more than 15,000 workers who have lost their jobs during this period of violence. It’s not a relief, because the businesswoman then concludes: “So I think any recovery we’re going to have, if this ever ends, is going to have very, very high costs. I think this is going to take at least five to 10 years.”

He returns to his mother’s house to pick up the children. He tells her that now he’ll have to apply for jobs, that he’ll be working as a private platform driver, but that he’ll do it only until 11 p.m. because “things get really bad after that.” Juan Ignacio says: “It’s inevitable that she’s going to worry, but she understands that everything has been going to hell.”

The woman blesses her son and begins to talk about the 20 deaths that morning, and how when she went to the supermarket she heard the cashier talking about it while her colleague asked, “I wonder what they had gotten involved in?” Juan Ignacio’s memory brings to mind the time when his friend Itzel’s brother, Joseph, was killed.

He wonders: “What’s the point of today? How are the mothers, sisters, daughters, and brothers of those 20 men? Have they all been identified yet? Has someone’s terrible wait ended? Twenty men in one fell swoop, and what about the ones still missing?”

When she got the news about Joseph, eight years ago, the food Itzel was preparing was left forgotten on the stove; she barely managed to put out the fire. The dish stayed there for days until it grew moldy. The news website Línea Directa ran the story; they’d written his name and address wrong, but it was him. She later reviewed more news from that March 29th news report, and there was a story with a photo where she recognized his pair of sneakers peeking out from under the blue tarp. A few feet away, a line of onlookers were taking pictures with their cell phones. They were taking pictures of Itzel’s brother’s body, but she still doesn’t know why. She wanted answers, and she got them, even if they weren’t the ones she needed.

On Facebook and WhatsApp, many people circulated photographs of the hanging bodies and the other bodies inside the van.

Juan Ignacio’s heart is heavy; he says it feels like lead. He cries and wipes his face so his children, his mother and his wife don’t see him, because he believes he must be strong, and that tomorrow he’ll have to go out and look for work and drive his car as a private driver for an app, and carry on as if nothing had happened. Although he knows very well that’s not true.

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