US sanctions against jailed cartel leader ‘El Marro’ highlight Mexico’s lack of control over its prisons

The U.S. Treasury Department took a swipe at the Mexican prison system on Wednesday, disguised as a sanctions announcement against a criminal leader — one of many it reports each year. The Treasury explained that it has decided to sanction José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, alias “El Marro,” head of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel (CSRL), for his “industrial-scale” fuel theft operation in the state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico. Arrested in August 2020 and imprisoned since then, the U.S. government alleges that El Marro continues to run the criminal group from behind bars.

The comment appears in one of the final paragraphs of the statement, as if it were just a minor detail. “Despite having been arrested, El Marro continues to be active in CSRL from within prison, sending instructions and orders to his collaborators through his lawyers and family members,” the text reads. Yépez, 45, has been imprisoned in the federal prison in Durango, in northern Mexico, since 2014, when he was transferred from the Altiplano prison in the State of Mexico, near the capital — a transfer about which the government, then under Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2014), remained silent.

The Treasury’s criticism underscores the Mexican state’s inability to control its prisons, even the federal ones, theoretically the most secure and closely monitored. It reinforces a widely accepted theory, one that transcends Mexico’s borders and pertains to Latin America in general: the idea that prisons, rather than being centers for social rehabilitation, are universities of crime and spaces for establishing networks with other criminals. Furthermore, in Mexico, many prisons function as veritable centers for telephone extortion, exposing the state’s unsuccessful attempts to curb cell phone use within their walls.

The U.S. Treasury statement also indicates that El Marro orchestrated the alliance between the CSRL and the Gulf Cartel from prison to fight the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) for control of Guanajuato, a state in the Bajío region, after the latter had expanded from Michoacán and Jalisco. The CSRL’s battle with the CJNG began more than seven years ago, with access to the pipelines of the state-owned oil company Pemex at the heart of their objectives. Criminals associated with both groups are intimately familiar with the least-guarded sections of the Pemex pipelines, and the fight for exclusive access has been brutal during this time.

The arrest of El Marro in August 2020 and those of several of his associates and family members in the following years seemed to tip the scales in favor of the CJNG. The decline of the CSRL appeared inevitable. The hope was that the weakening of El Marro’s group would lead to a decrease in violent crime in Guanajuato, a state hit hardest by the wave of violence that has gripped Mexico in recent years. But the release from prison of El Marro’s son, Luis Antonio Yépez, in August 2024, after a brief stint, and the CSRL’s alliance with the Gulf Cartel have changed the fate of both the group and the region.

Doubts are now focused on the freedom of movement of imprisoned crime bosses. Since taking office in October 2024, President Claudia Sheinbaum and Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch have regularly reported on the cumulative number of arrests, which is now around 40,000. Harfuch updates this figure every two weeks during the president’s morning press conferences. This is one of the criteria they use to justify their claimed success in the security strategy. But the case of El Marro, and others before him, show that the imprisonment of criminal leaders does not necessarily reduce criminal activity in the country. Nor does it reduce violence.

The transfer in February and August of more than 50 criminals and alleged criminals from Mexican prisons to the U.S. fueled this same discussion. Some of the profiles brought it to the forefront. The case of Abigael González Valencia, alias “El Cuini,” was one of the most prominent. Sent north of the border in August, El Cuini, leader of one of the factions of the CJNG, managed to build significant influence while incarcerated over the group of prisoners involved in the Ayotzinapa case, particularly with Gildardo López Astudillo, alias “El Gil,” with whom he shared a cell from 2015 to 2019. This was even reported by López Obrador before leaving office. El Gil, in fact, agreed to cooperate with the Ayotzinapa case investigation in exchange for the government not extraditing El Cuini.

The move ultimately backfired on González Valencia. El Gil stopped cooperating, and the Sheinbaum administration sent his former colleague to the U.S. to face justice there. But the idea that a single person could determine the course of the investigation into one of the most significant cases in Mexico’s recent history speaks volumes. There are other cases, some affecting entire regions, such as the border area. In February, the government extradited brothers Miguel and Omar Treviño Morales, former leaders of Los Zetas, the criminal group that dominated northeastern Mexico in the early 2010s, to the United States.

Since their arrests a decade ago, it was rumored that the brothers continued to control their successor group, the Northeast Cartel, based in Nuevo Laredo, from prison. It seems that this situation, whether accurate or not, ended this year. In the National Institute of Statistics’ latest report on perceived insecurity, from September, Nuevo Laredo entered the list of the 10 cities where the population feels safest, increasing by more than seven percentage points over the same month of the previous year. At that time, the Treviño Morales brothers were still in a Mexican prison.

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