The death of El Chapo Guzmán’s mother: The end of an era

When María Consuelo Loera was born, in 1929, Emilio Portes Gil was Mexico’s president. The Cristero War had ended, the PRI had not yet been founded, and opium trafficking was one of a few businesses controlled by a half-dozen networks of Chinese migrants who had settled in Mexico. Drugs were a footnote and the Golden Triangle — that impenetrable territory between Durango, Chihuahua and Sonora — was not yet the cradle that would see the birth of the names who would dominate the drug trade over the next decades: Pedro Avilés, Ismael Zambada, Juan Esparragoza, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Joaquín Guzmán and a dozen more.

Over 94 years, Doña Consuelo had time to see the business transform. She was a witness to the Sinaloans’ triumph over the Chinese in the 1940s, of the strength (and violence) of the State during the hard years of Operation Condor, of the exile of her sons and nephews to Guadalajara in search of the cocaine trade in the ‘80s and of the implosion of their fragile alliances a decade later. Just as Luis González y González narrated the mid-20th century from San José de Garcia, Doña Consuelo Loera observed “the whole” of the history of narcotrafficking from her mansion in Tuna, Badiraguato, a ranch town from which, in addition to the blue sky and ochre mountains, one has been able to view airplanes coming and going for some 50 years. That has been the only constant.

María Consuelo Loera was born poor in a town that saw the rise of very rich men. It’s difficult to comprehend how her oldest son has conquered the cover of Forbes when three others, all quite young, died from malnutrition. Such are the dimensions of wealth, such are the dimensions of poverty. 94 years is enough for several lifetimes.

Of Consuelo Loera’s biography we know just a few things. As a young girl, she never knew running water or electricity. She married a violent and alcoholic man; none of her 10 children finished primary school, but the eldest got his doctoral degree at 15 years old in the planting and trafficking of marijuana and poppy. At the end of her life, tell those who went to Tuna to interview her, Doña Consuelo dedicated her time to taking care of small animals, healing people and praying in an evangelical church that her son, El Chapo, had built in town. In a ranching town with a handful of houses there were masses at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. every Sunday. Such prayer and self-sacrifice weren’t enough to fulfill Doña Consuelo’s final wish: to look into the eyes, for the last time, of the eldest of her sons, incarcerated in a United States maximum security prison. She spent her last bullet in a written letter to the president which, aside from unnecessary polemic, was less useful than an Our Father invoked with little faith.

The death of Consuelo Loera takes place at a moment in which at least two changes in the dynamics of national drug trafficking are being heralded. The first: the displacement of traditional drugs for synthetics, much easier and simpler to produce. Little by little, but inevitably, the Golden Triangle will cease to be the center of gravity for the Mexican drug trade. Other mountains, roads and borders will take the place of the historic region that saw the birth of Consuelo Loera’s children. The ability to synthesize fentanyl and methamphetamines in a few square feet makes the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental an unnecessary refuge. The light aircrafts will continue to cross the skies of Badiraguato, but they will be less relevant and their captains will have other last names.

The second change is even more radical. Drug trafficking organizations will be less and less sustained by family relations. The path was set by the Zetas some 20 years ago: violence, not consanguinity, will be the foundation of criminal alliances. Until now, the narco business stayed in the family, between brothers, neighbors, peers and cousins that sometimes, like Cain and Abel, betrayed and killed each other. Family until the end. That model no longer exists, it belongs to the past. The Zetas understood this, as do the bosses of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), a group for which place of birth and last name matter less than one’s desire to kill.

In more than one sense, the grandchildren of María Consuelo Loera, Los Chapitos [The Little Chapos] —the triumvirate made up of Joaquín, Iván and Jesús Alfredo— represent an organizational model that better pertains to the end of the last century than to today’s Mexico. They will hold out for a few more years —of that, you can be sure— but they are part of yesterday’s world. If they don’t know it, they should at least suspect it.

María Consuelo Loera won’t be around to see the end of her lineage. The incarceration of her oldest son, the extradition of Ovidio Guzmán, the daily battle of the Chapitos against their former friend Zambada, the CJNG’s attacks in various parts of the country and the arrest of a half-dozen top cartel leaders, including the group’s security chief, El Nini, suggest that the end of the Sinaloa Cartel, as least as we know it, is just around the corner. Most likely, it will eventually implode into a number of increasingly less solid cells with less professional leadership. Perhaps they will be much more violent.

Doña Consuelo won’t be witness to this. In the end, 94 years were not enough to tell the story of a business that —although it seems infinite— will change names and geographies. The person who will tell the end of this story has yet to be born.

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