Daniel’s story is darkly familiar. Around a third of Mexico is ruled by cartels like the CJNG, while more than 130,000 people are missing nationwide. But what’s different about Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco state in the west of the country, is that it is now welcoming thousands of football fans. The World Cup has just started, and the city’s gleaming Akron Stadium is hosting a number of games. Cartel violence has unsurprisingly thrown these plans into doubt — and, even if the security forces do manage to keep order, the scourge of the drug gangs will linger long after the final whistle blows.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has dominated the state for years. Emerging in 2010, after the so-called Milenio gang broke up, it’s since expanded across Mexico and beyond. Today it boasts a presence in some 40 countries. Its big earner is drugs: the cartel pulls in billions of dollars annually trafficking fentanyl, meth and cocaine to the US. Jalisco’s geography is key to this bonanza. Importing chemical precursors through ports such as Manzanillo, in the neighboring state of Colima, the CJNG then smuggles finished narcotics north to America’s southwestern border.

With wealth has come violence. The Jalisco cartel is now infamous for staging brazen attacks against Mexican government officials; that the CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, more commonly known as “El Mencho”, remained at large was deeply embarrassing for President Claudia Sheinbaum and her government ahead of the World Cup. Further pressure came from Donald Trump, who pushed his Mexican counterpart to “go after” the cartels, ominously warning that he’d put US boots on the ground if she didn’t.

Things came to a head in February, when Mexican special forces swooped on El Mencho. He was fatally wounded, Mexican officials say, following a shootout at a remote mountain property near the town of Tapalpa, about 100 miles southwest of Guadalajara. But that coup, aided by US intel, soon sparked cartel reprisals across Jalisco. Gunmen torched cars and blocked roads, including at the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta, where terrified tourists were left cowering in their hotel rooms. The violence left 25 National Guards dead in Jalisco alone, with bloodshed taking place within 10 miles of the Akron Stadium.

Suggested reading

Mexico’s unending drug wars

By Ioan Grillo

With the World Cup approaching, Sheinbaum urged calm, claiming that Mexico could ensure there was “no risk” to supporters traveling to Guadalajara. Héctor Flories isn’t convinced. We speak in his Guadalajara home, as the smell of gas wafts in from a nearby restaurant. “We want them to come,” Héctor says of World Cup visitors, a picture of his son’s smiling face emblazoned on his t-shirt. “But [the government] can’t even have security for their own people, let alone people coming from other countries.”

In theory, Guadalajara has plenty going for it. A booming tech industry has earned it the title of the “Silicon Valley of Mexico”. Intel and Bosch are just two global firms to have a presence here, drawn to the steady flow of computer science graduates from the city’s several universities. In truth, though, it’s tequila, not tech, that puts the city on the map. The eponymous town of Tequila, just an hour from the state capital, is the cradle of an industry that produces up to 500 million liters of booze each year. It all comes from the rows and rows of blue agave plants that thrive in Jalisco’s volcanic lowlands, with profits from the drink running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet the party town has a sinister side. Across Guadalajara, extortion is a major problem. For obvious reasons, no hard figures exist, but national surveys suggest there are hundreds of thousands of extortion attempts against Mexican businesses each year. Guadalajara is no exception. From tortillerías to car washes, “cobro de piso” (“floor charge”) is just another cost of doing business. Pity anyone who doesn’t — or can’t — pay up. There are roughly 1,500 murders a year in the Guadalajara metropolitan area, with many down to cartel brutality.

As if that weren’t bad enough, CJNG also raises money through kidnapping, forcing their victims to act as lookouts, move drugs — or worse. According to one former prisoner, who later spoke to Héctor Flores, the criminals sometimes make their victims carry out sicario hits. Daniel is far from alone here, with 16,000 people officially “disappeared” across Jalisco’s canyons and agave groves.

When I visit Guadalajara, there are signs of resistance. The city’s Monument to Boy Heroes, built in 1950 to commemorate a 19th-century battle against the United States, has been rechristened the “Roundabout of the Disappeared” ahead of the World Cup — and is covered by posters of the missing. One features the face of Jonathan Emmanuel Serratos Virgen, who was just 31 when he was abducted. A caption below the poster pleads: “Have you seen him? Help us find him.”

Héctor Flores tells me he’s co-founded a group called Luz de Esperanza (“Light of Hope”), which campaigns for the disappeared. Printing out flyers and posting on social media, the activists also lobby the state to invest more money in identifying corpses, increasingly found in mass graves across the city.

The grim irony is that this toll has risen with development. As the authorities have plowed money into preparing Mexico’s Silicon Valley for the World Cup — widening roads and building new apartment blocks — contractors have chanced upon a bloody harvest. According to activists, some 22 graves have in recent years been found around the Akron Stadium alone. One of the most horrifying examples emerged in February last year, when construction workers turned up 260 bodies at a place called Las Agujas, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, with many mere body parts.

A year on from the discovery, I decide to visit Las Agujas myself. I’m accompanied by Maria Luisa Estrada Hernández, a crime journalist who reports on the cartel, as well as a colleague from the UK. Héctor Flores had warned us that the cartel shooed away other journalists who’d tried their luck here — and Hernández had other reasons to be nervous. In July 2023 she’d survived an assassination attempt, after a gunman on a motorbike opened fire on her car when she was traveling with her daughter. He missed — but according to official statistics at least 141 journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000, and, according to a 2024 Amnesty report, at least 61 of those deaths were clearly related to their work.

It’s early on a Saturday when we drive up a dirt track towards the area of Las Agujas where the mass grave was found. We park our car beside a neat lawn, water sprinklers stuttering. It’s only 10am, but the air is dry and dusty, the sun already biting. High walls block the view into the killing site. We approach a security hut and ring a bell, hoping to gain access. A wiry security guard in his sixties emerges from behind a booth, the gate beside him firmly shut. He gruffly tells us he has no authority to let us pass, directing us to contact the landowners instead. To our right, a hooded man with long hair saunters back and forth, glancing in our direction. Another hooded man races by on a motorbike.

Suggested reading

The railway dividing Mexico

By Samuel McIlhagga

We ignore them, and instead keep walking, hoping to peek at the mass-grave site beyond the wall. Suddenly, a man speeds towards us in a dark blue pickup truck, the window on the driver’s side down. He pulls up on our left, his tires spinning in the dirt. “Guys, you can’t be here on this property, you gotta go,” he says in perfect American English, another hint of the cartel’s reach north of the Rio Grande. He’s in his late forties, thin, bearded, and wearing a black baseball cap. “We’re journalists,” we insist, as if that phrase means anything to him. “I know,” he replies in a menacing voice, “but you gotta get outta here now.” We pile into our car and Hernández takes the wheel and races back down the dirt road towards the highway. A red pickup truck follows and matches our speed. Estrada takes a sharp right; the red truck follows. She pulls off to a clearing on our left, then does a sharp u-turn as we race back towards Guadalajara.

That only leaves one more place to visit: the Akron Stadium itself. It rises, a low white oval, from a grassy mound on the edge of the city, more spaceship than sports venue. As we drive round the perimeter, the security presence is heavy. Army pick-up trucks stand guard, with officers in the back manning .50-caliber machine guns. The Special Forces and National Guards have their own contingent of trucks — I easily tot up more than 100 trucks in total. Football’s governing body seems pretty positive too. “FIFA is confident that the efforts being made by the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved,” the organization tells UnHerd, noting that Mexico and the other host nations safely welcome thousands of visitors every day. As for the cartels themselves, they have been quieter in recent weeks, apparently warning their members not to bother visiting fans.

Whether that’s enough to protect the throngs of tourists now descending on Jalisco remains to be seen. The US State Department has advised its citizens to “reconsider” traveling to the state, while violence in Guadalajara continues unabated. Just this week, armed men on a motorbike chased down a man not far from the city center — before shooting him in the head. For his part, Héctor Flores is skeptical whether a show of force really makes Guadalajara safer, not least when so many officials are on the CJNG payroll. Remarkably, he says, that includes the same men who kidnapped his son, with members of Jalisco’s state prosecutor’s office caught on camera that fateful day in 2021. Local police still haven’t acted, even though, in June 2025, a tribunal confirmed that officials were indeed involved in Daniel’s disappearance. “In Mexico,” Héctor laments, “you don’t know when organized crime starts and the prosecutor’s office begins.”

If the Sheinbaum administration has struck some blows against the cartel’s leadership, few here believe that much will change. In fact, things could soon become even worse. If a leadership fight erupts for El Mencho’s crown, it could spark an all-out war, a bloodbath — and a disaster for Mexico during the World Cup. It hardly helps, here, that the flow of weapons from the US continues unabated. Cartel men boast heavy guns of the sort wielded by troops at the Akron, with government forces sometimes overwhelmed by superior firepower. Bullet casings from these weapons have been traced back to the US: one factory, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri, is even owned by the government. Once such bullets enter the open market, they soon end up in the hands of criminals, a neat way to spend all their American drug money.

Aware, perhaps, of the oddly symbiotic relationship between his country and Mexican gangs, the Trump administration has kept up the pressure on Sheinbaum. Last month, for instance, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency claimed that Mexican officials have been “in bed for years” with drug traffickers. Perhaps that’s fair enough. Yet political point-scoring does nothing to help Héctor Flores, let alone his vanished son.

Car bombs are one of the many terrifying weapons in the arsenal of Mexico’s cartels as they battle over territory, not only to traffic and sell drugs, but to steal oil from pipelines, smuggle migrants over the US border, and extort businesses, among other crimes. They also wield weaponized drones that drop makeshift bombs unleashing shrapnel and nails. They lay landmines that kill soldiers in their Humvees as well as farmers. And they build fighting vehicles known as “monsters” that look like they are out of Mad Max, with walls of bulletproof steel and battering rams.

Mexican soldiers have been out in force fighting the cartels since 2006, and the new Left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum has promised to keep up this militarized strategy. But the troops have failed to quell the death toll (or perhaps made it worse): Mexico has suffered over 400,000 murders since the army crackdown began almost two decades ago. During this period, many security officials have themselves been found working with cartels, including the former security minister Genaro García Luna, who was sentenced by a New York court in October.

Living and reporting in Mexico since 2001, I have covered the conflict in depth and it’s as bad as ever. In recent months, I’ve been in a village in Guerrero state that suffered attacks with armored drones, and in the city of Culiacán, where residents have shut themselves in their homes because of the violence, calling it a “narco pandemic”, in allusion to the Covid lockdown. Over the years, I have seen horrors that I couldn’t have imagined such as going into a morgue with 49 bodies that were all decapitated and had their hands and feet cut off.

It’s a complex conflict that spirals across Mexico with dozens of different groups, ever-changing frontlines and unclear rules. The cartel war is a fight that the Mexican army can’t win yet can’t pull out of. And it’s a conflict that Washington needs to be wary about getting dragged deeper into.

The United States is already involved in Mexico’s cartel war. Agents for the DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and CIA run operations against drug traffickers, using undercover agents and stings. Washington gives aid to Mexico City, partly in return for holding back migrants and hitting narcos. US companies sell arms to Mexican security forces, and gangsters smuggle an iron river of guns over the Rio Grande.

But Donald Trump has called to bring the US military into the battle. “When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again,” Trump said in a 2023 statement. Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced legislation for authorization of US military force against cartels. “You need something that says, ‘You have finally pissed off the gringos. You finally did it,’” he told me last year. Trump has picked Ronald Johnson, a retired colonel and former CIA liaison to special operations, as ambassador to Mexico.

I used to think that scenes in the movie Sicario of US special forces sneaking over the border to take out cartels were pure fantasy. Now I think there is a chance such operations could really come to pass. But Washington should avoid getting drawn too deep into this quagmire.

The Republican hard-liners rightly blame cartels for trafficking fentanyl; they buy precursor ingredients from Chinese pharmaceutical companies and cook it into the lethal substance in labs south of the border. They are also right to call out US overdose deaths as a true national catastrophe; several years saw over 100,000 overdose deaths, with fentanyl in about 70% of cases.

Yet the problem with the call to bomb cartels is not only that it would inflame cross-border tensions, especially if civilians were killed, which could put American lives in danger of revenge attacks. It’s that it wouldn’t stop cartels.

More from this author

The man who betrayed El Chapo

By Ioan Grillo

The cartels are not composed of a few arch villains who can be taken out. They are sprawling networks with look-outs, runners, gunmen, traffickers, “mules”, businessmen, accountants, and plenty of police, soldiers, prosecutors, and mayors on the payroll. A study published in Science found cartels were one of the biggest employers in Mexico with 160,000 to 185,000 members. I think that is an underestimate. Even if US special forces were to blast away 1,000 cartel operatives then more than 99% would still be standing.

Furthermore, US forces could not take out one cartel and declare victory. There are about 20 significant groups, from the biggest cartels to powerful regional players to important local mobs, and dozens more affiliated gangs and crews. As US drug agents have discovered from decades of experience, when they weaken one cartel, another steps up and it often just creates more violence and fragmentation. The US arrest of the kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July has created a devastating civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel that is drowning the state in blood.

The call to bomb cartels gets into the question of what kind of conflict we are dealing with south of the border. Mexico’s cartel war is not officially a war. In 2017, a British think tank claimed Mexico had the world’s second deadliest armed conflict after Syria. But Mexico’s foreign ministry in response released a forceful communiqué arguing that it is a criminal problem. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an ‘(non-international) armed conflict’ in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect. Neither the existence of criminal groups nor the use of the Armed Forces to maintain order in the interior of the country are sufficient reason.”

I think the Mexican conflict is a weird mix of crime and war and we don’t have the best language and legal norms to deal with that. Yet the same is also true for various countries in the Americas, from Jamaica to Honduras to Brazil to Ecuador. Cartels wield paramilitary forces, people flee their villages and towns, and Mexico is littered with mass graves. Yet the gangsters are not ideological and are looking to make money rather than sweep to power like the Taliban. And to recognize Mexico as having a legal armed conflict would be to recognize cartels as belligerents with rights under the Geneva Convention.

There are no missile attacks or full-on aerial bombings. It’s a brutal battle but one that paradoxically allows much of Mexico to live outside the bloodshed. When you go to much of Mexico, you might be surprised how ordinary it feels, from colonial towns with bustling markets to hipsters sipping lattes in the trendy quarters of big cities. Mexico City is a thriving and popular capital and the Caribbean beaches are bustling with record numbers of tourists. Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and a big middle class despite the crime. It’s a weird duality of violence alongside normality.

Suggested reading

Can Donald Trump's tariffs fix America?

By Yanis Varoufakis

If the United States were to classify cartels as terrorist groups, it would create other issues. Those fleeing over the border to claim asylum would have their cases strengthened. US gun stores could be charged with providing material to foreign terrorist organizations.

Perhaps Trump is using the threat of violence to pressure Mexico to act. In November, Trump stated he would put 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods if they didn’t stop migrants and fentanyl coming in. On 3 December, Mexican security forces made what they claimed was their biggest fentanyl bust ever.

Such pressure could have a long-term effect. Mexico might not be able to eliminate cartels right now but it could manage to force them to reduce their fentanyl trafficking. Seizures at the border in the coming months will see if that is the case. That would be a positive development and also stop the poison spreading in Mexico. But the United States would still have to deal with fentanyl being made elsewhere, including on US soil.

The United States could create a new robust law against cartels, this novel type of paramilitary organized crime spreading in the hemisphere. But it would need to wield the law in US cities, where cartels move vast quantities of drugs, money and guns. And Mexico has to try and reduce the bloodshed in its homeland. Right now, perhaps the best it can hope for is reducing the worst crimes. In the future, it would have to go through some fundamental change to really become a less violent society.

Cartel bosses like to bathe their guns in gold and jewelry. The Mexican army has many such captured weapons in a base in Mexico City in what is known as the “narco museum”. A gleaming captured pistol there has words carved on the side saying, “only the dead have seen the end of the war.” And Trump’s unlikely to change that.

Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered. 

If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.

Though Mexicans were disappeared in the Nineties, the modern epidemic of vanishings really started in 2006. That year, President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs. As gangs defended their turf, from both the police and each other, the republic was drowned in an ocean of blood. Over the next 18 years, Mexico suffered some 431,000 homicides, from random shootings to organised beheadings. Alongside the violence, disappearances have been normalised too. Alongside those 113,000 desaparecidos, after all, 4,000 clandestine graves have also been found. 

Mexico’s drug cartels are clearly to blame for the mayhem — yet it’s not quite right to see them as straightforward criminals. Their influence is so powerful that it’s nowadays impossible to draw clear lines between cops and crooks. At every single level of government, from the police to the judiciary, there have been countless examples of collusion between officials and the cartels. Indeed Los Zetas, one of the most powerful and brutal of all the gangs, actually emerged out of an elite battalion of soldiers. Trained in counterinsurgency and drug war tactics, the troops then used that knowledge to become one of the most feared cartels around. 

Given these blurred lines, it makes sense that investigations into the missing 43 have gone nowhere, and have instead been met by denial, impunity and red herrings. Only six weeks after the outrage, Mexico’s attorney general famously presented what he called the “historic truth” — and announced the students’ bodies had been incinerated by a cartel, with their remains thrown down a nearby ravine. Yet forensic investigators from Argentina, leading experts in finding desaparecidos after their own country’s history, soon dismissed these claims.

In 2021, meanwhile, drone footage showed the apparent site of mass murder being prepared. First taken by the Mexican Navy, it later shows their presence alongside soldiers and the attorney general. The families of the victims had long suspected official involvement in the massacre, a position later taken by an independent enquiry into the event. Led by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), it concluded that the disappeared 43 amounted to a “state crime”.    

Despite accepting some involvement, however, the Mexican government continues to insist that the truth of the disappeared is ultimately a case of cartel violence, and perhaps a few corrupt politicians and police officers seduced by the violent glitz of drugs. A timely reminder of this has been the recent re-arrest of Gildardo Lopez Astudillo. Kingpin of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, he was detained just a few weeks before the tenth anniversary of the Ayotzinapa attack, with the authorities presenting his capture as a definitive win in the search for truth. 

More from this author

How the Left fetishised the Zapatistas

By Brad Evans

As obfuscation over Ayotzinapa persists, meanwhile, all Mexico suffers. In a study on Colombia — a nation with over 100,000 desaparecidos of its own — the former US ambassador coined the phrase “narco-statization” to refer to a situation in which every aspect of life is shaped by the violence and corruption of the drug trade. That’s clear enough from one of the leading GIEI investigators into the Ayotzinapa disaster. As Carlos Beristain has publicly noted, the moment his inquiry got too close to pinpointing state involvement, and especially military involvement, requests for information went unanswered.

Considering all this, it’d be easy to see the case of the 43 is a quintessential example of state failure. Yet in his compelling book, Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman showed how the first systematic attempt to disappear an entire people couldn’t happen without meticulous planning and organisation. Disposing of human life isn’t straightforward. Rather, it requires a monstrous organisational effort to ensure the dead remain hidden. What we see in Mexico is not state failure, in short, but state excessiveness and impunity. 

That’s especially true when you recall that violence doesn’t actually come easily to humans. We are far from natural born killers. As with other forms of systematically enforced and culturally normalised violence, rather, disappearance thrives when it’s a learned practice. This requires us to situate the disaster in Mexico in a far broader historical and geographical framing.

In mapping out the global topography of disappearance, our journey could plausibly begin in Nazi Germany. From there, we might follow ex-Nazis down the so-called “ratlines” to safety in South America. Certainly, not enough attention has been given to links between former National Socialists and the Argentinian junta, who also disappeared a number of Jewish activists and intellectuals through the Seventies. Then, like Che Guevara, we could travel up the spine of the Andes, learning how disappearance was remastered and exported, and how many of its advocates were students at the US military training facility now infamously called the “School of the Americas”.

Like all violence, the practice of disappearance has taken new forms as societies have changed. As Latin American countries have been transformed by the globalising logic of the free market, for instance, violence itself has been privatised. Just like global capital, meanwhile bloodshed has moved with the markets, from Colombia to Mexico to the frontiers of the US itself.

The geography of violence, in turn, has shaped how it’s counted. Keen to show how he brought peace and stability to Mexico, President Andreas Manual Lopez Obrador came to power promising to find the 43. Along the way, he founded the National Search Commission, and in one of his final official acts tasked it with reorganising Mexico’s disappeared into a more “accurate” picture. Unsurprisingly, the numbers fell dramatically. At just 12,377, the National Search Commission clearly used a politically motivated methodology. Families, for their part, responded to this development by decrying “the disappearance of the disappeared”. 

More from this author

We need to talk about violent speech

By Brad Evans

This is far from just a Mexican problem. A few months ago, I was part of an organising committee leading an international conference on disappearance in Belfast. Hosting the event in Northern Ireland was significant — not least given the acknowledgment the UK isn’t immune to the practice either. As Padraig Og O Ruairc’s recent book on the disappeared of Ireland vividly shows, it’s a technique the British government (and its opponents) have employed for centuries, and on a scale unknown even during the Troubles. The Belfast event was opened by testimonies from two women. The first, Elizabeth Santander, described how her husband was vanished by the Colombian state in the Eighties. Dympna Kerr, for her part, explained how she’s still searching for her 19-year-old brother Columba McVeigh, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1975. 

Having spoken with such courage about the weight of absence, I was especially struck by how both women ended their testimonies with poetry. Apart from the beauty of their words, it reminded me how important art has become for the vanished of Mexico, with no local artist more dedicated to confronting the horrors of disappearance than Chantal Meza. In splattered flashes of red and grey, her paintings are a howl of grief for the 43 and every desaparecido. It’s appropriate, then, that today her extensive State of Disappearance collection is unveiled in the Chancellors Building at the University of Bath. A decade on from their final bus ride, it’s heartening to know that the Ayotzinapa students haven’t fully been forgotten.

In a twist of fate, however, García Luna is now himself on trial in New York, accused of pocketing millions of dollars from those same kingpins after helping them traffic tons of cocaine to America. The trial, which began on 17 January in a federal court in Brooklyn and is expected to last eight weeks, breaks new ground in the drug war. Since Richard Nixon first declared a war on drugs in 1971, the US has taken down a vast array of Mexican traffickers — most famously Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was convicted in the same Brooklyn courthouse in 2019. But never before has such a high-ranking Mexican official faced a US jury on drug charges.

Journalists and activists have for years pointed out that it is no use targeting the mobsters if you don’t go after their political protection. This case therefore marks a serious turning point for US law enforcement. But it also rings alarm bells. The level of corruption alleged by the witnesses goes beyond anything I’ve seen in my two decades covering Mexico’s drug war. At the very least, the trial is deeply embarrassing for Washington’s drug agents and politicians who schmoozed with García Luna. (There are photos of him with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder.) More seriously, the far-reaching allegations also suggest that, unless the United States can reduce the amount that Americans spend on illegal drugs — estimated at close to $150 billion a year in one study — this narco corruption may just carry on with catastrophic consequences.

What’s more, it is by no means guaranteed that the jury will convict García Luna. In his opening argument, defence lawyer César de Castro claimed the prosecution does not have hard evidence that his client led a double life as law enforcer and crime boss. “No money. No photos. No videos. No texts. No emails. No records,” De Castro said. “No credible, believable, plausible evidence Mr García Luna helped the cartels.”

Prosecutors are, however, using the testimony of so-called cooperating witnesses, including scarred and grizzly cartel operatives who could have made deals with prosecutors to take the stand. Some have confessed to killing multiple victims and were major traffickers. Before the trial started, the judge even had to rule that the defence could not ask them about potential acts of cannibalism — a practice that various gangsters have been found to engage in — because it might be “distracting”.

As the jury was selected, prosecutors rigorously made sure the candidates agreed they could believe such witnesses and convict someone on their evidence, even if it were not backed up by physical proof. If the jury were to find García Luna not guilty, it would be, as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Tuesday, “a fiasco — the agencies and government of the United States would look very bad”. There is a lot at stake.

When I met García Luna back in 2005, when he was a rising star as the head of a federal investigative agency dubbed as Mexico’s FBI, he struck me as underwhelming, largely because he mumbled and stuttered. But he was convincing in his argument that Mexican law enforcement had to change to meet the new challenges. This was a time when gangland murders in Mexico were on the rise and Mexican traffickers had usurped Colombians as the biggest gangsters on the continent, smuggling the lion’s share of cocaine, heroin and crystal meth over the Rio Grande.

The following year, García Luna rose to a cabinet-level role under President Calderón, who ordered soldiers and police on a national offensive against the cartels. García Luna revolutionised the federal police, increasing it from a force of 6,000 to 37,000 officers. He also tried to salvage its image, financing a TV soap opera called El Equipo, in which good-looking cops went on daring operations. Moreover, Calderón crafted the Merida Initiative with Washington to increase cooperation in the fight. Under it, the United States provided Mexican law enforcement with billions of dollars in equipment and training, including Black Hawk helicopters and wiretap gear. García Luna also forged strong relationships with agents from across the US security apparatus.

More from this author

Inside El Salvador's brutal gang crackdown

By Ioan Grillo

At first, this new war on cartels appeared to bear fruit. In 2007, Mexican marines made the world’s biggest ever cocaine bust, a seizure of 23 tons off the Pacific coast. Kingpins who had long evaded justice were shot dead. Detained cartel suspects were made to record confession videos, like that of Tyson, in which they detailed serial murders.

But then violence erupted, with relentless firefights, execution-style hits and massacres. I covered much of this bloodshed — a grim period spent discovering bullet-ridden corpses on the street and watching too many mothers screaming in grief. By the time President Calderón left office in 2012, Mexico was suffering from a humanitarian crisis of mass graves and disappearances that remain unsolved. For his part, García Luna left Mexico for Florida to set up a security consulting company and rent a luxury beach house.

Seeing García Luna in the first days of the trial, he cut a transformed figure, silver-haired and beaten down by prison, where he has been since his 2019 arrest. Yet he also looked calm and alert to all the technicalities of the trial, occasionally smirking and blowing kisses to his wife. The first government witness was Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a hulking enforcer known as El Grande, a former police officer who was recruited by the Sinaloa Cartel. The fact that Villarreal was in the police before the mob is not a freak occurrence, but revealing of Mexico’s history: the country’s cartels grew from their humble beginnings as peasant farmers with the help of corrupt networks in the security forces. The career path between gangsters and police officers was like a revolving door.

Villarreal described seeing his boss, the kingpin Arturo “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva, meet García Luna in a safe house in the south of Mexico City and hand over bribe payments in duffel bags and cardboard boxes — worth more than a million dollars a month — on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. In return, García Luna allowed the cartel’s cocaine to travel through Mexico, busted its rivals and passed on police intelligence. “Everything ran perfectly. It was the best investment they made,” he said. One time, the cartel used this intelligence to steal two tons of cocaine from rivals, Villarreal testified, and split the profits with García Luna himself.

Such testimony was expected in this trial. But what Villarreal then described was remarkable. The cartel, he explained, would make false cocaine bricks and swap them with police for real cocaine that had been seized. Another time, the mobsters dressed up as police, arrested a rival and then handed him over to the real officers. On one occasion, the cartel kidnapped García Luna and brought him before The Beard because he wasn’t answering the telephone.

Villarreal also explained how the cartel’s close relationship with corrupt police actually succeeded in reducing Mexico’s murder rate for a period in 2007, just when Calderon’s offensive seemed to be going well. But then, he said, the deals inside the cartels fell apart and the violence soared. One of the biggest battles was between Beltrán Leyva and his childhood friend “El Chapo”, which ended with Beltrá Leyva being gunned down by Mexican marines.

More from this author

Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl

By Ioan Grillo

In 2019, I covered a stretch of El Chapo’s trial, which was more enthusiastically embraced by the New York media. Everyone wanted to be in the courtroom and see such an infamous mobster and his beauty-queen wife in the gallery. US cable networks ran regular segments on the trial’s revelations, whether it was El Chapo running through a tunnel naked to escape marines or his former lover taking the stand and crying while his wife chuckled. García Luna’s trial, by contrast, has garnered far less attention. But in some ways, the revelations are more important in showing how corrupted Mexico’s institutions are and why the country is so violent.

The trial might act as a deterrent to make Mexican officials think twice before blatantly taking cartel bribes. Mexican President López Obrador certainly looks upbeat when he talks about it in his morning press conferences, saying it shows how corrupt the previous administration was. Yet the trial also symbolises something uncomfortable about modern-day Mexico. It is notable, for instance, that the trial is in New York not Mexico City. Mexican judges have convicted generals and state governors for working with drug gangs, but not an official as powerful as García Luna — or a former president. And as long as the country’s security forces find more sophisticated ways of taking bribes, such as using intermediaries, this looks unlikely to change. Perhaps even more depressing is the fact that since García Luna has gone, the cartels have shifted to more perilous synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, which are driving a far worse rate of overdoses in the United States.

Everything has changed since, and not necessarily for the better. In his testimony, El Grande also talked about the glitter of narco wealth; how his boss The Beard had a fleet of cars, including a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and a Rolls Royce, and pets including a white tiger and black panther. Amid such opulence, achieving justice for the deaths on both sides of the border will be an extraordinary, if impossible, challenge. While the stories of El Grande, The Beard, and El Chapo may dominate the headlines, they are far removed from the bloody conflict that has consumed Mexico — and the decaying corpses still being dug up in mass graves.

But taking the lethal option was almost as undesired by the perpetrator as the victim. Murder has a way of redoubling the authorities’ efforts; and besides, dead men can’t pay kickbacks.

Today’s bad guy, however, leaves nothing to chance. The tripartite of gangsterism, terrorism and militarism has become a crowded market, and the art of intimidation has given way to the credo of shoot-first-don’t-even-bother-asking-questions-later.

I’ve seen this callous disregard for human life, and the blurred lines between crime, politics, warfare and “legitimate targets” in countries ranging from war-torn Sierra Leone to South Africa. But nowhere is it more abundant than in Mexico: the narco-capital of the world, a place where ingenious methods of drug trafficking and murder go hand in bloody hand.

To gauge what a typical Mexican crime reporter’s beat reads like, here’s the introduction to a recent report from Albinson Linares of current affairs show, Noticias Telemundo:

“The corpses of three people, dismembered and burned, were found in bags in Abasolo, in the state of Guanajuato, on Sept. 2. Three days later, a trans woman was murdered in the same state, and the body of a man, burned and tortured, was found hanging from a tree in Coacalco state. On Sept. 7, more than 300 migrants who had been kidnapped were rescued in Aguascalientes, and on Sept. 19, an entire family in Chihuahua was killed and an explosive package in Guanajuato caused the deaths of two men.”

And that’s a tiny sample of the 438 “acts of extreme violence” registered in Mexico that month. In this sense, then, daily life in Mexico is not a million miles away from the corrupt, ultra-violent, narco-state image of the country that Netflix has successfully cultivated via multiple documentaries, movies, series and “dope operas”.  The latest, and greatest, incarnation in the streaming service’s drug dramas is season three of Narcos: Mexico — a show notorious for its “brutal” executions and murder.

More from this author

The rise of Trinidad's cocaine caliphate

By David Matthews

But the truth is that, if anything, these shows actually downplay the violence of cartels. In Narcos, when someone gets whacked they’re dispatched like a third-rate nobody. A bit of blood splatter; a groan; next. In the real world, people who fall foul of the cartels get taken out in the most macabre of fashions: in one execution video allegedly released by the La Familia Michoacán drug cartel, a pit bull rips the man’s testicles off in full view of the camera. It’s horrific, gruesome, and in keeping with the cartels’ sadistic rule of law.

“These videos emerged in Mexico way back in late 2005, with the first one supposedly coming out of Acapulco,” says British journalist, Ioan Grillo, who left Britain for Mexico 20 years ago and is the bestselling author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. “It showed the interrogation of a gang member who was strapped to a chair. At the end of the video someone puts a gun to his head and blows his brains out. Literally. That video wasn’t posted on the internet in the same way that videos are today, because at that time it wasn’t as easy to post videos online. It actually turned up on a VHS tape and was given to a regional newspaper in the United States before making its way to the Dallas Morning News newspaper and then onto Mexican TV. They didn’t show the video in its entirety, but that was arguably the start of it all.”

According to Grillo, the cartels got the bright idea of shooting VHS videos of their murderous activities, and disseminating them via American and Mexican mainstream media, from watching al-Qaeda’s beheading videos of Westerners in the early 2000s. After one Mexican news programme ran the unexpurgated version of an American contractor’s beheading by the terrorist group in 2003, the cartels registered the hype it generated, and a new narco-propaganda tool was born.

Ever since, an endless stream of filmed ‘media-friendly’ atrocities and ultra-violent stunts have been employed by various warring cartels, including the rolling of five decapitated heads onto a crowded dance floor in Michoacán in 2006 by masked gunmen and the discovery of a box containing a football with a man’s face sewn onto it in a Sinaloa street in 2010 as a threat to the Juarez drug cartel. Inside the box was the message: “Happy New Year, because this will be your last.” The victim, Hugo Hernandez, was found chopped up into seven pieces.

More from this author

Why did Tottenham erupt?

By David Matthews

Yet decapitations have become so routine that, as Grillo says, they’re barely newsworthy anymore. So to up the propaganda and aesthetic stakes, the likes of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel records videos to spread on Facebook and Instragram. They usually show a phalanx of military vehicles and cartel members posing in tactical gear with assault weapons and, as Grillo notes, “sometimes torturing and executing enemy cartel members”.

While YouTube had been an unwitting early adopter of cartel snuff videos, and the jihadist executions that had inspired them, its $1.6 billion acquisition in 2006 by Google soon put paid to all that. The drug lords’ propaganda activities retreated into the shadowy recesses of the Internet and onto ‘dark social’ platforms and encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp, which contain no digital referral information about source material and thus make it nigh on impossible for law enforcement to track a video’s origins.

With decapitation fatigue setting in among Mexico’s informational gatekeepers, and the Western mainstream media having little or no interest in Latin American current affairs, dark social has given the cartels, with the help of a new breed of ‘citizen journalists’ and the pervasive use of mobile technology, the opportunity to spread its propaganda. Websites such as Blog del Narco have become aggregators and repositories for the worst of Mexico’s violent drug war, disseminating information the mainstream media and political establishment choose to ignore due to cynicism or boredom.

From these blogs — and increasingly their associated Twitter and Instagram accounts — a sort of narco-chic has evolved, spanning everything from music to fashion to ‘slanguage’. Like the criminal milieu of West Coast gangs and their symbiotic relationship with gangsta rap in the Nineties, or the petty New Jersey mafiosi who got their dress codes from The Sopranos in the early noughties, the narcotariat is seeping into mainstream culture thanks the nexus between Narcos and traditional-cum-trendy drug culture.

More from this author

How drug dealers won lockdown

By David Matthews

And so at one end of the spectrum we have narcocorridos, or drug ballads, about the exploits of drug traffickers, sicarios (cartel hitmen), their lovers or even mass murders. And at the other we have buchonas: the cosmetically enhanced, Kardashian-esque girlfriends of flashy cartel players whose style has become something of a social media phenomenon. Just look at Jenny69, one of the more visible ambassadors of buchona culture despite being from California, who has racked up more than two million followers on Instagram.

No doubt we’ll learn about these developments in Netflix’s next outing in Mexico. But just as journalists have to wrestle with cartels exploiting us as useful idiots in a trade-off between proper news and propaganda, so documentary and film producers must contend with the costs of glamorising one of the most dangerous criminal underworlds on the planet.

In 2017, Narcos producer Carlos Muñoz Porta was shot dead while location-scouting in Temascalapa, north of Mexico City. To date, no one has been brought to justice for the murder. We will probably never know whether it was cartel-inspired or just another random act of violence. Either way, it seems guaranteed that the blurry line in Mexico between art and reality will continue to be crossed for many more seasons to come.