A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex.
Last year, Don Winslow released a novel, The Cartel, based on his tunnel escape.
In the first months of the investigation, the authorities learned that Cardinal Posadas approached the airport on May 24 , 1993 at just the moment in which gunmen led by Ramon Arellano Felix, a leader of the main cocaine-smuggling organization in the Mexican state that borders California, opened fire on a rival cartel based in the states south of Arizona.
Intelligence officials said it was highly likely that he was killed in retribution for the arrest on Jan . 21of Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, one of the leaders of a cartel based in Sinaloa State.
The war began in Juárez around 2008, when the cartel based in Sinaloa, the marijuana- and opium-growing areas close to the Pacific Coast, moved in on the local organization, which controlled valuable smuggling routes.
On Sunday, the office put out a statement saying that it believed that Los Aztecas, a violent street gang working for La Línea, the operations arm of the drug cartel based in Ciudad Juárez, was responsible for the shootings.
Chihuahua state legislators said Sunday that they have asked federal authorities to ban "Call of Juarez: The Cartel," which is based on drug cartel shootouts in Ciudad Juárez.
It is actually a cartel and monopoly based on political privilege and theft by increasing the money supply.
To engineer a deal in alliance with the Sinaloa cartel and its allies, based on the old system in which politicians, police, army and the cartel know their place – and the Zetas are defeated.
The Sinaloa-born traffickers went on to head cartels based in several other parts of the country, including Guadalajara, Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana.
The authorities said it was unclear who had lofted the grenades into the crowd of revelers, but suspicion immediately fell on the drug cartels based in the region that have been singled out by President Felipe Calderón's government.
