A man’s body, hands bound and covered by a blue tarp, lies by the side of the road where it had been dumped minutes earlier. A blood-soaked sign says he was a “Chapito,” a member of one of two criminal factions fighting for control of this city, the cradle of Mexico’s transnational narcotics industry.

Such macabre finds are common in Culiacán—a city of luxury car dealerships, fancy malls, and makeshift fentanyl labs—marking the shifting lines of nearly two years of relentless civil war between the two main clans of the pioneering Sinaloa cartel.

It’s a war that the Chapitos, the heirs of Mexican drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appear to be losing, casting doubt on the future of a dynasty that once ruled vast swaths of the criminal underworld on its way to becoming the world’s top producer and smuggler of fentanyl.

The latest blow came last month with the U.S. indictment of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha and nine other current and former state and local officials, charging them with taking bribes from the Chapitos to protect their criminal enterprise.

On one level, the fall of the Guzmáns marks a signal victory for Washington, which pursued them across four presidential administrations. Since his 2019 conviction in a Brooklyn federal court, El Chapo has been serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a Supermax prison high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

On another, it has cost Mexico dearly. The fight among criminal pretenders to Guzmán’s throne has unfolded like a Shakespearean drama, sparked by betrayal, ambition, greed—and rivers of blood. Since 2024, when one of Guzmán’s sons kidnapped the veteran head of a rival faction and handed him over to U.S. authorities, some 3,000 people, gunmen from both sides and innocent bystanders, have been killed in the fighting. Another 3,600 are missing.

Over the years, decapitating the leadership of successive cartels has done nothing to stanch the flow of drugs into an eager U.S. market, while leading to ever-greater violence as spinoffs clash over territory.

“Now that the elders have gone, the younger generation is out of control,” said Alma Rosa Rojo, the head of a group of women who search for missing relatives in Sinaloa. As she spoke, forensic experts carefully cataloged the skull and bleached bones of a body found dumped in a field close to the city’s most expensive gated community.

Citing concerns of such spiraling violence, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador adopted a “hugs, not bullets” approach to the cartels. Mexican soldiers largely avoided clashes with powerful organized crime groups, which grew in geographical reach, power and economic penetration.

Now the federal indictment out of the Southern District of New York outlines a long-suspected additional motive for the kid-gloves approach: endemic corruption. Although López Obrador himself hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, Rocha, one of his close political allies, figures prominently in the court papers.

A member of López Obrador’s leftist Morena Party, Rocha met personally with two of El Chapo’s sons before the 2021 gubernatorial election, securing their support for his candidacy, the indictment charges, then benefited from a campaign of intimidation against his opponents. After winning an overwhelming victory, Rocha allegedly followed through on promises to protect the sons’ operations.

Former state and local police chiefs directly participated in cartel violence, according to the indictment, including arresting and murdering the Chapitos’ enemies, kidnapping individuals suspected of cooperating with U.S. law enforcement and informing the cartel’s leadership of planned U.S.-backed raids.

Rocha stepped down temporarily and vowed to fight the charges against him, saying they form part of a campaign against the Morena party. The current president, Claudia Sheinbaum—also a member of Morena—has said that the evidence presented by the U.S. to request the arrest is insufficient.

In Senate testimony Tuesday, Drug Enforcement Administration head Terry Cole said the Rocha indictment—the first time the U.S. has requested the arrest and extradition of a sitting Mexican governor—would be followed by other moves against officials in league with drug traffickers. “I can assure you, this is just the start about what’s to come in Mexico,” Cole said.

Forbes list

“El Chapo” Guzmán was a seminal figure in the Mexican narcotics trade. Born poor, he sold oranges as a child. But a third-grade education didn’t stop him from becoming the informal CEO of one of the world’s largest drug smuggling organizations with a fortune that put him at number 701 in Forbes’ 2009 billionaire’s list.

His path to power was forged in bloodshed. After his mentor, Guadalajara cartel founder Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, was arrested in 1989, El Chapo went to war with another faction run by the former leader’s nephews in the border city of Tijuana, a coveted smuggling route into the U.S. In late 1992, gunmen working for the nephews mistook Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas for El Chapo, shooting the cleric dead in his car outside the Guadalajara airport and shocking a country seemingly inured to cartel violence.

Guzmán pioneered the use of drug tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border to smuggle tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. And he was an escape artist, twice absconding from high-security prisons, the second time through an elaborate mile-long tunnel.

A yearning for the limelight led to a 2015 meeting with Hollywood star Sean Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo in the wilds of Sinaloa to discuss a possible biopic. The meeting provided vital information for U.S. intelligence services and helped lead Mexican security forces to Guzmán six months later. He was subsequently extradited to the U.S. In Sinaloa, El Chapo remains a folk hero, the subject of countless narco-ballads. At the Culiacán airport, travelers can buy baseball caps with his 701 ranking in the Forbes list.

The betrayal

The present conflict began in mid-2024 when one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, lured his godfather Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada into a trap.

The 78-year-old Zambada, a co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel and longstanding partner of El Chapo, enjoyed a reputation as a mediator who could resolve problems between drug bosses, politicians and other Sinaloa power brokers.

Also known as “the Gentleman of the Hat” for his trademark Stetson, Zambada headed to a secluded events center, where he expected to mediate a dispute between Gov. Rocha and Héctor Cuén, an influential local politician who had served as mayor of Culiacán and rector of the state university.

Putting his full trust in his godson, Zambada was accompanied by only four bodyguards.

Rocha has said he didn’t know about the meeting, and didn’t attend it. He declined to be interviewed.

At the events center, Zambada was ambushed by Guzmán López’s gunmen. They killed Cuén and stuffed Zambada into the back of a pickup truck, Zambada wrote in a letter later released by his lawyer. Guzmán López then flew Zambada to an airport near El Paso, where U.S. officials detained both men. Guzmán López had long been secretly negotiating his own surrender to U.S. authorities and believed that bringing in Zambada would sweeten his deal, according to U.S. officials. It didn’t work. According to his subsequent plea agreement, he is still awaiting sentencing because he is cooperating with ongoing investigations.

Zambada’s kidnapping stunned Sinaloa. Hostilities exploded in a matter of weeks with a wave of roadblocks and gunfights between armed groups that left a dozen cars riddled with bullet holes and a soldier and a civilian dead. Zambada’s son, Ismael “Mayito Flaco” Zambada, led the “Mayitos” charge against the “Chapitos.”

“We aren’t fighting against the government,” said Comanche, a Mayitos lieutenant, in a widely heard audio posted on social media. He ordered his gunmen to “break the backs of the Chapitos” and warned Mexican troops to stay out of a war that wasn’t theirs.

In the beginning, most analysts believed that the Chapitos, who outnumbered the Mayitos and were richer, would win out. The young Chapitos were flush with money and guns. For Culiacán, the Chapitos represented a new generation of drug traffickers, very different from their fathers. They are “narco juniors” who love flashy cars, the fast life, flaunting their money and guns on social media, where influencers on their payroll lauded their lifestyles and boasted of their close links.

For the Chapitos, the kidnapping of El Mayo was justified because his own son and brother had provided key testimony supporting El Chapo’s U.S. conviction, according to people close to the family. But it didn’t go down well with many Sinaloan clans, enabling the Mayitos to make their own alliances.

“When there’s a betrayal at the top, it’s the worst thing that can happen to an organization like this,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican security expert. “It generates a violent struggle between two factions, as is happening now in Sinaloa.”

Preppies vs. cowboys

A senior Mexican official sees the fight between the Chapitos and the Mayitos as a brawl between crazed preppies and hardened ranch hands, where the cowboys have proven to be the tougher bunch. In the end, Sinaloa will remain a hotbed of drug trafficking, but without El Chapo’s family at the helm, say some in law enforcement.

A recent report by Mexico’s Attorney General’s office says the Mayitos have “shown a more belligerent profile” than their opponents. Security experts say that they gradually infiltrated Culiacán to kidnap low-ranking operatives linked to the Chapitos. They extracted information and more names leading to the upper echelons of the rival gang, torturing, killing and sometimes dismembering their captives.

The Mexican government came down hard on the Chapitos. Security officials see them as one of Mexico’s greatest instigators of violence. Their connection to deadly fentanyl made them a top target for the U.S. as well. The government has dismantled much of the Chapitos organization, particularly Iván Archivaldo’s network of close confidants and lieutenants.

“They are detained, they are dead, and others have turned against him and are now working for the Mayitos,” says Ismael Bojórquez, the editor of Riodoce, a Culiacán newspaper that follows the drug war.

Last year, 17 members of the Guzmán family walked across the border to San Diego seeking refuge as part of a plea deal then being worked out for another Chapito leader, Ovidio Guzmán, Ivan Archivaldo’s half brother. Since then, Ovidio pleaded guilty to drug charges and is awaiting sentencing.

The Chapitos continue to hit back—and hard. They have killed scores of Mayito operatives and some relatives of Zambada. In January, they kidnapped 10 miners from a Canadian gold and silver mine in the town of Concordia, about 160 miles southeast of Culiacán. Officials said the Chapitos mistook the miners for members of the Mayitos. So far, the bodies of nine of the miners have been found. They also shot up and badly wounded two local politicians involved in a union election.

The Chapitos responded with threats on banners and social media. “Traitors, your end is near,” said one banner hung from a Culiacán pedestrian bridge last October. It named several prominent turncoat Chapitos as marked for death. At the bottom of the sign: a picture of a pizza slice, a symbol for the “Chapiza,” as the clan is also known.

At the beginning of the war, a Zambada operative involved in drug smuggling described Culiacán as sealed off, with nothing happening in the city that the Chapitos didn’t know about.

As many as 2,000 motorcycle-riding lookouts with walkie-talkies, patrolled the city, keeping an eye on army convoys sent to quell the violence. The Chapitos also had more than 2,600 illegal video cameras monitoring the city.

Desertions continued. “If they kidnapped and turned over El Mayo Zambada, if they did that to him, what would they do to you?” said Margarito Flores, who knows the combatants well. Flores and his twin brother made Chicago a drug-distribution hub for the Sinaloa cartel before becoming informants for U.S. law enforcement in 2008. They pleaded guilty to drug charges, and are now free after serving 12 years in prison.

Torn fabric

In attacking Culiacán, the Mayitos eschewed big, luxury sport-utility vehicles for smaller, nondescript sedans as well as delivery trucks as they made their move into the city, said the Zambada operative, who also belongs to a prominent Sinaloa cartel family.

Drug traffickers aren’t the only victims. Politicians and police officers, businessmen and restaurateurs who have flourished on the dollars pouring in from the cartel’s drug sales, have also paid with their lives. Much of society here has been seamlessly interwoven with the drug business that has thrived in Sinaloa for more than a century. That fabric has been torn.

Iván Archivaldo is no longer safe in Culiacán. He is constantly on the run, seeking shelter from an ever-shrinking group of allies in nearby states, say people close to the investigation.

A report last year by Mexico’s attorney general’s office noted that the Mayitos were responsible for the single most “high impact” violent act in Sinaloa’s civil war—the killing of 20 Chapitos, four of whose headless bodies were left hanging from a bridge.

A van stuffed with the remaining 16 bodies was abandoned nearby, with a sign insulting Iván Archivaldo by name.

“Welcome to the new Sinaloa,” the sign read.

A man’s body, hands bound and covered by a blue tarp, lies by the side of the road where it had been dumped minutes earlier. A blood-soaked sign says he was a “Chapito,” a member of one of two criminal factions fighting for control of this city, the cradle of Mexico’s transnational narcotics industry.

Such macabre finds are common in Culiacán—a city of luxury car dealerships, fancy malls, and makeshift fentanyl labs—marking the shifting lines of nearly two years of relentless civil war between the two main clans of the pioneering Sinaloa cartel.

It’s a war that the Chapitos, the heirs of Mexican drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appear to be losing, casting doubt on the future of a dynasty that once ruled vast swaths of the criminal underworld on its way to becoming the world’s top producer and smuggler of fentanyl.

The latest blow came last month with the U.S. indictment of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha and nine other current and former state and local officials, charging them with taking bribes from the Chapitos to protect their criminal enterprise.

On one level, the fall of the Guzmáns marks a signal victory for Washington, which pursued them across four presidential administrations. Since his 2019 conviction in a Brooklyn federal court, El Chapo has been serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a Supermax prison high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

On another, it has cost Mexico dearly. The fight among criminal pretenders to Guzmán’s throne has unfolded like a Shakespearean drama, sparked by betrayal, ambition, greed—and rivers of blood. Since 2024, when one of Guzmán’s sons kidnapped the veteran head of a rival faction and handed him over to U.S. authorities, some 3,000 people, gunmen from both sides and innocent bystanders, have been killed in the fighting. Another 3,600 are missing.

Over the years, decapitating the leadership of successive cartels has done nothing to stanch the flow of drugs into an eager U.S. market, while leading to ever-greater violence as spinoffs clash over territory.

“Now that the elders have gone, the younger generation is out of control,” said Alma Rosa Rojo, the head of a group of women who search for missing relatives in Sinaloa. As she spoke, forensic experts carefully cataloged the skull and bleached bones of a body found dumped in a field close to the city’s most expensive gated community.

Citing concerns of such spiraling violence, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador adopted a “hugs, not bullets” approach to the cartels. Mexican soldiers largely avoided clashes with powerful organized crime groups, which grew in geographical reach, power and economic penetration.

Now the federal indictment out of the Southern District of New York outlines a long-suspected additional motive for the kid-gloves approach: endemic corruption. Although López Obrador himself hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, Rocha, one of his close political allies, figures prominently in the court papers.

A member of López Obrador’s leftist Morena Party, Rocha met personally with two of El Chapo’s sons before the 2021 gubernatorial election, securing their support for his candidacy, the indictment charges, then benefited from a campaign of intimidation against his opponents. After winning an overwhelming victory, Rocha allegedly followed through on promises to protect the sons’ operations.

Former state and local police chiefs directly participated in cartel violence, according to the indictment, including arresting and murdering the Chapitos’ enemies, kidnapping individuals suspected of cooperating with U.S. law enforcement and informing the cartel’s leadership of planned U.S.-backed raids.

Rocha stepped down temporarily and vowed to fight the charges against him, saying they form part of a campaign against the Morena party. The current president, Claudia Sheinbaum—also a member of Morena—has said that the evidence presented by the U.S. to request the arrest is insufficient.

In Senate testimony Tuesday, Drug Enforcement Administration head Terry Cole said the Rocha indictment—the first time the U.S. has requested the arrest and extradition of a sitting Mexican governor—would be followed by other moves against officials in league with drug traffickers. “I can assure you, this is just the start about what’s to come in Mexico,” Cole said.

Forbes list

“El Chapo” Guzmán was a seminal figure in the Mexican narcotics trade. Born poor, he sold oranges as a child. But a third-grade education didn’t stop him from becoming the informal CEO of one of the world’s largest drug smuggling organizations with a fortune that put him at number 701 in Forbes’ 2009 billionaire’s list.

His path to power was forged in bloodshed. After his mentor, Guadalajara cartel founder Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, was arrested in 1989, El Chapo went to war with another faction run by the former leader’s nephews in the border city of Tijuana, a coveted smuggling route into the U.S. In late 1992, gunmen working for the nephews mistook Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas for El Chapo, shooting the cleric dead in his car outside the Guadalajara airport and shocking a country seemingly inured to cartel violence.

Guzmán pioneered the use of drug tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border to smuggle tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. And he was an escape artist, twice absconding from high-security prisons, the second time through an elaborate mile-long tunnel.

A yearning for the limelight led to a 2015 meeting with Hollywood star Sean Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo in the wilds of Sinaloa to discuss a possible biopic. The meeting provided vital information for U.S. intelligence services and helped lead Mexican security forces to Guzmán six months later. He was subsequently extradited to the U.S. In Sinaloa, El Chapo remains a folk hero, the subject of countless narco-ballads. At the Culiacán airport, travelers can buy baseball caps with his 701 ranking in the Forbes list.

The betrayal

The present conflict began in mid-2024 when one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, lured his godfather Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada into a trap.

The 78-year-old Zambada, a co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel and longstanding partner of El Chapo, enjoyed a reputation as a mediator who could resolve problems between drug bosses, politicians and other Sinaloa power brokers.

Also known as “the Gentleman of the Hat” for his trademark Stetson, Zambada headed to a secluded events center, where he expected to mediate a dispute between Gov. Rocha and Héctor Cuén, an influential local politician who had served as mayor of Culiacán and rector of the state university.

Putting his full trust in his godson, Zambada was accompanied by only four bodyguards.

Rocha has said he didn’t know about the meeting, and didn’t attend it. He declined to be interviewed.

At the events center, Zambada was ambushed by Guzmán López’s gunmen. They killed Cuén and stuffed Zambada into the back of a pickup truck, Zambada wrote in a letter later released by his lawyer. Guzmán López then flew Zambada to an airport near El Paso, where U.S. officials detained both men. Guzmán López had long been secretly negotiating his own surrender to U.S. authorities and believed that bringing in Zambada would sweeten his deal, according to U.S. officials. It didn’t work. According to his subsequent plea agreement, he is still awaiting sentencing because he is cooperating with ongoing investigations.

Zambada’s kidnapping stunned Sinaloa. Hostilities exploded in a matter of weeks with a wave of roadblocks and gunfights between armed groups that left a dozen cars riddled with bullet holes and a soldier and a civilian dead. Zambada’s son, Ismael “Mayito Flaco” Zambada, led the “Mayitos” charge against the “Chapitos.”

“We aren’t fighting against the government,” said Comanche, a Mayitos lieutenant, in a widely heard audio posted on social media. He ordered his gunmen to “break the backs of the Chapitos” and warned Mexican troops to stay out of a war that wasn’t theirs.

In the beginning, most analysts believed that the Chapitos, who outnumbered the Mayitos and were richer, would win out. The young Chapitos were flush with money and guns. For Culiacán, the Chapitos represented a new generation of drug traffickers, very different from their fathers. They are “narco juniors” who love flashy cars, the fast life, flaunting their money and guns on social media, where influencers on their payroll lauded their lifestyles and boasted of their close links.

For the Chapitos, the kidnapping of El Mayo was justified because his own son and brother had provided key testimony supporting El Chapo’s U.S. conviction, according to people close to the family. But it didn’t go down well with many Sinaloan clans, enabling the Mayitos to make their own alliances.

“When there’s a betrayal at the top, it’s the worst thing that can happen to an organization like this,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican security expert. “It generates a violent struggle between two factions, as is happening now in Sinaloa.”

Preppies vs. cowboys

A senior Mexican official sees the fight between the Chapitos and the Mayitos as a brawl between crazed preppies and hardened ranch hands, where the cowboys have proven to be the tougher bunch. In the end, Sinaloa will remain a hotbed of drug trafficking, but without El Chapo’s family at the helm, say some in law enforcement.

A recent report by Mexico’s Attorney General’s office says the Mayitos have “shown a more belligerent profile” than their opponents. Security experts say that they gradually infiltrated Culiacán to kidnap low-ranking operatives linked to the Chapitos. They extracted information and more names leading to the upper echelons of the rival gang, torturing, killing and sometimes dismembering their captives.

The Mexican government came down hard on the Chapitos. Security officials see them as one of Mexico’s greatest instigators of violence. Their connection to deadly fentanyl made them a top target for the U.S. as well. The government has dismantled much of the Chapitos organization, particularly Iván Archivaldo’s network of close confidants and lieutenants.

“They are detained, they are dead, and others have turned against him and are now working for the Mayitos,” says Ismael Bojórquez, the editor of Riodoce, a Culiacán newspaper that follows the drug war.

Last year, 17 members of the Guzmán family walked across the border to San Diego seeking refuge as part of a plea deal then being worked out for another Chapito leader, Ovidio Guzmán, Ivan Archivaldo’s half brother. Since then, Ovidio pleaded guilty to drug charges and is awaiting sentencing.

The Chapitos continue to hit back—and hard. They have killed scores of Mayito operatives and some relatives of Zambada. In January, they kidnapped 10 miners from a Canadian gold and silver mine in the town of Concordia, about 160 miles southeast of Culiacán. Officials said the Chapitos mistook the miners for members of the Mayitos. So far, the bodies of nine of the miners have been found. They also shot up and badly wounded two local politicians involved in a union election.

The Chapitos responded with threats on banners and social media. “Traitors, your end is near,” said one banner hung from a Culiacán pedestrian bridge last October. It named several prominent turncoat Chapitos as marked for death. At the bottom of the sign: a picture of a pizza slice, a symbol for the “Chapiza,” as the clan is also known.

At the beginning of the war, a Zambada operative involved in drug smuggling described Culiacán as sealed off, with nothing happening in the city that the Chapitos didn’t know about.

As many as 2,000 motorcycle-riding lookouts with walkie-talkies, patrolled the city, keeping an eye on army convoys sent to quell the violence. The Chapitos also had more than 2,600 illegal video cameras monitoring the city.

Desertions continued. “If they kidnapped and turned over El Mayo Zambada, if they did that to him, what would they do to you?” said Margarito Flores, who knows the combatants well. Flores and his twin brother made Chicago a drug-distribution hub for the Sinaloa cartel before becoming informants for U.S. law enforcement in 2008. They pleaded guilty to drug charges, and are now free after serving 12 years in prison.

Torn fabric

In attacking Culiacán, the Mayitos eschewed big, luxury sport-utility vehicles for smaller, nondescript sedans as well as delivery trucks as they made their move into the city, said the Zambada operative, who also belongs to a prominent Sinaloa cartel family.

Drug traffickers aren’t the only victims. Politicians and police officers, businessmen and restaurateurs who have flourished on the dollars pouring in from the cartel’s drug sales, have also paid with their lives. Much of society here has been seamlessly interwoven with the drug business that has thrived in Sinaloa for more than a century. That fabric has been torn.

Iván Archivaldo is no longer safe in Culiacán. He is constantly on the run, seeking shelter from an ever-shrinking group of allies in nearby states, say people close to the investigation.

A report last year by Mexico’s attorney general’s office noted that the Mayitos were responsible for the single most “high impact” violent act in Sinaloa’s civil war—the killing of 20 Chapitos, four of whose headless bodies were left hanging from a bridge.

A van stuffed with the remaining 16 bodies was abandoned nearby, with a sign insulting Iván Archivaldo by name.

“Welcome to the new Sinaloa,” the sign read.