‘El Guano’ Guzmán and the ‘old boss’ syndrome of the Sinaloa cartel

The years do not go by in vain, not even for the old bosses of the Sinaloa cartel. Ismael El Mayo Zambada and Aureliano Guzmán, El Guano, leaders of their respective factions, are about to reach 80. The DEA said a few weeks ago that Zambada is in poor health. In recent days, Mexican authorities arrested the alleged security chief of El Guano in a town in Durango. Some media speculated that El Guano, for whom the U.S. government is offering a reward of $5 million, managed to escape to the mountains.

If it were not for the serious accusations against the eldest Guzmán, who is El Chapo’s brother, it would be almost comical to imagine an octogenarian fleeing from a handful of soldiers, walking through the dusty roads, an outlaw to the end. But the accusations are serious. In two separate charges, the U..S State Department accused El Guano of trafficking heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and marijuana into American territory. El Guano is one of the most important members of the Sinaloa organization as far as the Biden administration is concerned, only surpassed by his eldest nephew, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán.

Ever since the third and final arrest of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, in 2016 in Sinaloa, and his subsequent extradition north of the Rio Grande, the Pacific cartel has been accumulating conflicts and problems. The downfall of El Chapo was followed by that of his old collaborator, Dámaso López, and his son, who squared off against the descendants of Guzmán, popularly known as Los Chapitos. In January 2023, the government captured one of them, Ovidio, who was extradited months later. Ovidio’s fall was followed by the arrest of their security chief El Nini, news about Zambada’s poor health, and the arrest of R8, El Guano’s lieutenant, this week.

Such a series of calamities should impose obstacles on the production and distribution chain of the Sinaloa cartel, although this matter is not at all clear. In its latest Drug Threat Assessment, released in May, the DEA points out that the Sinaloa cartel “is one of Mexico’s oldest criminal organizations, and one of the most violent and prolific polydrug-trafficking cartels in the world.” A series of skirmishes and internal battles have threatened the unity of the organization for more than eight years. Los Chapitos, commanded by Iván Archivaldo, are trying to expand their dominance and control. The old bosses, for their part, are trying to maintain it.

“Aureliano Guzmán always considered himself the successor of El Chapo, above and beyond his children,” says Eduardo Guerrero, director of Lantia Consultores, a consultancy that monitors the evolution of crime in Mexico. “It is a rivalry that has been going on for a long time, approximately since the arrest of El Chapo, but which has intensified due to various incidents, such as confrontations, conflicts over locations, arrests, and so on. An incident that greatly distanced Los Zambada from Los Guzmán was the capture of El Ratón, for example,” says Guerrero, referring to Ovidio Guzmán.

It is not clear, however, what role El Guano plays in all this, whether he is closer to one faction or another, or if, on the contrary, they are all distant from each other right now. If it is true that El Chapo’s brother was in Tamazula, in the state of Durango, where R8 was arrested, logic points to a distancing from Los Chapitos, who are strong in Culiacán. Guerrero defends that “the Guanos, although members of the Sinaloa cartel, are rivals in internal conflicts and right now they are at odds with Los Zambada and the sons of El Chapo.”

In the criminal world, sometimes betrayal is not as important as the perception of being betrayed. Faced with the impossibility of knowing who ordered what murder, thugs act by intuition. This is what has been happening since mid-2015, when gunmen murdered the half-brother of El Chapo and El Guano, Ernesto Guzmán, in the town of Badiraguato, in the mountains of Sinaloa, the birthplace of the clan. The local media indicated at the time that El Guano had ordered the murder, an assertion that was not confirmed.

That murder provoked the reaction of the criminal group that allegedly worked with the half-brother, heir to the Beltrán Leyva family, an old ally of El Chapo and later a staunch enemy. Between December 2015 and June 2016, armed commandos from this group showed up in Badiraguato, supposedly in search of El Guano. They did not find him, but they left a trail of dead in their wake. This dispute intersected with the escape of El Chapo, who had escaped from prison in July 2015 and was on the run, and with the first hostilities between Los Chapitos and Dámaso López’s group.

The rest is history. El Chapo fell in Los Mochis in January 2016 and was later extradited to the U.S. The same thing happened to López, whose son surrendered to U.S. authorities. The questions all these years revolve around the capabilities and inertia of each of the structures that orbit under the umbrella of Sinaloa. And the friction between them. In its last report, the DEA indicated that Los Chapitos and the Zambadas were at war, but said nothing about El Guano, which it placed on the same level as the other two groups.

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