One cartel leader says he’s trying to figure out how to protect his family in case the American military strikes inside Mexico. Another says he’s already gone into hiding, rarely leaving his home. Two young men who produce fentanyl for the cartel say they have shut down all their drug labs.
A barrage of arrests, drug seizures and lab busts by the Mexican authorities in recent months has struck the behemoth Sinaloa Cartel, according to Mexican officials and interviews with six cartel operatives, forcing at least some of its leaders to scale back on fentanyl production in Sinaloa state, their stronghold.
The cartels have sown terror across Mexico and caused untold damage in the United States. But here in Culiacán, the state capital, the dynamic seems to be shifting, at least for now. Cartel operatives say they’ve had to move labs to other areas of the country or temporarily shut down production.
“You can’t be calm, you can’t even sleep, because you don’t know when they’ll catch you,” said one high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel who, like other cartel operatives, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of capture.
“The most important thing now is to survive,” he added, his hands trembling.
The government crackdown on organized crime intensified after the Trump administration threatened retribution unless Mexico halted the supply of fentanyl into the United States, vowing high tariffs if the flow of migrants and drugs continued.
President Trump began floating the possibility of tariffs soon after his election in November, and soon after taking office announced 25 percent levies on Mexican goods if the country didn’t act on border security and drug trafficking. The president gave Mexico a month to deliver results, threatening to enact the tariffs on March 4 if he wasn’t satisfied.
Facing economic chaos, the Mexican government went on the offensive. President Claudia Sheinbaum dispatched 10,000 national guard troops to the border and hundreds more soldiers to Sinaloa state, a major hub of fentanyl trafficking where a cartel war has caused turmoil for months.
“Every day there have been arrests and seizures,” Omar Harfuch, the Mexican security minister, said at a recent news conference after returning from several days in Sinaloa. The detentions have led to “a constant weakening” of the cartel, he said.
The country’s law enforcement seized nearly as much fentanyl in the last five months as it did in the previous year. Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration says it has made nearly 900 arrests in Sinaloa alone since October.
Then, last week, the Mexican government said it had begun sending to the United States more than two dozen cartel operatives wanted by the American authorities. It was a clear signal to the Trump administration that Mexico was eager to fight the cartels, though Mr. Trump said on the same day that he was still not satisfied with the government’s efforts and that tariffs would go into effect on March 4.
“Criminal groups have not felt this level of pressure in such a long time,” said Jaime López, a security analyst based in Mexico City.
In interviews, cartel operatives agreed. Some said they were selling off property and firing unessential personnel to make up for lost income from the dent in the fentanyl trade. Others said they were investing money in advanced equipment to detect American government drones, which the United States flew into Mexico during the Biden and Obama administrations as well.
Criminal organizations in Mexico have a long history of surviving efforts to dismantle them, or simply splintering off into new groups. But several operatives said that for the first time in years, they genuinely feared arrest or death at the hands of the authorities.
Experts noted that a decline in production in Culiacán wouldn’t necessarily affect the flow of fentanyl north, since the drug is easy to make and the cartel can move its labs elsewhere. And it isn’t clear how long any disruption in Culiacán would last. Cooks and experts said they expected the cartel would restart labs in the city if the pressure subsided or the group needed an influx of cash.
But the crackdown has had an immediate impact, they said, and some cited the newfound pressure by Mr. Trump.
“Trump established a deadline, and we are seeing the results of everything we could have seen in years being done in a month,” Mr. López said. “The government is sending a message that when it really wants to, it can exert that kind of pressure.”
But even before tariff threats intensified, Ms. Sheinbaum had showed her willingness to take on the cartels as soon as she took office on October 1.
Her predecessor and political ally, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had pursued a strategy he called “hugs not bullets,” focusing on the root causes of crime and generally avoiding violent confrontations with criminals.
While she pledged allegiance to her mentor’s vision, Ms. Sheinbaum made headlines with a rash of battles between soldiers and cartel gunmen that left dozens dead earlier in her presidency.
Cartel members said they were making their own preparations for the heightened pressure under Mr. Trump. American officials say the United States has recently begun expanding drone flights into Mexico to detect drug labs, and last week the administration designated several cartels as terrorist organizations.
In interviews, cartel operatives said they were importing scanners to detect drones and hiring more people with experience operating and tracking such aircraft. They also said they had increased arms shipments from the United States, the source of most of the illegal weapons used by criminals in Mexico.
Inside the Trump administration, there is still some division over whether the United States should take unilateral military action inside Mexico against the cartels, or whether it should work more closely with the Mexican government in combating the drug trade.
Mexico’s cartels are known for amassing military-grade weapons, including I.E.D.s and land mines, yet the operatives acknowledged in interviews that they could scarcely compete with the American military’s arsenal. Even so, one high-level operative said the cartel would be prepared to respond if raids or strikes were carried out.
“If a helicopter comes here and soldiers drop out, 20 or 30 of them,” the operative said, “there’s no way we’d just sit here with our arms crossed.”
One cartel fentanyl cook, speaking from jail, said he was actually in favor of stepped up enforcement by the Mexican government, because he believed that curbing cartel violence could prevent the “deaths of innocents.”
Last week, Mexican forces arrested two big players within the Sinaloa Cartel who were close associates of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, the most powerful son of the drug lord known as El Chapo. After news of the captures spread, the Mexican military deployed a surge of soldiers throughout the city, setting up checkpoints and blocking off entire blocks.
Despite the arrests, the violence in Culiacán keeps claiming lives. On a recent Wednesday morning, the body of a man appeared face down in the middle of a street at a busy intersection, his hands tied and blood pouring from his head.
The next day, a different man’s body was found in a residential neighborhood nearby, with his feet bound and a plastic bag over his head. Officials at the scene said it appeared the victim had been shot dead on the spot.
Ms. Sheinbaum has defended her record on fighting the cartels and hit back hard against the Trump White House’s accusation that the Mexican government has “an intolerable alliance” with drug traffickers.
“We are combating organized crime groups, there can be no doubt about this,” she said at a news conference last month, adding: “We are going after organized crime.”
But few dispute that corruption is rampant in Mexico. The last major crackdown on organized crime was led by a security chief who was later convicted in U.S. federal court of taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Cartel members said the only reason the government hadn’t really fought them up until recently was because they’d bought off enough officials. One cartel cell leader said he doubted that this new effort would seriously damage the cartel because the group could ensure its survival by bribing key officials.
“There are always weak points,” he said, “there are always loose ends we can get to.”
When asked how it feels to be labeled terrorists, the cartel operatives responses ranged from apathetic to indignant.
The fentanyl cook in jail argued that the real terrorists were the users in the United States whose insatiable appetite for the drug fuels the trade. The two other young cooks agreed that the worst actors were north of the border: the arms dealers who turn a huge profit smuggling weapons into Mexico that kill so many people.
The high-level operative said he considered himself a businessman, not a terrorist.
“We talk about supply and demand,” he said, “not AK-47s, much less bombing Times Square.”
Even if the government bombs every drug lab in Mexico, he said, it won’t make Americans less dependent on the drug, which is one of the most addictive synthetic opioids available. He said that, with the right ingredients, fentanyl can be synthesized almost anywhere — in tiny kitchens or rudimentary mountain labs — and that as long as Americans want fentanyl, it will get made.
“Demand will never end, the product is still being consumed.” the operative said. “Addiction means demand never ends.”
