The Tijuana Cartel or Arellano-Félix-Cartel is a Mexican drug cartel based in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Founded by the Arellano-Félix family, the cartel once was described as "one of the biggest and most violent criminal groups in Mexico". However, since the 2006 Sinaloa Cartel incursion in Baja California and the fall of the Arellano-Félix brothers, the Tijuana Cartel has been reduced to a few cells. In 2016, the organization became known as Cartel Tijuana Nueva Generación and began to align itself under the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, along with Beltrán Leyva Organization (BLO) to create an anti-Sinaloa alliance, in which the Jalisco New Generation Cartel heads. This alliance has since dwindled as the Tijuana, Jalisco New Generation, and Sinaloa cartels all now battle each other for trafficking influence in the city of Tijuana and the region of Baja California.
Sonoyta, Sonora is a town in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. It stands on the U.S.-Mexico border, facing Lukeville, Arizona, in the United States. It is the municipal seat of the municipality of Plutarco Elías Calles.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is a U.S. national monument and UNESCO biosphere reserve located in extreme southern Arizona that shares a border with the Mexican state of Sonora. The park is the only place in the United States where the senita and organ pipe cactus grow wild. Along with this species, many other types of cacti and other desert flora native to the Yuma Desert section of the Sonoran Desert region grow in the park. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is 517 sq mi (1,340 km2) in size. In 1976 the monument was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, and in 1977 95% of Organ Pipe Cactus was declared a wilderness area.
Lukeville is a small unincorporated town on the Mexico–United States border in southern Pima County, Arizona, United States. It was named for World War I aviator Frank Luke, an Arizona native who was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, commonly known as "El Chapo", is a Mexican former drug lord and a former leader within the Sinaloa Cartel, an international crime syndicate. He is considered to have been one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world.
The Juárez Cartel, also known as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization, is a Mexican drug cartel based in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, across Mexico—U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. The cartel is one of several drug trafficking organizations that have been known to decapitate their rivals, mutilate their corpses and dump them in public places to instill fear not only into the general public but also into local law enforcement and their rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel. Its current known leader is Juan Pablo Ledezma. The Juárez Cartel has an armed wing known as La Línea, a Juárez street gang that usually performs the executions and is now the cartel’s most powerful and leading faction. It also uses the Barrio Azteca gang to attack its enemies.
The Mexican drug war is an ongoing asymmetric low-intensity conflict between the Mexican government and various drug trafficking syndicates. When the Mexican military began to intervene in 2006, the government's main objective was to reduce drug-related violence. The Mexican government has asserted that their primary focus is dismantling the cartels, and preventing drug trafficking demand along with American functionaries. Therefore, the conflict has been described as a Mexican theater of the global war on drugs, as led by the United States federal government.
The Mérida Initiative is a security cooperation agreement among the United States, the government of Mexico and the countries of Central America, with the declared aim of combating the threats of drug trafficking, transnational organized crime and money laundering. The assistance includes training, equipment and intelligence.
The Sinaloa Cartel, also known as the CDS, the Guzmán-Zambada Organization, the Pacific Cartel, the Federation and the Blood Alliance, is a large, international organized crime syndicate that specializes in illegal drug trafficking and money laundering. It was established in Mexico during the late 1980s as one of a various number of subordinate "plazas" operating under a predecessor organization known as the Guadalajara Cartel. It is currently headed by Ismael Zambada García and is based in the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa, with operations in many world regions but primarily in the Mexican states of Sinaloa, Baja California, Durango, Sonora, and Chihuahua. and presence in a number of other regions in Latin America as well as in cities across the U.S. The United States Intelligence Community generally considers the Sinaloa Cartel to be the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world, making it perhaps even more influential and capable than Pablo Escobar's infamous Medellín Cartel of Colombia was during its prime. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center and other sources within the U.S. the Sinaloa Cartel is primarily involved in the distribution of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl, cannabis and MDMA.
The timeline of some of the most relevant events in the Mexican drug war is set out below. Although violence between drug cartels had been occurring for three decades, the Mexican government held a generally passive stance regarding cartel violence through the 1980s and early 2000s.
Jaime Jorge Zapata was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent who was ambushed and murdered by the Mexican criminal group Los Zetas in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He was one of two agents who were ambushed in a part of the country that was increasingly under the influence of drug violence. Zapata's death was the second highest-profile killing of a U.S. agent in Mexico—the first one was Enrique Camarena, an undercover DEA agent who was tortured and murdered by the former Guadalajara Cartel.
The 2012 Nuevo Laredo massacres were a series of mass murder attacks between the allied Sinaloa Cartel and Gulf Cartel against Los Zetas in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Laredo, Texas. The drug-violence in Nuevo Laredo began back in 2003, when the city was controlled by the Gulf Cartel. Most media reports that write about the Mexican Drug War, however, point to 2006 as the start of the drug war. That year is a convenient historical marker because that's when Felipe Calderón took office and carried out an aggressive approach against the cartels. But authors like Ioan Grillo and Sylvia Longmire note that Mexico's drug war actually began at the end of Vicente Fox's administration in 2004, when the first major battle took place in Nuevo Laredo between the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas, who at that time worked as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel.
Los Ántrax is a large enforcer unit and hit squad for the Sinaloa Cartel, a major crime syndicate based in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. The group was led by the drug lords Jesús Peña, José Rodrigo Aréchiga Gamboa, René Velázquez Valenzuela, among others, and they are responsible for a number of homicides and for providing armed security services to Ismael El Mayo Zambada. The gang operates in the capital city of Culiacán, Sinaloa, where its members conduct homicides and violent attacks. Los Antrax is the Sinaloa Cartel's largest and deadliest enforcer unit.
Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza, commonly referred to by his alias El Macho Prieto, was a Mexican suspected drug lord and high-ranking leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a criminal group based in Sinaloa, Mexico. He worked as the cartel's assassins chief under the tutelage of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and as the regional leader of the cartel in the states of Baja California and Sonora. His base of operations was in Mexicali, where he coordinated marijuana and cocaine shipments through the Calexico–Mexicali border region. On 18 December 2013, Inzunza was killed in a shootout with Mexican authorities in the resort area of Puerto Peñasco, Sonora. Before the gunfight was over, several of his gunmen took the corpse of the drug lord with them.
Operation Coyote was a United States Department of Homeland Security 90-day effort to track and seize revenue generated by Mexican cartels in the human smuggling trade along the Mexico–United States border.
On 1 July 2010, members of two rival cartels clashed near the village of Sáric, in Mexico's northwestern state of Sonora, approximately 12 miles southeast of the little-used port of entry in Sasabe, Arizona. Local news media and officials in the Mexican government reported that the violence was the result of an ambush, organized by a group aligned with the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel to stop a convoy of over 50 vehicles of the Sinaloa Cartel from entering Saric. The Beltrán-Leyva group took up positions on a hill along the road outside of Saric, and as the convoy approached, laid down a devastating barrage of fire into the convoy below. Shortly after the fighting ended, Mexican police and military arrived to find the bodies of 21 dead and several bullet-strewn vehicles, mostly SUVs. Nine men were taken into police custody, six of whom received wounds in the shootout.
Operation Blue Storm was a successful police investigation of an illegal marijuana smuggling ring operating in Arizona and Nebraska. During a lengthy investigation in 2012, police investigators uncovered links between the South Family Bloods street gang of Omaha, Nebraska, and the Sinaloa Cartel of northwestern Mexico, which was supplying South Family with illegal marijuana smuggled into and out of Arizona. The Nebraska investigation resulted in the indictment and conviction of 15 individuals, and the seizure of $60,000 in property, while the investigation in Arizona resulted in the indictment of 11 others, who, according to police, were directly linked to the Sinaloa Cartel. Police officials also announced that the illegal marijuana ring was responsible for smuggling 16,000 pounds of product into the United States, with a street value of approximately $7.75 million.
Operation Terminus was a 30-month investigation into a Sinaloa Cartel drug smuggling ring in Arizona, California and Indiana. Beginning sometime in 2012, Operation Terminus investigators seized $7.5 million in cash, 485 pounds of methamphetamine, 50 Kilograms of cocaine, 4.5 pounds of heroin and 37 guns, including assault rifles, sniper rifles, and various other small arms. 77 suspects were indicted, and an "extensive drug trafficking network" stretching from Sinaloa, to Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, was uncovered. Police officials have also reported that as result of the legalization of marijuana in some U.S. states, Mexican cartels are turning to more dangerous illegals drugs to make up for lost profits. A police spokesman in Tempe, Arizona, Lieutenant Mike Pooley commented on the situation: "They are plowing marijuana fields and planting opiates. It's killing our youths. It's an epidemic."
Operation Kruz Control was a twelve-month, multi-agency investigation of a drug trafficking organization in southern Arizona, between December 2012 and December 2013.
The Arizona borderlands are the geographic and cultural region north of the Arizona portion of the US-Mexico border. The area is unique in that it features both an international border and the Tohono O'oham sovereign nation along much of that border. Frequent and persistent topics of interest in the area include the presence of illegal immigration, the confluence of local, state, and national politics surrounding the border, conservation and sustainable living, and the presence of drug traffickers and paramilitary forces in the vicinity.
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