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At least 10 murders in Mexico appear linked to arrests of cartel leaders in U.S.
The murders of at least 10 people in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa appear to be linked to infighting in the dominant drug smuggling cartel there, confirming fears of repercussions from the July 25 detention of two top cartel leaders.
Last month, Joaquín Guzmán López, a capo from one faction of the Sinaloa cartel – the Chapitos or “Little Chapos,” the sons of imprisoned cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán – turned himself in to U.S. authorities. However, he allegedly abducted the leader of the rival faction, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, forcing him on to the same flight to El Paso and turning him in.
Mexican authorities are caught in the middle of the coming storm: they weren’t involved in the July 25 capture, but they are unwilling to use the opportunity to crack down on the Sinaloa cartel. The cartel is splintering, and what’s at stake is who will take over Zambada’s faction now that he is in a U.S. jail.
To paraphrase a famous Mexican corrido song, “Smuggling and Betrayal,” the mixture of the two always leads to murder.
Analysts say the government doesn’t want to get involved, because both sides in the Sinaloa cartel’s internal dispute have damaging information on officials they could release at any time. So they have limited themselves to increasingly desperate appeals to both sides not to fight among themselves.
On Monday, Sinaloa state Gov. Rubén Rocha acknowledged that four killings on Friday and six murders on Saturday were related to the dispute between warring factions of the cartel.
“These are related to the drug cartels … and they can be linked to the situation that arose after the detentions of July 25,” said Gov. Rocha. “What I want is peace, and I have to ask for that from whomever, from the violent ones.”
/ AP
That echoed a statement earlier in the day from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who acknowledged that two more killings were linked to the dispute.
“We don’t want the situation in Sinaloa to take a turn for the worse,” López Obrador said. “It has been stable as far as violence is concerned. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t violence, but there wasn’t confrontation, fighting between groups.”
“Public opinion bombs”
That kind of peace – where drug cartels go about their business of smuggling, dealing and extortion, but don’t cause too much violence – is something the president has praised in the past. Rooting out the cartels, he says, is a policy imposed upon Mexico in the past by the United States, and is something he does not agree with.
But Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said authorities seem loathe to intervene for another reason. Zambada, the captured drug lord, appears to be willing to use the damaging insider knowledge he has about corrupt Mexican politicians to pressure them.
Zambada has already shown he is willing to do that. In a jailhouse letter, Zambada gave a version of the killing of Hector Cuén – a political rival of Gov. Rocha who was killed the same day Zambada was kidnapped – and blamed it on the Chapitos faction.
Rocha and state prosecutors claimed Cuén was killed in a random, unrelated gas station robbery, and published security camera footage they said backed that up. But federal prosecutors later said the governor’s version didn’t add up and was probably a fake.
Zambada apparently has more information he can release if things get too hot in Sinaloa, and if his sons are prevented from taking over his part of the business: the names of politicians, police and military officers he has paid off.
“It seems to me that Mayo Zambada’s media strategy is focused on assuring an orderly transition in the organization he commands,” said Saucedo. “With these (media) hand grenades, these public opinion bombs, Zambada is trying to assure that federal authorities don’t try to interfere in the leadership succession in his organization.”
If that’s the goal – keep things orderly in Sinaloa so drug leadership can pass from one generation to another, and politicians don’t get publicly exposed for cooperating with drug cartels – then the most recent killings don’t bode well for the strategy.
At least two of the men killed last week – they were tortured, shot and found with their heads wrapped in duct tape – were close associates of Zambada.
The Chapitos and their cartel associates used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers,” according to an indictment released by the U.S. Justice Department.
IVAN MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images
But as usual, it’s hard to decipher which killing or act of violence was committed by which cartel faction, and why.
For example, somebody started to methodically destroy the lavish family tomb of a prominent Sinaloa cartel clan a couple of days after July 25 arrests of the two capos. They used bulldozers and backhoes to break open the walls of the mausoleum and dig up the crypts.
The clan whose grandfather’s and uncle’s bodies lay in the tomb – both corpses were stolen – had had violent brushes with both the Chapitos and Zambada factions in the past.
In his jailhouse letter, Zambada called on the governments of the United States and Mexico to be “transparent” about his abduction, subsequent disappearances, and death.
“I also call on the people of Sinaloa to use restraint and maintain peace in our State,” Zambada wrote. “Nothing can be solved by violence. We have been down that road before, and everyone loses.”
If there is any clear victim to be laid to rest in the conflict, it’s the idea that the Sinaloa cartel was ever a monolithic, hierarchal gang with one leader at the top. As the war of lavish tombs in Culiacán, the state capital, shows, the cartel has always been made up of a loose alliance of drug trafficking clans who try to one-up each other, even in death.
El Chapo, the Sinaloa cartel’s founder, is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado after being convicted in 2019 on charges including drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons-related offenses.
Last year, El Chapo sent an “SOS” message to Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, alleging that he has been subjected to “psychological torment” in prison.
Renad Atallah is an unlikely internet sensation: a 10-year-old chef, with a repertoire of simple recipes, cooking in war-torn Gaza. She has nearly a million followers on Instagram, who’ve witnessed her delight as she unpacks parcels of food aid.
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We interviewed Renad via satellite, though we were just 50 miles away, in Tel Aviv. [Israel doesn’t allow outside journalists into Gaza, except on brief trips with the country’s military.]
“There are a lot of dishes I’d like to cook, but the ingredients aren’t available in the market,” Renad told us. “Milk used to be easy to buy, but now it’s become very expensive.”
I asked, “How does it feel when so many people like your internet videos?”
“All the comments were positive,” she said. “When I’m feeling tired or sad and I want something to cheer me up, I read the comments.”
We sent a local camera crew to Renad’s home as she made Ful, a traditional Middle Eastern bean stew. Her older sister Noorhan says they never expected the videos to go viral. “Amazing food,” Noorhan said, who added that her sibling made her “very surprised!”
After more than a year of war, the Gaza Strip lies in ruins. Nearly everyone has been displaced from their homes. The United Nations says close to two million people are experiencing critical levels of hunger.
Hamada Shaqoura is another chef showing the outside world how Gazans are getting by, relying on food from aid packages, and cooking with a single gas burner in a tent.
Shaqoura also volunteers with the charity Watermelon Relief, which makes sweet treats for Gaza’s children.
In his videos online, Shaqoura always appears very serious. Asked why, he replied, “The situation does not call for smiling. What you see on screen will never show you how hard life is here.”
Before dawn one recent morning in Israel, we watched the UN’s World Food Program load nearly two dozen trucks with flour, headed across the border. The problem is not a lack of food; the problem is getting the food into the Gaza Strip, and into the hands of those who desperately need it.
The UN has repeatedly accused Israel of obstructing aid deliveries to Gaza. Israel’s government denies that, and claims that Hamas is hijacking aid.
“For all the actors that are on the ground, let the humanitarians do their work,” said Antoine Renard, the World Food Program’s director in the Palestinian territories.
I asked, “Some people might see these two chefs and think, well, they’re cooking, they have food.”
“They have food, but they don’t have the right food; they’re trying to accommodate with anything that they can find,” Renard said.
Even in our darkest hour, food can bring comfort. But for many in Gaza, there’s only the anxiety of not knowing where they’ll find their next meal.
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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano. Editor: Carol Ross.
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“Sunday Morning” 2024 “Food Issue” recipe index
Delicious menu suggestions from top chefs, cookbook authors, food writers, restaurateurs, and the editors of Food & Wine magazine.
It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
“Sunday Morning” 2024 “Food Issue” recipe index
Delicious menu suggestions from top chefs, cookbook authors, food writers, restaurateurs, and the editors of Food & Wine magazine.
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