There was tension around one of the first planes to land in Culiacan this Friday. The state was in complete isolation for about 24 hours, and the airport had seen no one after closing its doors to organized crime shootings at a Mexican Army plane and an Aeroméxico commercial flight. A dozen shootings and a dozen drug blockades had scared people enough that nobody wanted to travel to Sinaloa that Friday morning. Neither the airlines nor the passengers who had their itinerary ready. The Volaris flight, one of the few companies to make the trip, did so with two-thirds of the plane empty, just a few locals wanting to go home and a handful of journalists. “Let’s go, but with a lot of fear we just want to lock ourselves in with the family,” says Doña Ana – fictitious name for security reasons – who lives in the city with her son.
From Thursday morning to Friday morning, Sinaloa spent 24 hours under fire. The first signs that war had broken out again came around 4 a.m. Thursday from a ranch in the town of Jesús María, 45 kilometers from the state capital of Culiacan. They had captured one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s darlings, Ovidio Guzmán, of the Los Chapitos faction. As in 2019, when security forces first arrested Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán’s son, the organized crime response was to paralyze the unit for the whole day pending their release. This time they failed, and Black Thursday, the second in the state’s recent history, left 29 dead, 35 injured and 21 incarcerated.
Culiacan was the epicenter of a fictional return to normal this Friday. Barely a few shops were open and a few cars were navigating the streets while the still-hot remains of the charred structures of trucks and cars could be seen to one side. Remnants of campfires that startled an entire town, which hours later emanated the smell of gasoline mixed with burned oil. A few police officers guarded hospitals where organized crime tried to kidnap doctors Thursday who were hiding out to treat wounded criminals. Another handful of soldiers guarded the forensic medical service so the cartel couldn’t take away the bodies of the fallen members. A few kilometers from there continued the remains of cars in the hands of armed men, but in much smaller numbers, something daily for the population of one of the most dangerous states in Mexico.
The fictitious revival did not reach the town of Jesús María, 45 kilometers from the state capital. Few dare to visit this drug trafficking corner where Ovidio Guzmán grew up on any given day. The journalist América Armenta did this the day after the outbreak of war. It was, as he puts it, one of the “hardest” things he’s had to do in his career. There he found a city besieged by the armed forces, with no communications, electricity or food.
Armenta narrates images worthy of a combat scenario. “The houses were riddled with gunshots, carpets with shell casings. The neighbors wanted us to know, ‘The authorities say everything is fine, but my neighbor has a stray bullet.’ If there was one thing these people were afraid of, it was fear.” Along the way, he found a dozen live grenades ready to be blown up and the bodies of two young men lying lifeless on a pile of rubble. In the background, already empty and with the doors wide open, is the Guzmán house. Where Thursday’s entire battle saw its beginning but not its end.
A cyclist rides past the remains of a charred car in the Tres Ríos sector of Culiacan Gladys Serrano
After the chaotic hours, the airport had few shops open and few visitors. Almost no military presence. Bryan Alonso, a Viva Aerobus employee, returned to work after the worst day of work of his life. Around 7 a.m. Thursday morning, he recalls, gunshots began to be heard at the airport gate. “They came from where the National Guard left off forever,” he says. People started screaming and ran to hide. No one understood what was going on, organized crime had never gone this far.
Alonso says many passengers took shelter behind the airline’s counter along with workers. Faced with the impossibility of entering the facilities, the criminals surrounded the place and began shooting at the planes from a net surrounding the runways, says another airport worker. They wanted to prevent security forces from taking Guzman away from Sinaloa.
The failure to stop the military operation sparked revenge. Organized crime took to the streets with all their might. Dozens of criminals spent hours subjugating a population used to living with the organized crime monster. But what happened that Thursday was more than the violence they see every day: it was the drug dealer’s fury in all its glory. They blocked at least 19 points across the state, and at those checkpoints, they robbed citizens of their cars and journalists of their cell phones at gunpoint. They threatened everyone they met, set fire to dozens of vehicles and shot the police officers they met on the street.
Despite people’s fear of going out, dozens of people contacted prosecutors this Friday to report the theft of their car. Cecilia Machado was one of those affected. The 29-year-old woman, an employee of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), was about to get milk for her daughter when a van cut her off and two men, around 25, got out, guns in hand. They took her vehicle and left her with nothing. “The boy said to me, ‘It’s part of my job’,” he said at the prosecutor’s gate, “I was very nervous, like I didn’t know how to steal.” A couple who were there received her at home so that she would not be left defenseless on the street. “It’s very ugly, it’s scary going out, I didn’t want to have my baby but I was scared,” she says, her voice broken.
A man sitting on the sidewalk at the prosecutor’s office says they grabbed a truck from his boss who was driving on the highway to Badiraguato, the birthplace of Guzmán’s father, one of the founders of the Sinaloa cartel. At around 5:40 a.m., a squad of ten armed men ambushed him in an attempt to steal his vehicle. “You’re scared of going out on the street and not knowing what’s coming,” says the driver, who doesn’t want to give his name out of fear. Hours later, they found the truck “completely burned” just meters from where it was taken from them. That Friday, he had to leave his home to report the robbery, despite panicking to look outside. Rumors of a greater revenge have not stopped circulating. “It’s scary, but you have to push yourself in life, you don’t have anything at home anymore.”
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