Mexico Says Drug Gangs are to Blame for Deaths Near Border
According to authorities in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, drug cartel groups are responsible for a series of murders that have occurred in an area along the U.S. border. At least 11 individuals have recently been slain around the town of Sonoyta, which borders Arizona.
As reported by The Associated Press, Ernesto Munro Palacios, the State Public Security Secretary, stated on Wednesday that the drug gangs were trying to control the area in order to run their illegal narcotics into the United States.
Although Munro did not say which groups were engaged in the deadly turf war, handwritten signs that had been hung up on footbridges this week in the state capital of Hermosillo supposedly name the gang leaders that ordered the murders. The groups involved are believed to be associated with the Sinaloa cartel, as most of the murdered individuals have been identified as coming from the state of Sinaloa.
Of course, it is not just the area around the U.S. Border where the Sinola cartel has made itself known.
Before his capture is February of last year, the Chicago office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had named the Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as the city’s Public Enemy No. 1. As reported in Fox News Latino, Dennis Wichern, a special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Chicago field division, explained the influence the cartel had in his city, saying: “Sinaloa Cartel traffickers sit on the top of the pile, and they feed down all the way to the street level dealers.”
As described in the article, in Chicago the biggest cash crop for the Sinaloa Cartel is heroin.
The 2014 arrest of Joaquín Guzmán was exalted by Mexican as well as U.S. authorities as one of the biggest blows against the drug trade made in decades.
But, as recently noted in the Guardian, a year after Guzmán's arrest and the business of the notorious cartel seems not to have changed much at all.
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