Looking out on the spectacular mountain slopes that hide his marijuana field, a Mexican farmer says he will be able to sell his harvest provided the army doesn’t go on an eradication spree. A restaurant owner lets slip her fear of war while serving breakfast, but quickly assures herself the cartel will adjust.



“It feels like we are children left alone in the house by our father,” said Conrado Lugo, a record producer who sums up the mood in the state of Sinaloa, heartland of the drug cartel run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán until his arrest a week ago. “It is worrying, sure, but we are still in the house.”

Parading the world’s most wanted man for the cameras, authorities in Mexico and the US hailed a major victory in the war on drugs. That the arrest occurred in a blaze of publicity rather than gunfire was greeted as a surprisingly positive sign by many.

But a week on, from the Sierra Madre, where Chapo rose from a childhood of poverty, to the streets of US cities where his product made him millions, it is hard to find anyone sharing the authorities’ enthusiasm.

Residents carry on as if nothing significant has happened, between outbursts of concern for what might happen if they are wrong. “It is an uncomfortable calm,” said Javier Valdez, a prominent author on the “narco” world.

And while it may spell more problems in New York and Chicago – where cocaine bought by Chapo’s men in South America for $2,000 a kilo retails for $100,000, and is said to comprise more than half the market – even US agents who hunted him say nervous Sinaloans have little to fear.

“Chapo’s arrest will have no effect on drug trafficking,” said a former senior Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official under presidents Bush and Obama. “If you are making a car and suddenly 15 people on the production line die, it is going to take a while to train new people. But if the CEO dies, it is actually no big deal – the machine is going to continue.”

Valdez agreed: “The arrest is a serious blow to the organisation. It is not a mortal one. Everything else is still intact.”

The cartel’s integration into the local economy is evidenced across Sinaloa, from the smart cars parked outside humble rural homes to the commercial buzz in Culiacán, the state capital. All this boosts the sense that Chapo’s “federation” is too big to be allowed to fail.

“You don’t have to be involved in drug trafficking to depend on the money it brings into Sinaloa,” said a metal worker, who, like many in Sinaloa, will only talk if his name is withheld. “Almost everybody relies on the organisation in some way, and without it lots of people will have trouble putting food on their tables.”

‘El Chapo’ is transferred to a helicopter of the federal police. Photograph: Omar Franco Prez Reyes/Demotix Photograph: Omar Franco Prez Reyes/Demotix

Yet the hopes expressed by many that the cartel can carry on as before is also rooted in terror. Few forget the war unleashed when an alliance between Chapo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers broke down in 2008. Since Chapo won, gun battles still rattle the state but no longer last for hours. It has become rare, too, for children to come across headless corpses on their way to school.

“Chapo is a terrible man, but I think it was a mistake to arrest him,” said a retired salesman. “The politicians let his organisation grow and now it is the only thing that protects us from other cartels, like the Zetas, who are even worse.”

With this in mind, many await signs of a new leadership that can send the message to their rank-and-file and rivals alike that “no pasa nada” in Sinaloa. “If there seems to be a lack of continuity and outward signs of weakness, it would be like a wolf seeing a limping lamb,” said Bob Mazur, a former senior undercover DEA agent.

Most experts point to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longstanding major figure in a cartel that has always operated as a kind of alliance of major traffickers, to ensure a smooth leadership transition in the part of the organisation that Chapo controlled directly. “He and Chapo have been working together for 20 or 30 years,” said Sylvia Longmire, a former US military special agent who focused on trafficking. “They have a unique working relationship in that it hasn’t been plagued by betrayals like others in the narco world. They finish each other’s sentences – that’s how tight these guys are.”

However, “Mayo is 66-years-old, and allegedly in poor health,” said Alejandro Hope, a former senior officer in Cisen, Mexico’s version of the CIA. “The guy was recently talking about retirement. So he may contain some of the fallout, but he is not the future of the organisation.”

Still, those hopeful the federation will remain strong also cite questions about Chapo’s arrest itself. The capo was overpowered without a fight after navy special forces stormed a modest fourth-floor apartment in the resort city of Mazatlán, where he was sleeping with his young wife. Their twin baby daughters and a nanny were in an adjacent room and just one bodyguard was in the hall.

Authorities say Chapo fled to Mazatlán five days before, after narrowly escaping capture at one of his safe houses in Culiacán by fleeing into a tunnel below a bathtub that led into the city’s rainwater drains and, eventually, a getaway car. “It doesn’t make sense that he allowed himself to be taken so easily,” says an agricultural worker from Culiacán. “He must have made a deal.”

True or false, the notion of a deal helps bridge the gap between the mythology of the man who built a global empire and $1bn personal fortune trafficking marijuana, heroin and cocaine after escaping from a high-security jail 13 years ago, and the portly, middle-aged detainee with died hair they saw on TV being marched towards a Blackhawk, his head bowed.

Many in the US, where Chapo faces seven criminal indictments in several states, fear that deal or none, he may none the less be guaranteed protection against deportation. Aides to Obama moved swiftly last week to lower expectations of extradition, while regional law enforcement officials scrambled to stake their claims.

“I think we have the strongest case,” special agent Jack Riley, Chicago’s DEA boss, told reporters. “I fully intend for us to have him tried here.” After declaring that they wanted him, too, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn were promptly told to shut up by their bosses at the Justice Department in Washington.

Charges in Brooklyn alone allege that between 1990 and 2005, Chapo and his deputies conspired to import more than 120 tonnes of cocaine into the US. Chicago prosecutors detail how the cartel smuggled hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and heroin a time across the Mexican border using a panoply of methods such as “cargo aircraft, private aircraft, submarines and other submersible and semi-submersible vessels, container ships, go-fast boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor-trailers and automobiles.”

More than $15bn of the estimated $65bn in drugs bought by Americans each year are estimated to have been supplied ultimately by the Sinaloa cartel, and special agent Riley estimates that Chapo controlled as much as 80% of the market in his city.

The Americans crave the prospect of transforming Chapo into the biggest supergrass in its 40-year “war on drugs” in return for a reduced sentence, bringing an end to years of flimsy boasts of having seriously weakened the cartel by making arrests of figures who actually turned out to be low-level operatives, which Hope dismisses as “pure propaganda”.

Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman was formally named Chicago's ‘Public Enemy No 1’ last year. Photograph: M Spencer Green/AP Photograph: M. Spencer Green/AP

Records unearthed by the Guardian indicate that one such high-publicity operation, in which agents in Brooklyn found almost 200 kilograms of cocaine in a Brooklyn warehouse, much of it hidden in statues of the Virgin Mary, did not live up the DEA’s boasts to have “dismantled all levels of criminal activity” involved. Of eight people arrested at the East New York site in 2006, half were convicted of crimes and only one remains in jail.

“The standard statement is ‘this is dealing a tremendous blow to the organisation,’” said Longmire. “But you later find the majority of the people who have been rounded up are back on the street because there was not enough evidence and they were selling dime bags on the corner.”

Court records in Illinois detail how Pedro Flores, a 32-year-old who served with his twin brother Margarito as Chapo’s principal lieutenants in Chicago, helped DEA agents lure a string of dealers below him in the food chain to their arrests in the car parks of Holiday Inns, Outback Steakhouses and dollar stores, after he was turned into a star witness. About a dozen have been jailed, but officials know they must set their sights higher.

Two alleged senior Sinaloa traffickers, Vicente Zambada-Niebla and Alfredo Vasquez Hernandez, have in fact been extradited, and are in federal custody awaiting trial in Chicago. An attorney for Hernandez said this week that he intends to plead guilty in court next week, but stressed that his client had made no deal with prosecutors.

No one is particularly optimistic that their boss will follow them, however. “There is not a snowball’s chance in the Sonoran desert that Chapo will be handed to the US,” said George W Grayson, a professor and Mexico specialist at the centre for strategic and international studies. “He might spill the beans on the hundreds, maybe thousands, of military, police and political figures to whom he has given generous bribes over the years.”

Banners against extradition abounded at a boisterous march protesting the detention that burst into Culiacán’s centre on Wednesday night, accompanied by a brass band and young men throwing tamales into the jiggling crowd to shouts of “Viva El Chapo.”

The marchers may well find their wish granted. “Even if he gets sentenced to a Mexican prison, eventually he will take over that prison,” said the former senior DEA official. “He will have a laptop, it will turn into a hotel, and he will return to running the cartel from there. That is not something he has to build – it is something he already has.”