Mexican officials briefly detained Ovidio Guzman, but as the cartel freed prisoners from a local jail and turned Culiacán into a war zone, they let him go

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT BELOW

The Mexican city of Culiacán descended into terror on Thursday, when soldiers and police launched a raid to capture one of the heirs to the throne of jailed Mexican kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. As state forces advanced into the city, the Sinaloa Cartel hit back with an array of military-style weapons — and won.

Distroscale

Mexican officials briefly detained Ovidio Guzman, one of Guzman’s sons who has emerged as a leading figure in the cartel after his father was arrested in 2016. But in response the cartel freed dozens of prisoners from a local jail, set numerous vehicles alight and turned Culiacán into a war zone. Soon, Mexican authorities released Guzman.

Security Minister Alfonso Durazo told Reuters Guzman was released to protect lives. Reports, which the government later denied, indicated the cartel took government soldiers hostage as a bargaining chip to secure his freedom. At least eight people were reported killed, including five suspected gang members, in the city of nearly 1 million people.

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Freeing one of Mexico’s most wanted drug traffickers — one who is indicted by the U.S. Justice Department — was a humiliation for Mexico’s government, and revealed the full of extent of the Sinaloa Cartel’s power. To add to this humiliation, the government was forced to back track after its initial tale of how the mayhem unfolded was widely ridiculed.

In a video statement Thursday, Mexican security officials initially described a scene in which agents, on a routine patrol, came under attack by armed men from a house in Culiacán. State forces had been unexpectedly overwhelmed, it was suggested.

Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images

Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP via Getty Images

“The personnel fired back and took control of the house, in which they found four occupants. During that action, one of them was identified as Ovidio Guzmán López,” Durazo said.

“This resulted in various groups of organized crime groups who surrounded the house with a greater firepower than that of the patrol. In addition, other groups carried out violent actions against residents in various parts of the city, creating panic.”

Photo by REUTERS/Jesus Bustamante

Some experts, however, quickly poured scorn on this version of events.

“My suspicion is that they went after him (Guzman) and they lost,” Eduardo Guerrero, a security analyst in Mexico City, told the New York Times.

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Then, on Friday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador admitted that the event had not been a random incident, but rather security forces had been on a raid — they were trying to capture Guzman after a judge issued a warrant for his arrest and extradition to the U.S.

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The plan was that, like his father, Ovidio Guzman would face justice in America (after a landmark Brooklyn trial this year, El Chapo is currently serving life without parole). This plan, though, unravelled when state forces were met with a cartel just as heavily armed as the Mexican troops. Lopez Obrador was asked who had taken the decision to free the gangster, and said it was his top security people, with his backing.

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“The officials who took this decision did well,” Lopez Obrador said, insisting the call had avoided slaughter. “We’re doing really well in our strategy. Capturing a criminal can’t be worth more than people’s lives.”

Lopez Obrador, who took office in December promising to pacify a country weary of more than a decade of gang violence, has backed away from an aggressive military-led strategy to defeat the cartels. He rejected criticism his government had acted weakly, hitting back Friday that the tactics of his predecessors had turned Mexico into a “graveyard.”

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Defence Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval, meanwhile, lamented that the bungled capture operation had been poorly carried out.

“It was done hastily, the consequences were not considered, the riskiest part wasn’t taken into account,” he said.

Security Minister Durazo admitted he and the military top brass were not aware ahead of time of the attempted capture, calling it a bureaucratic error.

What resulted was a level of carnage shocking even by recent standards in the troubled country.

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Within an hour of Guzman’s apparent capture on Thursday, images began flooding social media of mayhem on Culiacán’s streets.

Photo by REUTERS/Jesus Bustamante

Videos appeared to show heavily armed civilians firing machine guns mounted in pickup trucks. In other footage, a cartel man could be seen lying on the roadway, firing what appeared to be a .50 caliber machine gun on a tripod.

Another video on social media purported to show inmates running through the streets, forcing drivers out of their cars. Sinaloa public security director Cristóbal Castañeda told Milenio television that between 20 and 30 prisoners had escaped a local jail during the operation, though some had been recaptured.

“They’re freeing them,” a woman says in one video, as she watches the prisoners flee. “We can’t leave here.”

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Improvised roadblocks were constructed by the cartel, vehicles were set on fire, and some people sprinted through the streets, holding their children to make it from one building to another to avoid gunfire.

Audio clips — reportedly recordings of radio communications sent by the cartel to Mexican police — began circulating online in which gangsters were heard telling state forces to let go of Guzman, or else their families would be harmed.

The violence had erupted Thursday at around 3.30 p.m. local time and by 9 p.m., it was still going. Reuters and several Mexican news outlets soon reported that the wanted criminal had been released. As evening fell, government officials were warning residents not to venture into certain parts of the city.

Photo by REUTERS/Jesus Bustamante

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“In my 21 years of covering crime at the heart of drug world, this has been the worst shootout and the most horrible situation I have ever encountered,” Ernesto Martínez, a local crime reporter who witnessed the scenes, told the New York Times.

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He said he was reporting on a different shooting when he saw that an army vehicle had stopped a car full of gunmen. A shootout began between these two groups. Then, he said he saw a separate vehicle of masked men that began firing at the soldiers. A first shootout spanned 20 minutes; a second lasted four hours, he said.

Photo by REUTERS/Jesus Bustamante

“The sound of the bullets was so strong, I could almost smell the gunpowder,” he told the Times.

Culiacán in northwestern Mexico is the stronghold of the Sinaloa Cartel, where the organization has ample support and firepower — as demonstrated Thursday.

The cartel has remained the largest organized crime group in the country for nearly three decades and continues to be the most prominent cartel across major parts of the country. But its biggest rival, the New Generation Cartel of Jalisco, is growing fast and has been expanding its territory across Mexico, seeking to fill the void El Chapo left.

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Since the capture of El Chapo, the Sinaloa Cartel has been led primarily by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and El Chapo’s sons Jesús Alfredo Guzmán and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán.

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In February, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against two more of El Chapo’s sons, Ovidio and Joaquín Guzmán López for “knowingly, intentionally, and willfully” distributing drugs to be exported into the United States. They would have to be extradited to the United States to face trial on those charges.

Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP via Getty Images

The elder Guzman escaped from prison in Mexico twice, in 2001 and 2015. Under the previous administration, security forces captured him two times in Sinaloa, in 2014 and 2016.

During El Chapo’s trial in New York this year, prosecutors said the sons had played a role in facilitating their father’s 2015 escape, from a maximum-security prison in Almoloya, Mexico.

El Mayo has long remained an elusive figure who, unlike El Chapo, has remained largely out of the spotlight. There have been reported tensions between the leader and the two Guzmán sons in recent months.

Drugs continue to flow into the United States unabated as the Sinaloa cartel has ramped up its production of methamphetamines and fentanyl.

Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP via Getty Images

Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP via Getty Images

Gladys McCormick, a security analyst at Syracuse University, said in a statement to Reuters that Mexico resembled a nation in “the throes of war.”

“What is incontrovertible is that the Sinaloa Cartel won yesterday’s battle,” she said. “Not only did they get the government to release Ovidio, they demonstrated to the citizens of Culiacán as well as the rest of Mexico who is in control.”

Mexico’s 2019 murder tally is on track to surpass last year’s record total of more than 29,000.

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— With files from the New York Times and National Post

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Major incidents in Mexico’s drug wars (via Reuters):

The incident surrounding the arrest of Ovidio Guzman was on a scale rarely seen in Mexico’s long drug wars and raised pressure on President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office last December promising to pacify the country.

Here are some of the most significant moments in more than a decade of Mexico’s drug wars:

* Sept 15, 2008 – Suspected members of the Zetas drug gang tossed grenades into a crowd celebrating Mexico’s independence day in the western city of Morelia, killing eight people and wounding more than 100.

* Jan 31, 2010 – Suspected cartel assailants killed 13 high school students and two adults at a party in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.

* Aug 25, 2011 – Masked gunmen torch a casino in the northern city of Monterrey, killing 52 people, most of them women. Then President Felipe Calderon declared three days of mourning and demanded a crackdown on drugs in the United States, the main market for Mexican narcotics.

* May 4, 2012 – The bodies of nine people were found hanging from a bridge and 14 others found dismembered in the border city of Nuevo Laredo.

* Oct. 7, 2012 – Mexican Marines killed the leader of the Zetas drug gang, Heriberto “The Executioner” Lazcano, in the northern state of Coahuila. His body was snatched from the funeral home by armed men.

* Sept. 26, 2014 – Forty-three student teachers disappeared after they were abducted in the state of Guerrero by police who the government said handed them over to a gang involved in heroin trafficking. Authorities definitively identified the remains of only one of them, and the incident has never been fully explained.

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* April 6, 2015 – Fifteen police were killed in an ambush in Jalisco state during weeks of violence that claimed the lives of more than two dozen officers and culminated in the shooting down of an army helicopter. Authorities blamed the violence on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), formerly underlings in El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel who turned on their masters.

* July 11, 2015 – El Chapo, Mexico’s most notorious drug lord, broke out of a high-security prison for the second time, escaping in a tunnel built right under his cell. He had previously bribed his way out of prison during an escape in 2001.

* Jan 8, 2016 – Security forces recaptured El Chapo in a pre-dawn shootout and chase through drains in his native Sinaloa.

* Sept 6, 2018 – Prosecutors said the bodies of at least 166 people had been found in the state of Veracruz, an important trafficking route for drug gangs moving narcotics toward the U.S. border.

* Oct. 14, 2019 – Suspected CJNG hitmen shot dead more than a dozen police in an ambush in Michoacan, in one of the bloodiest attacks on security forces since President Lopez Obrador took office in late 2018. The next day, soldiers killed 14 suspected gang members in neighbouring Guerrero. (Compiled by Alistair Bell, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)