Mexican drug cartel implicated in attacks
Police say the Arellano Félix organization was behind a massacre May 10 in the mountain town of La Ajoya, where 23 men in ski masks and camouflage uniforms turned Kalashnikovs on a Mother's Day party, gunning down 12 people, including four police officers, a 70-year-old woman and a 6-year-old girl.
The attack came less than two weeks after gunmen believed to be on the gang's payroll rounded up five ranchers in Bastantita, another lonely enclave in western Sinaloa state, drove them to a sun-scorched ravine and shot them.
Police and witnesses also have implicated the Arellano Félix gang in a recent attack that left eight people dead in Durangito de Alaya, also in the Sinaloa highlands.
"These are personal scores between drug traffickers that turned into bloody attacks and killed innocent men, women and children," said the commander of 45 police agents sent to protect La Ajoya after last month's attack. "They come looking for growers or smugglers but, in the end, they kill everyone."
The police commander uses the pseudonym Jaime Jiménez, for fear of retaliation. He was among investigators, drug experts and witnesses who described an increasingly violent turf war between the Arellano Félix gang and Ismael Zambada, a rival kingpin known as "El Mayo."
The Arellano Félixes control Tijuana, using the border city to smuggle tons of cocaine and marijuana into California and the Western United States. Zambada, who has been trying to challenge the Arellano Félixes' authority in Tijuana for almost a decade, heads a free-lance group of smugglers based in Mazatlán, a resort city on Sinaloa's Pacific coast.
But instead of shooting it out on the U.S. border, the gangs are battling in Sinaloa's sprawling Sierra Madre mountain range, where year-round sunshine and a lack of police make marijuana and poppies, the principal ingredient in heroin, the crops of choice.
The White House estimates that since 1998, Mexico has produced 9,480 tons of marijuana yearly, with a ton fetching $1.6 million on average when sold to wholesale distributors in the United States. Mexico's up-and-coming poppy industry annually produces up to 7 tons of heroin, with each ton worth more than $2.5 million across the border.
Authorities say more than 200 drug distributors operate in Sinaloa, many of them from families recruited to grow marijuana and poppies for the Arellano Félixes, Zambada or another drug gang. Peasants are also paid to float their yields out of the mountains on small canoes and motorboats, police say.
"The rural areas are where the fighting between drug organizations has been the worst," said Oscar Fidel González, Sinaloa's attorney general. "A small cell of drug smugglers associated with the Arellano Félix family has escalated years-old conflicts with other groups."
The Arellano Félix gang's Sinaloa attacks have come just as Mexico's most powerful drug gang seemed in disarray.
On Feb. 10, Ramón Arellano Félix, the gang's ruthless enforcer, was killed in Mazatlán by state police who U.S. authorities say were working for Zambada. A month later, authorities captured the head of the gang's day-to-day operations, Benjamín Arellano Félix, in central Puebla state.
Sensing an opportunity to take over Arellano Félix operations in Sinaloa, Zambada's deputies went on the attack, investigators say.
Within days of Ramón's death, gunmen shot and killed Abelardo Zatarain, a member of the family long accused of heading the Arellano Félix gang's Sinaloa forces. Men wielding machine guns also killed Zatarain's 80-year-old uncle.
The Arellano Félixes responded with three mass killings targeting peasants who grew or transported drugs for Zambada.
In addition to the mass killings, a farmer suspected of cultivating marijuana for Zambada and his adolescent son were found shot to death in the northern Sinaloa village of El Lota. Scrawled in blood on the man's shirt was: "Mayo, you're next."
Violence is nothing new in Sinaloa, the birthplace of Zambada, the Arellano Félix brothers and nearly every major Mexican drug lord.
Authorities reported more than 270 homicides in the first five months of this year in a state with just 2.5 million people. Last month, Gov. Juan Millán said 80 percent of those slayings were drug-related.
Caught in the middle are places like La Ajoya, 800 miles northwest of Mexico City, where the air is so humid you can almost smell a coastline that's more than three hours away by car.
On the streets, crosses mark where people were gunned down by drug gangs, and more than half of the town's 800 residents have fled since the Mother's Day attack. Similar shootings have turned seven nearby villages into ghost towns since 1996.
Many families that have stayed are those who have abandoned growing beans and tomatoes to work for the Arellano Félixes or Zambada, said Jiménez, the police commander.
"Everyone knows who the traffickers are, but we are afraid to arrest them," he said. "If we put someone in jail today, the gangs will use their influence to get him out on the street tomorrow. He will come looking for us the next day."
Because of the shootings and kidnappings, police officers guard every public event in La Ajoya.
"The violence has made us prisoners in our own town," said José María Manjarez, the local justice of the peace. "The narcos control Sinaloa. There is almost no room for anyone else."