Puerto Vallarta (PVDN) – Mexico’s drug trade is dominated by the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) cartels, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The cartels have a strong presence in strategic locations across the country, especially on the northern border, making them key players in drug trafficking.
In its National Drug Threat Assessment 2020, the DEA noted that the Sinaloa cartel, led by Los Chapitos, Ismael El Mayo Zambada, and Aureliano Guzmán, El Guano, controls drug trafficking in 15 of the country’s 32 states, primarily in the northwest.
Compared to the CJNG and other Mexican criminal organizations, the Sinaloa cartel has a stronger international presence, giving it an advantage in exporting and distributing wholesale quantities of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana to the US. According to the DEA, this has contributed to the US’s worst crisis due to synthetic opioid use.
The CJNG, led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho, is the fastest-growing criminal group in Mexico, according to the DEA. It has a significant presence in 23 states and controls the port of Manzanillo, Mexico’s main connection to Asia, where most of the chemical precursors for synthetic drug production come from.
The DEA attributes the CJNG’s rapid expansion to the group’s use of violence against the Mexican government and rival cartels. The CJNG is a poly-drug group, like most Mexican cartels, manufacturing and distributing large quantities of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine through various trafficking corridors in northern Mexico along the border with the US.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels also compete for maritime cocaine traffic from Guatemala and Peru, which are part of the routes of passage and origin, in alliance with local groups and producers of this drug. Mexican criminal organizations have territorial control in rural and border areas of both countries, using them to transfer cocaine shipments bound for the US.
According to reports from the Guatemalan and Peruvian armies delivered to the International Center of Investigation of Analysis against Maritime Drug Trafficking based in Colombia, the CJNG operates in northern Guatemala, while the Sinaloa cartel has influence in southern Guatemala, close to the Pacific coast. In the central region of Guatemala, both organizations have little influence, creating an area of dispute.
