“The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán.”
drug cartels
The Cartel Next Door
Inside the $1 million plot to execute—in broad daylight—the attorney of a Mexican cartel boss, and the subsequent investigation, which ranged from south of the border to Florida and Texas, to solve the murder.
Exploiting Mexico’s Indigenous People to Get the West Its Drugs
How Mexican drug cartels prey on the indigenous Tarahumara people, using endurance runners to run drugs across the border.
Something Unspeakable Happened in Allende, Mexico
Seven years after a vicious drug cartel massacre, residents are still looking for answers about the fates of their loved ones.
The World’s Most Notorious Drug Trafficker Breaks Out of Prison (Again)
Drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo,” escaped from a maximum-security prison in Mexico this weekend. It’s his second prison escape. “Anyone who makes a mile-long tunnel from his cell and escapes on a motorcycle is necessarily in collusion with the government,” a government official told Patrick Radden Keefe in his New Yorker […]
What It’s Like to Be an FBI Agent in a Border Town
Lawson moved out of his extended-stay hotel and into a house in Laredo, not far from some of the Treviños’ extended family, he says. He came to appreciate the camaraderie of working the border, a destination so low on agents’ wish lists that the bureau lets them transfer wherever they want after five years. Most of the […]
How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business: Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying […]