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he hotel room is cold, antiseptic, the only sound the gentle whisper of central air. I can’t go outside, my fixer tells me, or I might be kidnapped.
From my window high up in the most expensive hotel in town, I look down at a baseball field and a new luxury condominium complex under construction. I am in the center of Culiacán, and here, things feel safe, like I’m in an American suburb. It is quiet, almost eerily so. Because as soon as the sun goes down, the killing will begin.
A few days ago, they found a body stuffed in a white sack stained with blood, dropped off in front of a funeral home. Sometimes, the bodies are surrounded by pizza boxes. And sometimes they are surrounded by black ball caps. And everyone who lives in Culiacán knows what both of those things mean. They are insults to El Chapo and El Mayo, the two men who once ran the Sinaloa Cartel, and who are now incarcerated in the United States.
Since last September the city has been at war. On one side are the boys of El Chapo — Los Chapitos — and on the other, factions aligned with Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. When a military convoy rumbles past, no one seems to notice. When the wail of a siren pierces the air, they all — the deliveryman on the motorcycle, the priest with the Coke-bottle glasses, the mother shielding her child’s eyes — glance at the crumpled body on the street and hurriedly walk on, wary of the invisible lines drawn by a war that’s reshaping the most powerful drug cartel in the world. And it’s only been made worse by the second Trump administration.
When Trump threatened to impose tariffs, the Mexican government made the concession of not just sending troops to the border and to cities like Culiacán, but of also allowing the U.S. military to fly in Mexican airspace. At dusk, if you look up, you’ll see drones, rumored to be American, all over the city, collecting intelligence.
And that’s why I can’t go outside. The city is crawling with DEA agents, and my fixer, who is from Culiacán, says I look like one. I have no idea if any of this is true. But I have no choice except to wait in this room that smells of jasmine and sandalwood, in this hotel that serves octopus in bone marrow for breakfast, and to hear the reports he brings me of a city teetering on the brink.
His name is Miguel Ángel Vega. He’s spent more than a decade as a journalist and a fixer, working with reporters and documentary filmmakers from around the world, helping them stay safe in one of the most violent cities in the world. Kids he played soccer with are now connected to cartel bosses or have become sicarios. Many of his childhood friends are dead. For a fee, he can take me to cooks at fentanyl labs, to the mountains where they grow poppies, and to high-level members of the Sinaloa Cartel. What he offers is the ability to tell the story of the war for control of Culiacán from the inside.
I’ve been reporting on drug trafficking on both sides of the U.S. border for more than two decades. And yet, every time I step into this world, I feel like I understand it less, not more. Which is why I’ve always wanted to go to Culiacán, the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. Maybe here, with Miguel as my guide, I can get closer to the truth of how this business works, if such a truth even exists.
MIGUEL IS TALL and lanky and has a craggy face and a strong, square jaw. It is a face made for Hollywood. In another life, he was an actor, and then a film director. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, made a hit movie about a bank robbery, and then worked in Mexico City, this country’s hub for film and TV. His second movie bombed, and that led him back to journalism, and eventually to this work. He has a drawer full of screenplays and an unfinished novel. If he can save up, he hopes to make those movies, but for now, this is his livelihood, earning between $400 and $600 a day for his services. Sometimes film crews balk at this amount, say it’s too much. He retorts: “What is the price of your life? Because that’s what you’re paying me for. Not just the story, but that you will get out alive.”
Miguel grew up in Colonia Morelos, a working-class neighborhood in Culiacán. Back then, in the early 1980s, the drug trade was different, not as professionalized. The men who worked in the trade were known as gomeros, which means gum, because they grew poppy in the mountains and fields that surround the city, cooked it into heroin, and then moved it across the border. The violence of the narcos — the killings and kidnappings and disappearances — was remote from Miguel, as were the men celebrated in the narco corridos. Still, he quickly learned the line between his world and theirs, and what it offered. “Money, power, fancy cars, and beautiful women,” he remembers.
While many of his friends were drawn to that life, Miguel never was. He always liked books, and could sit reading for hours, lost in his imagination as his friends played baseball between the cars parked on his street. His favorite book was The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which tells the story of a pilot crash-landing in the Sahara Desert, where he meets a prince who grew up on an asteroid. “One sees clearly with the heart,” a fox tells the prince. “Anything essential is invisible to the eye.”
This lesson would stay with Miguel in his chosen professions, but it held particular resonance with him as a boy, because he often spent time with his grandmother, who was blind. “I was her eyes,” he says. “Like I used to describe things that I saw on the streets or things in the house to her.” He realized that his skills at observation and his ability to write could become a career, which led him to screenwriting and journalism. His beat was crime.
In those early years, he listened to the police scanner and learned that when the frequencies filled with chatter, something was happening. He memorized the codes police use: The number 41 meant murder. His life became hanging out with cops, hopping in his car and driving to a crime scene, sometimes arriving even before the police. “I learned firsthand what is death,” Miguel remembers. He is a deliberate speaker, his voice a low murmur. “And death, it’s something that I got to know very well.”
And then one day, in 2008, a documentary film crew from Los Angeles called. They heard he spoke English and wondered if he could take them around Culiacán, introduce them to some narcos, maybe take them to a crime scene or to see the shrine of Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of narco traffickers. It was the sort of itinerary that would become a cliché in coming years. He was shocked when they paid him $1,000 for four days of work. A few months later, word had spread about him, and another crew called for another documentary. One day while shooting, he looked at the call sheet, which lists production details — the name of the director, shooting locations, the daily schedule — and noticed his name on the crew list. Beside it was the word “fixer.”
“I go, like, ‘Oh, so this is what I am,’ ” Miguel recalls thinking. Other journalists looked down on this type of work. In fact, his editor at the paper in Culiacán, Ríodoce, asked him why he was wasting time taking gringos around. Whether from France or Italy or the U.S., they often got things wrong, or perpetuated negative stereotypes, either out of laziness or racism, or a combination of both, arriving so unprepared they were surprised Culiacán had ATM machines.
They could also be insulting, asking Miguel if he knew what B-roll was, or asking him to go to dangerous places, strapping on bulletproof vests and expecting him to go without one.
The cartels asked him for favors, too — could he run a load from Phoenix to New York? (He says he never has and never will.) Or tried to accommodate him with favors he didn’t want. Once, for example, when a cartel operative heard a French film crew was in town, Miguel was asked if they wanted to film an execution. Arrangements could be made. Miguel was so horrified he didn’t even pass along the request, on the off chance the crew would actually want to do it.
He didn’t love the work, but he couldn’t find anything that paid better, and if someone was going to help the world understand his hometown, it might as well be him. To his friends, he described his job as part driver, part translator, but also guide and location manager and bodyguard and security consultant.
Over time, he realized something: He was perfectly suited for the work. He didn’t just speak both English and Spanish, he knew the slang only locals use in Culiacán, so people immediately saw him as one of their own, someone they could trust. And while Culiacán is a decent-size city, with a Costco and car dealerships and gated communities of McMansions, it can also feel like a small town, or a rancho, where everyone knows everyone.
“I’m two degrees removed from anyone,” Miguel tells me. “If you want to see a crystal-meth lab, a poppy field, a marijuana field, I’m the one who can take you there. If you want to meet a sicario, or you want to see guns, I can open those doors.”
As a fixer, Miguel has arranged interviews with El Mayo’s inner circle. He’s sat at the dinner table with El Chapo’s mom. He’s talked his way out of hostage situations and brokered deals to keep his colleagues alive. He’s been in a shootout where two sicarios were killed. He barely made it out with his life.
“I’m the one who faces all the threats, but most of that happens before the crew arrives. I meet with people I don’t know in a dodgy bar. I explain the project. They ask who it’s for and then they research everyone. Then they come back and say, ‘These people seem to be legit. But if this is a setup, if these people are not journalists, if they are DEA or undercover, you’re the first one who is gone.’ ”
By gone, he means dead. When the shoot is over, or the reporters from The New York Times or National Geographic have their story, they go home; but Miguel stays here in Mexico, with his wife and children, where most of the narcos and the cops know his name and can easily find out where he lives. When he returns home to his apartment in Mexico City, he tries to slip back into his normal routine — meeting friends for drinks, taking his kids to the park, going to the movies with his wife — but no matter how hard he tries, his mind is never far from Culiacán, and where he might go next.
“It sounds insane what I do,” he says, “but basically my job is to open access and also to make sure everyone on the team will get in and out unscathed.”
He stays alive by remaining committed to a set of principles he’s established in his 15 years as a fixer: He is fundamentally neutral. He never takes sides among the warring cartels. He is transparent and upfront. When asking permission to do a story, or when brokering an interview, he lays out the objective of the reporters or film crew, and what the reporting will entail, including whether the crew will interview members of rival groups, the government, or the police. He holds nothing back.
And most important, he takes great pains to honor every promise he makes — especially when it comes to protecting sources’ identities.
While other fixers prefer to operate in the shadows and keep as low a profile as possible, Miguel believes his visibility, even his celebrity, acts as a sort of cloak of protection. He is known in Sinaloa as “the fixer,” meaning he doesn’t have to be vetted. He’s even written a Spanish-language memoir about his work, titled, appropriately, El Fixer. The cartels know who he is and what he does. “They know I’m a man of my word.”
The true danger, he says, lies not in being on camera or writing a book, but in making one wrong move — taking sides, exposing a source, or accidentally bringing in someone undercover. That’s why he vets every member of a visiting crew and will shut down a production or reporting the minute the cartel asks him to, no matter how upset it may make those who have hired him. “My life is on the line every single day,” he says. “So I have to be extra careful, every time.”
I HAVE BEEN TOLD the ground rules. We will not go out at night. This is Miguel’s most basic rule when things are tense, when the cartels are at war, as they are now. Every time he breaks this rule, he regrets it.
When we arrive at a location, we will not linger by our car. We will get out, head to the interview, get back in the car, go back to the hotel. We will keep a low profile.
If something goes wrong, we will not panic. We will not resist if a gunman sticks us up. We will give our wallets. If we are kidnapped, if we don’t check back in at the hotel, calls will be made: to the press, to the military, to the police, to powerful people in Mexico City, to the U.S. Consulate. No one wants to kill a gringo journalist. It will only bring more heat.
Regardless, he will get us out, as he has done before. And no matter what happens, we will stay together and stay calm. There is nowhere to run, after all. The cartel clocked me from the moment I touched down at the airport, Miguel reminds me, and their hawks, or halcones, have been watching me ever since. They may work at the hotel, or behind the bar, mixing my mojito, or at the stoplight, washing the windshield while we wait for the light to change green.
And if something goes really, really wrong, Miguel and I will head directly to the airport and take the next flight out.
It is morning, and we are on the highway headed out of town in a convoy of military and police vehicles. We are traveling with a group of mothers in a white van ahead of us. They are looking for their sons, who have disappeared, and have arranged for a police escort because the cartel doesn’t want us going where we’re going.
The escort might as well be for show, though. If it provides any security at all, it is a false sense of security. “The cartel brought the military to its knees,” Miguel says. He’s talking about 2019, when the military swept in to Culiacán to arrest El Chapo’s son Ovidio. Once they had him in custody, the Chapitos blocked streets, set buses on fire, took hostages, and began shooting cops and soldiers. They radioed to the commanders of the operation that they were outside Sinaloa’s military base and would begin killing soldiers if they didn’t release Ovidio and retreat. And after that, they would start killing the wives and children of the soldiers. The standoff lasted for hours, but eventually, at the request of then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the military released Ovidio and left town.
Miguel looks out the window. “If they can kill soldiers, they own this city.”
Today he is dressed in all black, with a gray baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. It is the hat of the hometown team, Los Tomateros. Other than drugs, and baseball, Culiacán is known for its tomatoes. At one point, it produced more of them than any other city in Mexico.
Not far from a city landfill, the convoy pulls off the highway and enters a rutted dirt road, hidden from view by the branches of weeping willows. Vultures circle above in big loops. I tell Miguel I can see why this could be a perfect place to dump a body.
“Anywhere is a dumping ground,” he explains, as if to say, there is nothing special about this place.
We are here because one of the mothers in our convoy got a tip, Miguel says. The tip may have been delivered in a note, and the note may have gone something like this: “If you go to La Pitahayita, you’re gonna find a road, an open road to your left, and then like 100 meters down that road there is a dump where you can search for bodies. We left dead bodies there.”
Sinaloa sits on the Pacific Ocean, and just two and a half hours away is Mazatlán, where the cartels launder their money in gaudy hotels and nightclubs. But here, the landscape is dry, austere, spectral. The trees have no leaves. If I were to drop a match, the ground would catch fire, and fire would consume everything in this field of dead leaves and weeds. Once, a farmer grazed cattle here, or grew corn, but now the fields are barren and lifeless.
I look up and see the plastic head of a doll perched atop a fence post, blackened by soot. The mothers, who have come with shovels and pick axes, think this may be a sign and begin digging.
I ask Miguel how often they come out to killing fields like this one, searching for their sons.
“Maybe three times a week?” he says. He isn’t sure.
Their sons, they know, are most likely dead. To say they are “disappeared” is to hold on to some kind of hope. It is the same reason they are wearing T-shirts with photos of their sons screen-printed on the front, as if their boys are simply missing, and not gone forever.
They were probably connected, Miguel says, meaning they worked for the cartel, or a faction of it, the Chapitos or the Mayitos or some other cell no one has ever heard of. Maybe they were sicarios or drug mules. Maybe they ran loads across the border. And then they made a mistake. They said something they shouldn’t have said. They didn’t pay a debt. They lost a load. Or maybe they didn’t make a mistake at all. They killed someone on orders and then were killed on orders from someone else. These are young men in their late teens and early twenties, from neighborhoods like the one Miguel grew up in. These are the casualties of the war for Culiacán.
The mothers work dutifully, spending no more than a few minutes at each spot, hacking away at the hard desert soil. They look for some sign, a piece of clothing, a flip-flop, a charred bit of trash. I ask Miguel why they don’t dig deeper if they think there’s something there. He shrugs. If a body is here, whoever buried it didn’t bother digging deep, because there’s no fear of getting caught.
They find the burned body of an animal, and Miguel explains that animals are often burned to cover the stench of death. It is a good clue, but after a few minutes the mothers stop digging and move to another spot.
I stop one of them. She asks me not to use her name because she is afraid of the cartels. The other mothers have covered their faces to not be identified. She tells me she has been leading trips like this for four years. She has found more than 100 bodies. But she still has not found the body of her son.
I look at my notes later. Did she say 100 bodies, or 500? The numbers are incomprehensible. I ask Miguel. He doesn’t know. Who can keep track of all the killing, all the bodies? Nearly 2,000 disappeared since last September just in Sinaloa, according to the official tally.
I later ask how he makes sense of all of this. How does he distinguish between the official numbers given by the government and the things he learns out here, where bodies are found and the killing is done?
“To me, they’re almost the same. One of them is official, and the other, it’s the criminal. But they both have agendas,” he says.
For example, before El Chapo’s capture in 2016, both the Mexican government and the DEA called El Chapo the head of the Sinaloa Cartel. But Miguel says they knew this wasn’t true. The Sinaloa Cartel has never been that regimented. It has always existed as a conglomeration of interlocking cells.
The DEA and the Mexican government knew that El Mayo Zambada ran his own faction and didn’t answer to El Chapo, Miguel explains, but no one said this. The narrative of one man in charge was cleaner.
“The truth is, in Culiacán, we have, like, 20 El Chapos,” Miguel says. “Very powerful people with a lot of money. And they are untouchable. No one ever mentions them or talks about them. They are white-collar people.”
When he asked sicarios who they worked for, they wouldn’t say El Mayo or El Chapo, they would simply say the Sinaloa Cartel, to protect their bosses. It became a global trademark and offered protection for everyone to obscure who they work for, where the money comes from, and who is really in charge.
“A lot of times, with criminal sources, there is no way to verify what they are telling you,” Miguel says. “The problem is the government does the same thing.”
I ask him who he fears more. He doesn’t hesitate.
“The government,” he says.
He looks out at the field, where the mothers continue digging in the dirt. Today, they won’t find any of their sons.
IN THE YEARS WHEN El Chapo and El Mayo ruled the Sinaloa Cartel, peace reigned in Culiacán. Miguel’s job was much easier then. He could take camera crews to the shrine of Jesús Malverde. He could set up interviews with sicarios without a problem, meet with drug mules, visit a fentanyl lab.
But last August, everything changed. El Mayo arrived at a meeting that one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, had brokered with Sinaloa politicians, including the former mayor of Culiacán and the governor of Sinaloa. Far less flashy than El Chapo, El Mayo had long been considered the Sinaloa Cartel’s best strategist and negotiator — essentially the brains behind the operation. He was also the suspected architect of sprawling networks of corruption that had infiltrated nearly every level of government in Mexico.
El Mayo, who was 76 at the time, was led into a room and knocked down. A hood was placed over his head, according to a letter he later wrote from prison. He was then put in the back of a pickup truck and taken to a landing strip, where he was forced onto a private jet headed for the United States. He had been double-crossed by Guzmán López, who was also on the plane and had been arranging his surrender for some time.
To this day, no one is quite sure what Guzmán López’s end game was, but the speculation is that by delivering El Mayo he could leverage a better sentence for himself.
Regardless of Guzmán López’s motives, the capture of El Mayo set off a war in Culiacán. Suddenly, the rules of engagement that had long imposed order on the city were no more. Under El Chapo and El Mayo, those not involved in the drug game were off-limits, but now, the only rule was mayhem: carjackings, kidnappings, schoolchildren gunned down in the crossfire between the Chapitos and the Mayitos.
The city was carved up like a Risk board: Downtown and most of the city belonged to the Chapitos. A small sliver and the outskirts on the southern end of town belonged to the Mayitos. The most dangerous areas were the spaces in between.
Then came Donald Trump and his threats of tariffs. In response, the new Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, sent 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to the border and roughly 13,000 soldiers to Sinaloa.
That may be a precursor for what’s next. Trump has long yearned to unleash the U.S. military on the cartels, and he seemingly took a first step in February, when he declared the Sinaloa Cartel and other Mexican drug cartels terrorist organizations.
Doing so gives him legal pretext to invade Mexico, an idea that would’ve sounded insane during any previous administration, but under Trump, anything seems possible. As Rolling Stone has previously reported, Trump administration officials have considered everything from sending in special-ops soldiers to assassinate cartel leaders to using drones or other military aircraft to conduct air strikes on cartel infrastructure and drug labs.
This heightened tension had made Miguel’s sources in the underworld even more jumpy than usual. “The cartels are freaking out,” he tells me.
This evening, we’re set to meet with two low-level sicarios, who can provide us some up-to-date intel on the status of the war for the city. Miguel’s mood has darkened, though, as the day has gone on, and he seems increasingly reluctant to bring me along.
They first agreed to meet at a gas station, then a restaurant. And now they want to meet at a safe house in a sketchy part of the city. It is late afternoon, and Miguel isn’t sure if the meeting is going to happen. If it does, he will go alone first to meet them, and then if it is safe, come back and get me.
He leaves me at the hotel and disappears, out into the city, to work his contacts, to try to broker a meeting that may be falling apart.
I sit in the restaurant of the hotel, a gathering place for what seems like every meal of the city’s rich and powerful. A Catholic priest in a scarlet-colored shirt sits across from a broad-shouldered man wearing a cowboy hat. A woman heavily enhanced by plastic surgery is seated across the room. She carries a Chanel purse. Her boyfriend, or husband, or lover sits across from her, holding her hand, whispering something in her ear that makes her grin wickedly.
All of these people are narcos, somehow connected to the drug world. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Somehow the money touches everyone here, and everything. But I also wonder if this is actually true. Couldn’t they also be connected to a family with a large tomato plantation? Generational wealth passes through legitimate streams here, too.
It’s dark when Miguel calls. The meeting with the sicarios will not happen. It’s too dangerous, he explains. He sounds disappointed, like he has failed somehow.
I look out at the glittering lights of the city. The condo complex across the street is dark. The baseball field is covered in shadows. Everything is quiet, almost eerily so. In the morning, Miguel will call me and tell me they found another body.
ON MY LAST DAY in Culiacán, I go downstairs for breakfast and find Miguel in a quiet corner of the restaurant, typing furiously on his laptop. His notepad is sprawled open before him, with pages full of scribbles scattered across the table. I sit down and ask the waiter for coffee. Miguel does not look up or even acknowledge me. He is on deadline for his weekly column on narco violence in Ríodoce, where he’s now been working as a staff writer for a dozen years.
When he is finished, he looks up, a bit startled, as if he is just now realizing I am there. I ask him how much longer he thinks this war between the Chapitos and the Mayitos will last.
“At least six months, maybe more,” he says.
There are some in Sinaloa, and Mexico more broadly, who like what Trump is doing, he will later tell me, and other security consultants will confirm as much: There was a broad perception that López Obrador did little to confront the cartels. “He had this attitude that the drug war was all the fault of the U.S.,” says Victoria Dittmar, a Mexico City-based analyst with InSight Crime, a think tank and publication focused on organized crime. “But we have to acknowledge that Mexico has a role to play as well in stopping the flow of drugs.”
The unpredictability of Trump, the thinking goes, has put pressure on the Mexican government to crack down on cartels.
Miguel doesn’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but in the long run, he’s not sure what it will accomplish, either. The presence of the military in Culiacán has done nothing to quell the violence; if anything, it’s made the city more dangerous. People try to avoid going out after dark, and in a city where everything is touched by narco dollars, the economy is collapsing.
There is also a fear that the recent uptick in collaboration between the Mexican and U.S. militaries to share intel could backfire, especially if the U.S. military actually invades Mexico. “There’s a growing anti-American sentiment in Latin America due to the Trump administration,” Dittmar tells me. “If the U.S. actually violates Mexican sovereignty and invades, it will take a generation or more to regain trust, and then that flow of information stops.”
Regardless, the Sinaloa Cartel has never been weaker, and there is speculation that it will never be the same. What the Sinaloa Cartel offered at its apex was certainty and protection. That required massive amounts of money for transportation networks, for weapons, for hit men, and above all, for bribes — to cops and politicians and soldiers and border agents.
Without one umbrella cartel to pay a tax in exchange for protection, there are more cells, and the barrier for entry is lower, which means the lesser crimes El Chapo and El Mayo forbade in Culiacán — kidnappings, extortions — are here to stay until someone else rises up and restores order. Miguel is betting that someone won’t be the military.
But he doesn’t believe the stories of the demise of the Sinaloa Cartel, either, or that it is even in decline. It is simply reorganizing.
I came to Sinaloa hoping to get closer to the truth of how the drug business works, and hoping Miguel could take me there. But I realize now, sitting with him in this cafe, that the longer he’s been helping people like me chase the truth, the more elusive it has become. The official story told by official sources, the story we’ve been trained to trust, is often a distortion, or a downright fabrication. And the stereotypes that form our understanding of the drug trade in Mexico — corrupt cops, narcos who keep tigers as pets, sicarios who kill for fun — often fall apart under closer examination. Most narcos aren’t rich. Most of them don’t like killing. Very few, if any, own tigers. Mostly they are desperate people, simply trying to make a living, wishing there were some other way. Just like Miguel.
He suddenly gets up, shakes my hand, and tells me he has to go. A film crew from Italy has just arrived in Culiacán.
