The Reign of ‘El Chapo’ Is Over but the Bodies Keep Piling Up

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A man’s body, hands bound and covered by a blue tarp, lies by the side of the road where it had been dumped minutes earlier. A blood-soaked sign says he was a “Chapito,” a member of one of two criminal factions fighting for control of this city, the cradle of Mexico’s transnational narcotics industry.Such macabre finds are common in Culiacán—a city of luxury car dealerships, fancy malls, and makeshift fentanyl labs—marking the shifting lines of nearly two years of relentless civil war between the two main clans of the pioneering Sinaloa cartel.It’s a war that the Chapitos, the heirs of Mexican drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appear to be losing, casting doubt on the future of a dynasty that once ruled vast swaths of the criminal underworld on its way to becoming the world’s top producer and smuggler of fentanyl.The latest blow came last month with the U.S.

indictment of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha and nine other current and former state and local officials, charging them with taking bribes from the Chapitos to protect their criminal enterprise.On one level, the fall of the Guzmáns marks a signal victory for Washington, which pursued them across four presidential administrations.

Since his 2019 conviction in a Brooklyn federal court, El Chapo has been serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a Supermax prison high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.On another, it has cost Mexico dearly. The fight among criminal pretenders to Guzmán’s throne has unfolded like a Shakespearean drama, sparked by betrayal, ambition, greed—and rivers of blood.

Since 2024, when one of Guzmán’s sons kidnapped the veteran head of a rival faction and handed him over to U.S. authorities, some 3,000 people, gunmen