When I visited Cuba last week, the country looked like it had been hit by an immense natural disaster — a hurricane, say, or an earthquake — that had shaken it to the core. But the crisis ravaging the island is man-made: a US blockade on fuel and goods is hammering a nation with an already dysfunctional economy under a dictatorship.

At night, power-cuts unleash a black cloud that envelops vast swaths of the tropical Caribbean island; residents huddle in candle-lit homes away from the dark, threatening streets. By day, you can see mountains of rubbish clogging up corners of Havana: mosquitoes, potentially carrying disease, buzz around the waste, while desperate men and women leaf through old boxes and tins for food. Highways are eerily quiet: sporadic buses go by along with the odd bicycle and even horse-driven carts, while scattered motorists search to buy gasoline at exorbitant prices. Many people look stressed, upset, and visibly hungry as they fight to get through another day.

While government food handouts used to keep Cubans in decent health, despite extremely low salaries, shops now only have a fraction of the rations to give them. The rice, beans and pork they provide are keeping people alive — and so far preventing a full-on famine — but the population is facing malnutrition, with the UN human rights chief Volker Türk saying that the blockade is “directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable”. Even the public hospitals, long one of the Revolution’s key achievements, lack sufficient medicine and power.

On the seafront, I find a fisherman called Joaquín, 50, holding two fish he caught in a red plastic bucket. He also has a job as a TV repairman but says that has ground to a halt in the crisis. “The government is meant to provide us with [television] parts, but they haven’t got any. And there is no electricity most the time so who wants to fix their TV anyway,” he says. “This is rock bottom. I don’t care what happens now. It can’t get any worse.”

Cubans are exceptionally open and warm people. While many at first say they don’t talk politics, it often doesn’t take them long to get into it. I meet many Cubans who have government jobs but are also out hustling on the street, trying to buy and sell goods, to borrow and to scavenge, to get food for their family for that day. But the American blockade is squeezing them ever harder, with more foreign companies leaving the island, from French freight ships to Spanish hoteliers. Cubans try to withdraw their savings, but the banks only let them take out a few dollars worth each day. People form endless queues for small sums of cash. There are many other queues too: for rice rations, for medicine, for papers to get off the island.

Washington’s blockade is cruel and inhumane, and punishes the same poor people it purports to liberate. Yet America isn’t the only problem: Cuba suffers an authoritarian government whose proclaimed socialism is now a mere echo of the past. Billboards display revolutionary slogans and glorify guerrillas in the mountains in the Fifties, but this means little to most Cubans fighting for life’s basic needs in the 21st century. Meanwhile, a small clique of politicians and military officers cling to power for the spoils. Without Cuba’s revolutionary founding father Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, there is no charismatic strongman to lead the country.

How did Cuba reach this point? For decades, the Soviet Union provided the island with canned goods, resources and technology in return for sugar. However, after its fall in 1991, Cuba was hit by a major recession. It found a lifeline in tourism, with Europeans, Latin Americans, and Americans flocking to the island for its vibrant culture, beaches, and revolutionary chic — and in many cases for sex. In 2016, President Barack Obama encouraged this opening by visiting Havana, symbolizing a thaw in relations. But President Donald Trump refroze them in his first term. Then the tourist industry was clobbered by Covid and with the blockade it is now on the verge of collapse, with gigantic hotels almost empty.

“I just pray to make something in the day, to get one customer,” says Arienne, 50, a tour guide with thick black dreadlocks who shows people around the historic sites of Havana, sometimes with the help of a partner driving a classic Fifties Ford motorcar. As we walk down the narrow streets, the sounds of percussion pour out from a deteriorating colonial building and a dozen men and women chant and sway to a tropical rhythm. Even in its pain and hunger, Cuba’s spectacular music plays on.

Cuba has long endured US sanctions. Soon after Castro led his revolutionaries to seize Havana in 1959, Washington began a trade embargo, and Castro turned to embrace Moscow. But the blockade that Trump has erected this year is far more punishing. After US Delta Forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on 3 January (and killed most of his Cuban bodyguards), Venezuela ended its fuel supplies that had kept the lights on across Cuba. Since then, Trump has pressured other countries including Mexico not to send oil tankers to the island and seized boats at sea trying to bring fuel. The blockade is the key cause of the blackouts, since Cuba depends largely on oil for electricity, although the nation’s power grid is also in a terrible state. The fuel shortage has a knock-on effect across all parts of life: people struggle to get to work, trucks can’t collect garbage, meat and shrimp go rotten.

I travel to the satellite town of Alamar, where Russian engineers used to live. Soviet-style concrete blocks line a rocky Caribbean beach. The situation here appears even worse than in central Havana, with several people telling me they haven’t been able to travel to their jobs in the city. My driver is a friendly, light-skinned 55-year-old called Benjamín, who has a compact car that he converted to hold a diesel engine. This makes our driving around affordable as he can find diesel on the street for $4 per liter, while fully refined gasoline goes for $10 per liter. He tells me that some of the fuel he buys has been swiped from supplies allotted for government buses. Curiously, the Trump administration allows some oil to be sold from the United States into Cuba’s private sector, which then circulates on the island.

Trump has not been explicit about what Cuba can do to get the blockade lifted. In April, the Cuban government announced the release of more than 2,000 prisoners from its jails in an apparent bid to appease Washington. On Friday, Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel also announced new reforms to open up the state-run economy more to the market. But with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cubans in Miami, shaping policy, the White House appears to want nothing short of regime change. It could switch Cuba’s president like it did in Venezuela, or even occupy the island.

The Pentagon has assembled a major force in the Caribbean, including the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group, while the U.S. Justice Department indicted Fidel Castro’s brother (and former president), Raúl Castro, for ordering the shooting down of two American planes in 1996. At the age of 95, Raúl may not survive being whisked away by special forces, but the indictment could give Washington an excuse for invasion — although Trump might wait until he’s out of his Iran mess.

Critics of Trump and Rubio have a valid point that they might be more interested in looting the island’s resources than improving the lives of Cubans. Cuban exiles in Miami also have claims over property rights on the island going right back to 1959, which could be a nightmare to resolve. Some are also out for revenge. If the US were to knock out the government in Havana, it would risk pushing the island into chaos.

While the American blockade is making the lives of Cubans miserable, it’s not actually forcing the regime to collapse or the people to rise up. Protests are limited, often just consisting of people banging pots in the night. There were significant demonstrations in 2021, when Covid clobbered tourism, but police swiftly arrested demonstrators and many were given harsh prison sentences of up to 25 years for alleged crimes such as sedition, assault, and public disorder.

“Why risk going to protest?” says a bus driver, 28, who moves passengers in a rickety old truck on a route through the west of Havana. “If you already have a bunch of problems, you go to prison and then have a bunch more problems. Who is going to feed your family if you are in jail?”

The prospect of an uprising is also dampened by the fact that many of the young and strong fled Cuba in waves of emigration. The biggest surge came during the Covid crisis, with many Cubans taking advantage of permissions to travel to Nicaragua — run by the nominally socialist Sandinistas — and then heading through Mexico to the United States. One to two million people have left the island so far during the 2020s, according to estimates; the population has decreased by at least 10% and some estimate much higher. Many of those who remain are poorer, older, and more vulnerable. 

Miguel Díaz-Canel has called the US blockade “genocidal, criminal and inhumane”, and said that Cubans “will give our lives defending the Revolution”. But judging from the desperation I saw on the streets, it seems unlikely many Cuban people will battle a potential gringo invasion, or that soldiers will fight as fiercely as they did against the thwarted, CIA-organized Bay of Pigs attack in 1961. If US forces want to conquer Havana, they probably could — but the question is what to do after.

I find attitudes to the prospect of a US attack mixed. A couple of people talk angrily about the gringos. “They are sons of whores,” says one guy peddling a bicycle taxi. “Trump is a son of a whore.” (He pronounces Trump more like “Crump”.) “I wouldn’t talk to you if you were from the United States,” says another guy, who is trying to buy dollars with Cuban pesos.

The bus driver speculates that while the bloodshed would be bad, the United States could make Marco Rubio the president of Cuba, which he actually doesn’t object to. The fisherman Joaquín says more blatantly that a US attack would be good. “Let them come in and get rid of this bunch of thieves in power,” he says. When I ask him if he is worried that talk like that could land him in prison, he shrugs. “Things are terrible. They can’t do anything more to me.”

While Cuba was never as violently authoritarian as Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, it is still a dictatorship. There is an extensive intelligence agency known as the G-2 and many government informants. The military is a sprawling organization that also controls much of the economy through a shady conglomerate known as GAESA. The government allows some private businesses, but they are limited and struggle to make money.

I talk to several people who used to support the Revolution but are now disillusioned with it; some gave up on it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, others following Fidel Castro’s death or during Covid. “Cubans were not really communists,” says my driver Benjamín. “They were Fidelistas. And without him it doesn’t work.”

Benjamín looks back to the Eighties, when Cuba was a more insular country, as the good old days when Cubans had enough food in their bellies. But he says that Cuba has to embrace a full market economy. I ask him if the nation should keep the free healthcare and other achievements of the Revolution. “In an ideal world, we would. But if it has to go then so be it.”

It could at least be argued that the Cuba of the late-20th century, which intellectuals from Jean-Paul Sartre to Gabriel García Márquez visited and celebrated, could have been a viable alternative model to capitalism — and the enchanting island still sits in the hearts of many in the international Left as the home of brave, bearded revolutionaries. But the broken Cuba of today is a world away from that, and foreigners who still promote it as an example of functioning socialism are often projecting a fantasy. As my driver Benjamín says: “If they think this is great they should change places with me. They wouldn’t last a week.”

Arienne, the tour guide, says the ruling party has to go but is less specific about what would replace it. “We need a government that provides dignity,” she says. Walking through Old Havana, we pass a graffiti saying “2+2=5”. I ask her if she knows the reference to George Orwell’s book 1984. She says she doesn’t: she just thought it meant that things are really bad.

For decades, Cuba has had low murder rates by Latin American standards — one of the achievements of Fidel Castro. The government, with the help of informants, made sure civilians didn’t have guns, and that muggers and thieves were quickly locked up. With the current shortages and blackouts, however, people tell me they are getting more worried about robbery, and that gangs are forming among youths in the barrios. “If they got guns here it would be worse than Mexico,” a motorcycle taxi driver tells me.

I go to the zoo in the south of Havana, where I am one of the only visitors. The lions, tigers and chimpanzees look haggard, hungry and aggressive; a jaguar bares its teeth to me. The zoo keeper explains that due to the shortages they are only giving the animals scraps. “I had a scare as I was feeding the tiger and it tried to break through a barrier and get me,” he says. Some hyenas have even begun killing each other. “They saw a weaker one and ate it,” the keeper says. “It’s a question of survival.”

I fear the fight for survival that could be unleashed in Cuba if the situation gets more severe. While some Cubans say it’s already at rock bottom, the cruel reality is that things can always get worse.

***

Note: Some names have been changed.

As the world now knows, it wasn’t. But what that means for this city and Fermín’s country remains unclear. For though Fermín felt euphoria over Maduro’s arrest, after years of Chavista misrule, Venezuela’s ruling socialist party is still in power, and a dangerous pro-government militia is still active in Fermín’s neighborhood. Indeed, with its web of guerrillas, gangsters, soldiers and political police, the frontier city of San Antonio del Táchira speaks vividly to explosive problems in Venezuela and the dangers of them spilling into more violence — amid Trump’s new “Donroe Doctrine” of open aggression in Latin America.

Since 2014, almost eight million people have fled hunger and poverty in Venezuela. Close to three million have settled in Colombia, and frontier towns like the sprawling Cúcuta are particularly popular destinations. With the Venezuelan economy in a mess — inflation currently sits at 225% — many of Fermín’s countrymen follow him over the border into Cúcuta to work. In the evenings, they cross back over the Táchira River, being sure to return before the Simón Bolívar International Bridge closes at 9pm. Close by, as dusk falls, I talk to Venezuelans as they are blasting salsa and reggaeton, drinking Coca-Cola and beer in plastic cups, and eating hot dogs from a stand.

There are more opportunities in Cúcuta than in Venezuela. The sweaty city of a million people, framed by green hills, has a booming clothes industry, coffee and sugar trades and universities. Even so, this lively community where they sell food and drinks, and zoom about as motorcycle taxis, has its problems. On the Venezuelan side, there are pro-government militias: the so-called colectivos. Since the American attack, they are reported to be putting up checkpoints and detaining people suspected of siding with Washington. The army and political police, known by the acronym SEBIN, also keep tabs on opponents.

Repression is increasing in other ways, too. The government is detaining journalists in Caracas and it has blocked foreign journalists from entering since the strike. Several teams tried to cross in as tourists at Cúcuta; Venezuelan troops held them and deleted photos and video before deporting them back across the river. In front of the bridge, dozens of TV crews made do with taking live shots from Colombian soil, a boon to the gaggle of drinks sellers nearby.

Locals must also contend with guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which has an estimated 5,000 fighters. Active on both sides of the border, the ELN is a fierce backer of Chavismo; following Trump’s attack, it released a statement calling on Venezuelans to defend against “the gringo aggression”. In more prosaic terms, though, the guerrillas extort many businesses in the area, calling payments “vaccines”. One Venezuelan tells me he used to have a food business but gave up because of the extortion, and now drives a taxi.

Whatever its Marxist rhetoric, the ELN also makes money from the drugs trade. Close to the bridge, along a stony river where goats munch on bags of trash, are dirt tracks known as trochas. They’re used by smugglers to take contraband over the border, whether sides of beef — or bricks of cocaine. Once the runners reach Venezuela, crossing the river on rickety wooden planks, they’re liable to face a tax: whether from guerrillas or soldiers. “They all work together,” says Celio, a charismatic former gasoline smuggler. Gangs get their cut too: Celio warns me not to go further along the trochas because it’s the home to infamous gangs like the Tren de Aragua. Five men with guns recently held up a photographer friend there, stealing his equipment.

Collaboration between gangsters and the state is key to the case against Maduro. US prosecutors indicted him in 2020 and again this year on crimes including narco-terrorism conspiracy. Though Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine, nor of other drugs like fentanyl, narco traffickers do shift tons of white powder from Colombia through places like Catatumbo, north of here, and on to the United States and Europe, all with the alleged complicity of the Venezuelan army. In 2018, I interviewed convicted Mexican trafficker Fernando Blengio, who told me that the military worked openly with narcos.

While Trump may have taken out Maduro, then, these broader criminal networks still appear firmly in place. And if the regime begins genuinely to totter — violence has lately erupted on the streets of Caracas — corrupt soldiers and gangsters could yet be used to repress the population. Another possibility, of course, is that they instead turn on each other, transforming Venezuela into a low-intensity civil war.

Amid this tangled mesh of state power and criminal violence, the people of La Parada, the local term for the Bolívar bridge checkpoint, seem unsurprisingly cynical of the government in Caracas. Several speculate that the army had not put up a fight but let Maduro be captured. “How come things are normal here if there was really an invasion of our country?” asked Sarai*, selling drinks by the river crossing in Cúcuta. Even so, some are optimistic that acting president Delcy Rodríguez is capable of overseeing a transition back to democracy. “We have to move slowly to change the institutions,” suggests Roberto*, a stocky former Venezuelan soldier. “We need someone inside the government to do that.” The guerrillas, gangs and militias of Cúcuta show how difficult such change could be.

Nor is Venezuela the only country facing challenges following America’s attack on Caracas. On the west bank of the river, I join a Colombian army convoy as it patrols the roads north of Cúcuta. It’s nighttime, and a bright moon bounces light off the heavily armored vehicles. The colonel in charge describes how he also woke to news of the US attack on Venezuela; unlike Fermín, he was soon on a call with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who ordered 30,000 police and soldiers to reinforce the 1,300-mile frontier with Venezuela.

Petro, himself a former guerrilla, fervently condemned the abduction of Maduro, posting that “the United States is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in human history”. Trump responded by accusing Petro of being involved in cocaine production and saying he didn’t have long left himself. Ominous words — though there’s currently no known indictment of Petro, and he’s anyway due to step down this year once his term ends. If the Donroe Doctrine means additional attacks in Latin America, then, other countries may have more to fear. That includes Cuba and Nicaragua, both with more entrenched authoritarian Leftist leaders. Trump, as always, has shown he can be impossible to predict.

As for Colombia, an army officer in the convoy tells me he thinks the Americans are more likely to strike a cocaine lab than attack the government itself. Yet even if Petro and his successors avoid direct intervention, the challenges of Cúcuta still hint at trouble ahead. For one thing, there are those ELN guerillas. Colombian army sources warn that a large concentration have lately crossed the border from Venezuela. In December, the ELN also carried out a wave of bomb and gun attacks on Colombian targets, causing terror with makeshift explosives and killing an ambulance driver as they shot up a police station.

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that a meltdown in Venezuela is likely to spark even more violence across the border. Guerrillas and gangs operate across the two countries and flee heat from one to the other, and that’s before you add Colombia’s own brutal history of drug runners and Marxist fighters. One US argument for taking out Maduro was that his regime causes instability. But a collapse in Venezuela could cause even more.

For the moment, anyway, the rhythms of life in Cúcuta continue. As night falls, Fermín says he’d have to return home to Venezuela — and the fears and hardships he has faced for years. But, he adds, Venezuelans have learned to wait, hardly surprising when the Chavistas have been in power since 1999, when Fermín was just 12 years old. “Before,” he adds, “we made the mistake of thinking things would change when they wouldn’t. Now, we have learned to be patient.” The risk, of course, is that change could be violent, with US forces weakening the regime from the top and guerrillas and militias taking advantage of the power vacuum from below. So while things might get better, there is also the fear they could get even worse.

*Names have been changed.

Two days earlier, then-president Felipe Calderón announced the deployment of 6,500 soldiers and federal police in an offensive called Operation Michoacán. The following January, an additional 3,300 troops would carry out Operation Tijuana. It gradually became a national mobilization with the bulk of the Mexican army along with marines and paramilitary federal police taking on narcos. Soon after, President George W. Bush held talks with Calderón. By 2008, Washington was bankrolling the new Mérida Initiative, a pan-American campaign to take on drug traffickers.

“New pages of glory will be written. I instruct you to persevere until glory is achieved,” Calderón told soldiers in February 2007. “We will give no truce or quarter to the enemies of Mexico.” These were stark martial terms. In another event, Calderón addressed troops wearing an army jacket and cap in a base on Michoacán, unusual attire for a Mexican president.

Over 18 years later, the Mexican army is still on the streets fighting cartels, which have diversified from drugs to a portfolio of rackets including extortion, human smuggling and oil theft. During this time, Mexico has suffered about half a million total homicides (Mexico’s statistics institute counts 486,000 between 2007 and 2024). Cartels and the security forces fighting them, which have also committed massacres, could be responsible for almost two thirds of that number. Cartel sicarios — hitmen — not only wield Kalashnikovs and 50 cals (mostly from the United States), but build home-made fighting vehicles, or “monsters”, armored drones and improvised landmines. Self-defense militias, or auto defensas, have risen up as a third force, though they can often just be narcos in disguise. With 130,000 people disappeared, and mass graves in cow fields and ranches, mothers join brigades to search for their lost children, while citizens march vainly for peace.

Meanwhile, foreign mercenaries are increasingly involved on the side of the cartels. They have come from various countries, including the United States, but Colombian veterans are especially sought after, with their combat experience and with specialist snipers and drone operators.

And then there’s Trump. He has designated various cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and US special forces are currently training Mexican soldiers. He has also threatened US attacks on cartel targets in Mexico, and US forces have blown up boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.

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While this bloody mess in Mexico has claimed more victims than some traditional wars, there is still disagreement over how we should understand this conflict, or even name it. This isn’t just an academic debate. Recognizing an armed conflict has legal implications for the Mexican government. It’s also bad publicity.

When the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London classified Mexico as the second deadliest armed conflict in the world in 2017, Mexico’s foreign office issued an irate response. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an “(non-international) armed conflict” in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect.”

But beyond what is politically convenient for Mexico, there are other factors making the Mexican labyrinth tricky to frame. Much of the country appears largely peaceful despite the bloodshed, and even when cartels control territory it’s as a shadow power rather than a full takeover. And as there are comparable problems of organized crime and militarized law enforcement across Latin America, should we also talk about armed conflicts in Brazil, Honduras and now Ecuador?

So how can we understand this period of violence, which I now think is best referred to as the Mexican Cartel Wars? We need to look at when it really began, who the sides involved are, and, to offer some hope, when it may finally end.

I join some other writers in describing the Mexican Cartel Wars as a form of hybrid armed conflict, somewhere between crime and war. This crime war is far less lethal than international conflicts like the Second World War, and nor does it reach the threshold of traditional civil wars, like the Spanish, US or Salvadoran, in terms of intensity or politics. There aren’t two sides with clear leaders and ideologies fighting for dominance of the central state. Yet there is endemic organized violence, which claims thousands of lives per year. As such, it could be compared to periods of violence elsewhere, which, though brutal, did not descend into full-scale civil wars. These include the Colombian conflict, the civil conflict in the Philippines, the Chinese warlord era, the Haitian crisis and, albeit on a smaller scale, the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The Mexican Cartel Wars involve a plethora of criminal kingpins, death squads and self-defense militias, as well as police, soldiers and marines. All these are entwined with the cartels and fight among themselves. Violence shifts around the country in a series of distinct but interconnected conflicts, with operatives, money and techniques (from beheading to drones) flowing between them.

The Geneva Conventions haven’t caught up with the language and laws for this type of hybrid conflict. I wouldn’t argue that the Mexican government has to treat sicarios like prisoners of war, but it still has to figure out a strategy for peace.

Cartels are at the heart of this conflict, yet they are complex and evolving organisms. Essentially, they are hierarchical networks of paramilitary organized crime. Profits from drugs and a range of rackets drive the violence. Cartels include the biggest mobs, Jalisco and Sinaloa, and powerful regional players, like the Gulf and Northeast cartels, as well as more local but still brutal outfits like the Guerreros Unidos, which we could call cartelitos.

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When Calderón launched his offensive in 2006, he was reacting to rising cartel violence, especially in his home state of Michoacán. But fighting between drug traffickers and the involvement of the Mexican army in anti-drug operations go back decades. The first US Customs probe into Mexican opium traffickers was in 1916. The Mexican government mobilized soldiers against poppy growers in Sinaloa in the Forties, and then more seriously in the Seventies in what it called Operation Condor (which was also the name of a CIA op against Leftists across Latin America).

Colombian traffickers were dubbed the Medellín Cartel from about 1980, and the Guadalajara Cartel reached its zenith in 1985 (though, as the academic Carlos Pérez Ricart writes, people didn’t refer to it as that until later). The Tijuana Cartel pioneered narco terror in the Nineties, and army defectors in the Zetas seriously upped the game with paramilitary hit squads in the 2000s, leading to Calderón’s offensive.

Yet the sheer quantity of Mexican troops on the streets, and the severity of cartel violence, reached new heights under Calderón. We could see the period from the Nineties to 2006 as a proto-phase of cartel battles: with the real Mexican Cartel Wars unleashed after the military offensive.

Another detail is that after Calderón kicked off the crackdown, murders in Mexico actually dipped, before going up sharply in 2008 and then exploding in 2010. It’s unfair to blame Calderón entirely for the cartel wars, but he did throw oil onto the fire, as cartels escalated their brutal battle tactics and Mexican soldiers carried out murders themselves. From 2010 onward, Mexico suffered the massacres and mass graves that have characterized the conflict.

A tricky but central question is how many murders are actually related to cartels, as opposed to just bar fights or “passion” killings. The truth is we can’t know for sure: about 90% of homicides are never solved. Yet there are clues.

Calderón created a unit with members of the army, police and Mexico’s intelligence agency (CISEN) to estimate how many deaths were cartel-related. Alejandro Hope, who was then at CISEN, described to me how they looked for signs of cartel activity, from beheadings to the use of grenades and AK-47s. They also included killings confirmed by soldiers.

The count varies by year, but in both 2010 and 2011 cartel-related violence represented close to 60% of all homicides. If you extrapolate that over all homicides since 2006, it would be about 300,000 deaths. That is a colossal figure. Over these last two decades, Mexico has been a genuine bloodbath.

Is there a way to end the Mexican Cartel Wars? One challenge is that it’s not like a regular war where governments or political factions come to the table and hammer out a peace deal. We have also learned that taking out kingpins, like El Chapo and El Mayo, doesn’t stop it. Cartels are many-headed hydra, and when you cut off a head, several more vicious ones grow in its place.

Some have called to send the army back to the barracks. This doesn’t finish the fight either, as cartels keep on battling amongst themselves. Presidents have pulled troops out of various cities only to send them back when violence explodes.

But no conflict goes on forever. About 2010, I heard a CISEN officer make the prediction it would be a 30-year war. There is no exact science to that, but it rings true to me: a full generation of killing before things calm down. Or until the murders go back to the level of 2006, with 10,000 homicides or fewer in a year.

There needs to be a combination of factors to reach this. More effective law enforcement in Mexico is crucial, however that is achieved. Trump’s idea of bombing cartels is certainly a deterrent, though it could put prices up, which encourages others to get in the business. And Trump hasn’t addressed US drug demand; perhaps in the future this will finally go down. Changing demographics in Mexico may be key too: as the birth rate falls, there will be fewer youths to recruit as sicarios. Increased living standards could also reduce the temptation of becoming a cartel killer.

There are other worries though. Back in 1998, Charles Bowden wrote Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, illustrating the violence on the US-Mexico border. In retrospect, the title was prescient about the bloodshed that awaited Mexico in the 21st century. But has Mexico over the last two decades itself been a laboratory for a new style of warfare? And if that is the case, could this type of hybrid armed conflict find new environments to nestle in? With organized crime moving easily over borders, economic stagnation and the power of many states eroding, I fear it will.

The tellers count out piles of pesos worth $500, $300, $100 or whatever the relatives are able to send from their wages picking tobacco, mixing cement, or washing dishes. These “remittances”, as the money sent home is called, have kept Ixmiquilpan afloat for decades along with its surrounding villages, an area dominated by the indigenous Otomí people. While Mexico suffers heavy cartel violence, Ixmiquilpan is a fairly peaceful area. Families use the dollars to build sprawling homes on ancestral corn fields, put money into community groups to construct parks and churches, or they open grocery stores and taco stalls. But most of the dollars are used to just keep food on the table.

Despite Donald Trump waging a crackdown on undocumented migrants, especially those with criminal records, migrant dollars keep flowing south. In February, Mexico received $4.4 billion in remittances, according to Mexico’s Central Bank which tracks transfers. That was a 0.8% fall compared to the same month last year but it’s still historically a huge number. In total in 2024, Mexico received a record-breaking $64 billion in remittances, the second highest in the world behind India.

Inside the United States, the Trump administration has been making high-profile raids that make media splashes in both English and Spanish. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even went on an operation where she rather awkwardly pointed a rifle at an agent’s head as she spoke into the video camera in front of a heavily armored vehicle. The administration has been flying deportees on military planes and it released videos of migrants with the amplified sounds of chains. Most controversially, it deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to the unforgiving CECOT prison in El Salvador. (Lawyers for many of the deportees claim they were innocent people caught up in the sweep because of tattoos of football teams or local carnivals).

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The Mexican side of the border crisis

By Ioan Grillo

All of this is on people’s minds here. María Quezada, 61, lines up to collect money sent to the family from a brother working in construction in North Carolina. “They need to keep quiet there in El Norte,” she says, using a common term for the US. “They are worried right now. This famous president, he doesn’t like migrants.” Yet others have high hopes that their own families will be okay. “I think those who get deported are the ones who have done something wrong,” says Benita Huerta, 30, as she cradles a baby in her arms. “If you don’t owe anything, you should be fine.”

The issue of the US-Mexico border, of millions of migrants swimming over the river and of smugglers sneaking in fentanyl, was a core factor that drove the MAGA movement and propelled Trump to power. Since returning to office in January, Trump has indeed transformed “The Border”, sending troops to the Rio Grande, virtually shutting down asylum claims and pressuring Mexico to hit drug cartels. The number of “encounters” by Border Patrol agents (the government term for when agents find migrants on the border area) has plummeted 94% since a record high under Joe Biden in 2023. The amount of fentanyl seized has gone down 73% since September.

Yet while deportations make headlines, the overall numbers have stayed fairly steady under Trump. The frequency of deportation flights has been similar to the last months of Biden and the total quantity of deportees appears to be slightly lower.

While Trump has massively reduced the number of new migrants coming in, therefore, he has not cut deeply into the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants already in the United States. (Some claim the true figure is much higher.) It’s hard to predict Trump, but if he does eventually do real mass deportations, as has been threatened, then it would massively disrupt many businesses, especially farms, construction sites and restaurants by taking away their workers.

In Ixmiquilpan, almost every family has members working in the US. Most of them went over illegally, either plodding over the seething desert or swimming over the river — although they usually went some years ago. None I speak to has had a loved one deported since Trump regained power, although I find several who were deported under previous presidents.

Heriberto Pedraza, 58, who sits on a sidewalk a few blocks from the central square. He says he worked construction for two decades in the US, mostly in Florida, but was deported in 2009 under President Barack Obama after he was caught drunk driving. (The liberal hero Obama actually has the record for the highest number of “removals,” at over 3 million. Migrant activists call him the “deporter in chief.” This was in response to a rising number of undocumented workers at the time and use of expanded agencies). Pedraza said he never tried to return after that. “The Nineties were a great time to be in the United States. But things have changed now,” he says. “I’m happy here in my hometown.”

Immigration over the US-Mexico border has gone in waves over the past century. In the 1910s, people in northern Mexico fled over the Rio Grande from the desperado armies of the Mexican Revolution. From the Second World War to the Sixties, millions of Mexicans went over legally to toil in fields in what was called the Bracero Program to bring over farm workers. In much of central and southern Mexico, including Ixmiquilpan, people began heading to the United States in big numbers from the Eighties. This coincided with a 1986 amnesty for undocumented migrants under Ronald Reagan, which could have encouraged further immigration.

“It used to be that men here would go to Mexico City to get work,” says Martín Rodríguez, 75, as he sits in the shade in his tire repair shop on the outskirts of Ixmiquilpan. “But then it changed. Instead of people saying, ‘I’m off to Mexico [City], they would say, ‘I’m off to El Norte.’” Locals went especially to Florida and North Carolina, where they built particular links with towns and jobs, although they worked in many other states, from Kentucky to Michigan.

Emigration from Ixmiquilpan probably reached a peak in the 2000s, but then hit a wall with the Obama deportations and great recession. Another problem was that cartels took over the Mexican side of the border running the human smugglers, or coyotes, and making it dangerous to cross without paying them. Locals tell me that coyotes now charge as much as $15,000 to go from Ixmiquilpan to a US destination, and most can’t afford that.

Instead, the record wave of migration under Biden was from elsewhere; more than two-thirds of those caught crossing in his term came from countries other than Mexico, especially Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Cuba but also as far afield as China and Central Africa. This was due to instability and violence in those countries and increased use of refugee claims; many applied for asylum rather than just sneaking over to work like the people of Ixmiquilpan used to.

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The difficulty in going to the US means those already there fear coming home. A woman waiting to pick up money has a tear in her eye when she tells me she hasn’t seen her daughter in 15 years. But despite living away for decades, migrants still loyally send money home.

Many migrants from the area now have children who were born in the United States and are citizens. The American influence means that many in Ixmiquilpan speak English as well as Spanish and the indigenous Otomi tongue (which the locals call hñähñu). You can see this influence in palatial houses amid the cinder block shacks, with migrants using techniques they learned building walls in North Carolina and adding in their own touches like Romanic pillars. There are also hundreds of half-finished houses scattering the villages waiting for those last dollars.

Some residents have tried hard to turn the remittances into a sustainable economic base. In the nearby village of Puerto Dexthi, Hilario Cerroblanco, 59, saved money from construction to build a small factory using a local plant to make brushes. “We need businesses so we can stay here,” he says. He secured orders from some shops in Mexico City but it’s hard to compete with Chinese plastic goods.

A lot of locals have been more successful selling cement and tools for migrant families to build their homes, or food stalls to spend the dollars on delicious meals. Ixmiquilpan market is buzzing with families. They are eating sheep that has been slow-cooked for more than ten hours in ovens carved in the earth, and they are drinking fresh green juice of celery, parsley, and nopal cactus. It’s a vibrant atmosphere that has been built on decades of global movement and cross-border transfers. But as turbulent new politics smash this old order, the resilient community of Ixmiquilpan will have to adapt to the new era.

Car bombs are one of the many terrifying weapons in the arsenal of Mexico’s cartels as they battle over territory, not only to traffic and sell drugs, but to steal oil from pipelines, smuggle migrants over the US border, and extort businesses, among other crimes. They also wield weaponized drones that drop makeshift bombs unleashing shrapnel and nails. They lay landmines that kill soldiers in their Humvees as well as farmers. And they build fighting vehicles known as “monsters” that look like they are out of Mad Max, with walls of bulletproof steel and battering rams.

Mexican soldiers have been out in force fighting the cartels since 2006, and the new Left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum has promised to keep up this militarized strategy. But the troops have failed to quell the death toll (or perhaps made it worse): Mexico has suffered over 400,000 murders since the army crackdown began almost two decades ago. During this period, many security officials have themselves been found working with cartels, including the former security minister Genaro García Luna, who was sentenced by a New York court in October.

Living and reporting in Mexico since 2001, I have covered the conflict in depth and it’s as bad as ever. In recent months, I’ve been in a village in Guerrero state that suffered attacks with armored drones, and in the city of Culiacán, where residents have shut themselves in their homes because of the violence, calling it a “narco pandemic”, in allusion to the Covid lockdown. Over the years, I have seen horrors that I couldn’t have imagined such as going into a morgue with 49 bodies that were all decapitated and had their hands and feet cut off.

It’s a complex conflict that spirals across Mexico with dozens of different groups, ever-changing frontlines and unclear rules. The cartel war is a fight that the Mexican army can’t win yet can’t pull out of. And it’s a conflict that Washington needs to be wary about getting dragged deeper into.

The United States is already involved in Mexico’s cartel war. Agents for the DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and CIA run operations against drug traffickers, using undercover agents and stings. Washington gives aid to Mexico City, partly in return for holding back migrants and hitting narcos. US companies sell arms to Mexican security forces, and gangsters smuggle an iron river of guns over the Rio Grande.

But Donald Trump has called to bring the US military into the battle. “When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again,” Trump said in a 2023 statement. Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced legislation for authorization of US military force against cartels. “You need something that says, ‘You have finally pissed off the gringos. You finally did it,’” he told me last year. Trump has picked Ronald Johnson, a retired colonel and former CIA liaison to special operations, as ambassador to Mexico.

I used to think that scenes in the movie Sicario of US special forces sneaking over the border to take out cartels were pure fantasy. Now I think there is a chance such operations could really come to pass. But Washington should avoid getting drawn too deep into this quagmire.

The Republican hard-liners rightly blame cartels for trafficking fentanyl; they buy precursor ingredients from Chinese pharmaceutical companies and cook it into the lethal substance in labs south of the border. They are also right to call out US overdose deaths as a true national catastrophe; several years saw over 100,000 overdose deaths, with fentanyl in about 70% of cases.

Yet the problem with the call to bomb cartels is not only that it would inflame cross-border tensions, especially if civilians were killed, which could put American lives in danger of revenge attacks. It’s that it wouldn’t stop cartels.

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The cartels are not composed of a few arch villains who can be taken out. They are sprawling networks with look-outs, runners, gunmen, traffickers, “mules”, businessmen, accountants, and plenty of police, soldiers, prosecutors, and mayors on the payroll. A study published in Science found cartels were one of the biggest employers in Mexico with 160,000 to 185,000 members. I think that is an underestimate. Even if US special forces were to blast away 1,000 cartel operatives then more than 99% would still be standing.

Furthermore, US forces could not take out one cartel and declare victory. There are about 20 significant groups, from the biggest cartels to powerful regional players to important local mobs, and dozens more affiliated gangs and crews. As US drug agents have discovered from decades of experience, when they weaken one cartel, another steps up and it often just creates more violence and fragmentation. The US arrest of the kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July has created a devastating civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel that is drowning the state in blood.

The call to bomb cartels gets into the question of what kind of conflict we are dealing with south of the border. Mexico’s cartel war is not officially a war. In 2017, a British think tank claimed Mexico had the world’s second deadliest armed conflict after Syria. But Mexico’s foreign ministry in response released a forceful communiqué arguing that it is a criminal problem. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an ‘(non-international) armed conflict’ in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect. Neither the existence of criminal groups nor the use of the Armed Forces to maintain order in the interior of the country are sufficient reason.”

I think the Mexican conflict is a weird mix of crime and war and we don’t have the best language and legal norms to deal with that. Yet the same is also true for various countries in the Americas, from Jamaica to Honduras to Brazil to Ecuador. Cartels wield paramilitary forces, people flee their villages and towns, and Mexico is littered with mass graves. Yet the gangsters are not ideological and are looking to make money rather than sweep to power like the Taliban. And to recognize Mexico as having a legal armed conflict would be to recognize cartels as belligerents with rights under the Geneva Convention.

There are no missile attacks or full-on aerial bombings. It’s a brutal battle but one that paradoxically allows much of Mexico to live outside the bloodshed. When you go to much of Mexico, you might be surprised how ordinary it feels, from colonial towns with bustling markets to hipsters sipping lattes in the trendy quarters of big cities. Mexico City is a thriving and popular capital and the Caribbean beaches are bustling with record numbers of tourists. Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and a big middle class despite the crime. It’s a weird duality of violence alongside normality.

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If the United States were to classify cartels as terrorist groups, it would create other issues. Those fleeing over the border to claim asylum would have their cases strengthened. US gun stores could be charged with providing material to foreign terrorist organizations.

Perhaps Trump is using the threat of violence to pressure Mexico to act. In November, Trump stated he would put 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods if they didn’t stop migrants and fentanyl coming in. On 3 December, Mexican security forces made what they claimed was their biggest fentanyl bust ever.

Such pressure could have a long-term effect. Mexico might not be able to eliminate cartels right now but it could manage to force them to reduce their fentanyl trafficking. Seizures at the border in the coming months will see if that is the case. That would be a positive development and also stop the poison spreading in Mexico. But the United States would still have to deal with fentanyl being made elsewhere, including on US soil.

The United States could create a new robust law against cartels, this novel type of paramilitary organized crime spreading in the hemisphere. But it would need to wield the law in US cities, where cartels move vast quantities of drugs, money and guns. And Mexico has to try and reduce the bloodshed in its homeland. Right now, perhaps the best it can hope for is reducing the worst crimes. In the future, it would have to go through some fundamental change to really become a less violent society.

Cartel bosses like to bathe their guns in gold and jewelry. The Mexican army has many such captured weapons in a base in Mexico City in what is known as the “narco museum”. A gleaming captured pistol there has words carved on the side saying, “only the dead have seen the end of the war.” And Trump’s unlikely to change that.

More recently, the silver-haired populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “Amlo”, chose the Zocalo as the site of dozens of rallies during his 12-year quest for power. When he finally won the top job in 2018 with his Morena party — short for “Movement for National Regeneration”, while also meaning “brown skinned woman” — he moved the seat of the presidency back to the square’s National Palace.

It was also in the Zocalo that the current opposition, centred around presidential contender Xóchitl Gálvez, filled the square with activists dressed in pink on Sunday 19 May, promising a “pink tide” to sweep to power and replace what they claim is an authoritarian government by Morena. (The pink signals Gálvez’s coalition of parties rather an ideological bent.) Come Sunday, however, it will almost certainly be Morena supporters who will be celebrating.

A 61-year-old environmental engineer, Claudia Sheinbaum — Amlo’s anointed successor — was mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to last year. With opinion polls showing her leading the polls by a whopping 20 to 30 points over Gálvez, the campaign has been no nail-biter. Either way, Sheinbaum or Gálvez will give Mexico its first female president, ahead of its super-power neighbour the United States.

Despite misgivings among commentators in the UK and US, this weekend’s election — the biggest in the nation’s history by number of eligible voters and positions being contested — is a testament to the tenacity of Mexico’s democracy. Undeniably, its political system is heavily flawed, besieged by drug cartels who finance and murder candidates as well as journalists. But, for the most part, especially when compared with the rest of Latin America, it still functions. Mexico, remember, is nothing like the nearby authoritarian regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua; nor is it suffering the political meltdown of Peru nor the complete ungovernability of Haiti.

And yet, read the British and American press and you could be forgiven for thinking that Mexico is sliding into a dictatorship. Two years ago, for example, the London-based Index On Censorship named Amlo “Tyrant of the Year”, above Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, while The Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded Mexico from a “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime”. Elsewhere, the Financial Times has warned  that “the country’s democracy is now in real danger”, while a headline in The Atlantic referred to Amlo as “The Autocrat Next Door”.

At its heart, this is not necessarily an issue of Right vs Left. Amlo, after all, identifies as Left-wing and promotes a range of different social programmes, some of which have reduced poverty and which Sheinbaum promises to carry on. But, perhaps confusingly for many in the West, he does not talk about “socialism” and is socially conservative on some issues, being strongly nationalist and in favour of the family. “The Mexican family is the principal institution of social security,” he has said.

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At the same time, however, Amlo is clearly populist, employing a rhetoric that pits the Mexican people against what he calls “a mafia of power”. This style has garnered comparisons with Donald Trump, with whom Amlo was friendly when he was US President. In a similar vein, since his election in 2018, critics have focused on how Morena has expanded its power across various state institutions, including the judicial system, a process they fear will carry on under Sheinbaum. They also point to Amlo’s combative approach with the media. In February, he published the telephone number of a New York Times reporter who had investigated narco-corruption, and revealed the supposed income of a Mexican journalist who wrote a report on the president’s son.

Both amounted to acts of gross intimidation that deserve to be condemned. They are, however, not necessarily symptoms of how an authoritarian regime might function. Under Amlo, for instance, there have not been any major violent crackdowns on protests or round ups of political prisoners, such as those in Nicaragua and Venezuela, let alone in Syria or China. Indeed, as Amlo goes through his last months of power, he remains genuinely popular with an approval of around 60%, according to newspaper El Financiero.

Moreover, focusing solely on Amlo risks ignoring the fact that Mexico was already a very flawed democracy before he took office. The nation’s democratic transition since was long and twisted, and it was only in 2000, after 72 years in power, that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency and a real multiparty system took root. Nor did its trials end there. Under the new president Vicente Fox, there was a dubious criminal charge against Amlo in 2004 that would stop him running for president that was only dropped after huge protests (in the Zocalo again). Under Fox’s successor Felipe Calderón, the public security secretary Genaro García Luna was later found to be in the pocket of Mexico’s drug cartels. And under the next president, Enrique Peña Nieto, a scandal blew up over his wife buying a $7-million mansion from a company that received government contracts. In other words, Mexico’s democracy was hardly in fine shape before Amlo came along.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t single out Amlo for criticism, particularly when it comes to national security. During his five years in office, Mexico has suffered more than 150,000 murders, the worst stretch in recent history. Cartels continue to operate brazenly in swathes of the country, using drones to drop bombs and shaking down businesses, even tortilla sellers.

And unsurprisingly, this violence places a great strain on Mexican democracy. Under Amlo, 37 journalists have been murdered, while over the past year, assassins have killed at least 30 political candidates seeking office, with victims from both Morena and the opposition. Yet while it is no excuse, the uncomfortable truth is that cartel violence has been soaking Mexico in blood for almost two decades. Neither Calderón nor Peña Nieto nor Amlo has found a solution to it. We can only hope that Sheinbaum has more success — although she has offered few concrete policies so far.

An argument made by critics is that Amlo is moving gradually towards an authoritarian system: that his aggressive rhetoric and greater control of institutions will lead to more open authoritarianism down the road. “The democratic retreat does not follow a fixed sequence,” writes Mexican journalist Eduardo Ruiz-Healy. “It is a gradual and prolonged process.” According to these fears, Amlo could still rule from behind the scenes with Sheinbaum as a puppet. However, surely it is dangerous to condemn a government for something that could happen in the future; we need to report the facts of what is actually happening.

It is common for anti-populist commentators to see populists as naturally inclined towards authoritarianism. According to this thinking, as soon as politicians start to talk of the people versus the elite, it is only a matter of time before they try to seize more power. The reality, however, is far more complex. Framing societal conflict in terms of a battle between the demos and their rulers is hardly a new phenomenon: rather, it can be traced back to the golden age of social democracy, including to the British Labour Party’s campaign in 1945.

Besides, in the following decades, a number of populist Latin American Presidents, including in Argentina and Ecuador, left office peacefully to be replaced by rival populists. Critics will rightfully point to the authoritarian takeovers in Nicaragua and Venezuela by self-avowed socialists, but they are the exception. Mexico, by contrast, is about to welcome North America’s first female president into power, off the back of a largely successful exercise in mass democracy.

Yes, it is imperfect — and yes, it can be dangerous. But after two and a half decades, Mexico’s democracy stumbles on.

Known as J, short for Junior, Flores is 42, but looks younger, with thick cropped hair and wide alert eyes. He’s driven and talkative, disarming with an easy manner and a lively mind that jumps from details of his trafficking logistics to the books he read in prison. He knows both the world of Chicago’s Little Village, where he was born, and small-town Zacatecas, Mexico, where his father hails from. He speaks with a Chicago-Latino accent.

Though he doesn’t have an aggressive demure and was never convicted of violence, Flores was key to networks that have pumped narcotics into America and drowned Mexico in blood. Mexican drug traffickers wouldn’t have made their vast fortunes without US associates to move their product north of the river. “Chapo or Mayo or Arturo couldn’t do what we did in the United States,” Flores says. Indeed, the twins made more bank from their hometown of Chicago than many of the drug lords south of the border.

Flores didn’t exactly choose this world — he was born into it. When his mother was pregnant with him in 1981, his father was incarcerated for being caught with 11 kilos of black tar heroin. He and Pedro grew up with an older brother who became a shot caller for the Latin Kings, a fearsome street gang, as well as a major drug dealer. “I didn’t have your regular childhood,” he tells me. “My brothers were in the most violent, biggest organisation which was the Latin Kings… I am basically being raised in that kind of culture.”

When his father finally came out of prison, he was furious. He was an old-school narco from Zacatecas and forbade the twins from what he saw as the crude, tattooed life of gang bangers. “He despised gang members, believe it or not. It’s this weird contradiction. Because he was in prison with them. He didn’t understand their reasoning.”

His father’s idea of education, meanwhile, was taking the twins down to Mexico to buy marijuana and drive it back to Chicago. On their first trip, aged seven, they helped stash weed in the gas tank. Over the following years, they learned how to find marijuana plantations in the mountains and negotiate with sellers. “My father made sure he introduced us to everyone and that we treated everyone with respect.”

When they were 12, their father went on the run to Mexico. After a stint there, the twins returned to Chicago to live with their Latin King brother — and help him deal drugs. After he too was sent to prison, they began making their own deals with Sinaloa Cartel intermediaries in Chicago. By 17, they had made their first deal — 30 kilos of cocaine — and by 20, they were shifting more than a tonne a month and making millions.

That the twins rose so fast up the ranks was partly thanks to their upbringing, which put them in a special position to link the drug lords in Mexico with the gangs that sold drugs on US streets. They knew both worlds, but weren’t quite part of either. Instead, they styled themselves as businessmen. It helped that they’d had a better education than most of their counterparts: even while trafficking through their teenage years, Margarito had received a high school diploma and Pedro did a couple of semesters of college.

In this business, brains are important. “Drug trafficking is not easy,” Flores says. “Prisons are filled with failed drug traffickers. Cemeteries are filled with failed drug traffickers.” He explains that moving dope in America is about running a smooth logistical operation. The cartel needs the drugs delivered fast and the payment back faster. Traffickers who are slow to move loads and mess up on paying are the ones who get killed. Luckily, the twins were workaholics who took care of every detail as they built a network of independent truck drivers, discreet stash houses, and crucially, money-counting machines.

Meanwhile, the twins kept an eye on the fluctuating cocaine prices in different cities like brokers watching the stock market. Since sale prices are higher the further north you go, they made profits by delivering to the northeast and into Canada. The buying prices are also lower the higher up the chain you get, so the twins cut out the middlemen and built relationships directly with the heads of the Sinaloa Cartel.

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Gaining the trust of the top players was not easy, however. In early 2005, an associate of El Chapo kidnapped Pedro and held him for over two weeks, almost starving him to death. Flores went to the mountains, where he successfully negotiated with El Chapo for Pedro’s release — though he ended up paying off a debt that had been caused by El Chapo’s own man messing up. Eventually, the twin’s gained El Chapo’s approval to buy cocaine directly from the inner circle of Sinaloa drug lords at a cheaper rate. This would boost their trafficking to more than three tonnes a month and up to $10 million in profit.

El Mayo (or Ismael Zambada), another Sinaloa Cartel warlord, was easier to work with, praising their ability to move so much powder, and joking about how much they could have moved if they were triplets. “He was a fierce man, but he was also one of the fairest,” recalls Flores. Now 76 years old, El Mayo has never been inside a jail cell. The veteran drug lord boasts a reputation for smoothing relations and paying off cops.

“He reminded me a lot, even nicer probably, than my father,” Flores says. “I feel like he had genuine love and respect for us… When it came to any type of business, he would be like, ‘Whatever you guys decide and you know what, here is an extra something for you guys.’ It doesn’t surprise me that he continues to be the head of the organisation, the most successful one for sure.”

In their case, US prosecutors portrayed El Chapo as the supreme head of the Sinaloa Cartel. But Flores’s account paints a picture of a federation with a cupola of bosses: among these, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a roughneck known as Barbas, or The Beard, was actually moving more cocaine. “He was a calculator; I would grab my phone to calculate and before I even pressed a number, he was already telling you what it was,” says Flores. “He was one of the best businessmen I feel like there was in drug trafficking.”

However, Beltrán Leyva also had a reputation for murder and even cannibalism. Margarito says it bothered him that he wasn’t as famous as Chapo and Mayo, and he used violence to put himself on the map. “It’s always about legacy… To them, you are your name,” he says. “He had no limit when it came to violence.”

Another gangster with a bloody reputation was El Mencho, or Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes. When Mexican federal agents arrested the twins in Jalisco, Mencho led a squad of gunmen to force their release. He was then a rising figure in a local group affiliated with the Sinaloa mob, but Margarito says he was an aggressive, hungry guy and he didn’t like to do business with him. “He had that chip on his shoulder, a violent man from the beginning.”

In 2008, these Sinaloan bosses broke into a bloody civil war. The violence had various fronts, but a central battle was between Beltrán Leyva and El Chapo — The Beard versus Shorty. As these old childhood friends turned into bitter enemies, their gunmen painted the streets of Sinaloa with blood. In May, sicarios fired 500 bullets into a son of El Chapo, Édgar, at a Culiacán shopping mall, and from then on residents lived with ensuing daily revenge hits.

The twins were ordered to choose between Chapo and Beltrán Leyva. But by this point, they were working with the DEA. They tried to play the two men off against each other, hoping to gather evidence on both. “We were threatened by the two most powerful, most violent, drug cartels I would say in the world at that time,” says Flores.

Flores has a tear in his eye when he describes their decision to co-operate. He realised his path would only lead to death or the Super Max but flipping gave him a glimmer of hope. “I had a spiritual epiphany one day,” he says. “I felt like, I wanted to do something good for my family.” I’m reminded of his earlier description of watching the film Scarface as a kid: “Scarface was a great story, but it never motivated us to die like him.”

With the civil war raging, the twins began recording their dealings with traffickers. The risk of being caught snitching was huge, but they made good under-covers. Their sentencing memorandum has a list of 54 recorded conversations with narcos. Finally, they got El Chapo himself on the phone. To lure him in, Pedro renegotiated the price of a batch of heroin they had already received. “In the drug business you don’t do that,” Flores says. “You don’t receive a shipment and then try and get a better price.”

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On 30 November 2008, the twins handed themselves into custody and went from living the life of millionaire narcos to witnesses in jail cells. Their cooperation led to indictments against everybody: Chapo, Mayo, Beltrán Leyva, their sons and brothers and lieutenants, and even members of the twins’ own organisation in Chicago. They spent years alone in prison, segregated for their own safety. Then in 2018, Pedro took the stand and testified against Chapo in his showcase trial in Brooklyn.

As a reward, the twins were given 12 years in prison rather than a life sentence. At least, Flores says, they are alive and able to be fathers and husbands. Since his release, he has been trying to turn his life around. He’s giving classes to law enforcement about the inner workings of cartels with a group called Dynamic Police Training and testified before the Congressional “Task Force to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels,” headed by Rep. Dan Crenshaw. “I have this need to do something with all my knowledge,” he says. “I want to make sure that by the time I leave here my legacy is something positive.” Indeed, Mexican journalists often complain that the US side of the trafficking equation is poorly documented — Flores is shedding much-needed light on it.

“This a cautionary story, we are not trying to promote the life at all,” Flores says. “My brother and I were always applauded for bad, so now it feels good to go to an event where I am teaching law enforcement. Where I get a hug or a handshake or a standing ovation. And they tell me ‘Thank you.’”

A version of this interview appeared on Ioan Grillo’s CrashOut Substack.

Over the past month, this small stretch of river has turned into the symbolic ground zero of the US battle over the border and immigration, the central issue of a contentious election year. But its fault lines extend well beyond these waters. This is also the epicentre of the problems that have dogged both America and Mexico for years: drug cartel money, the exodus from crumbling regimes and an existential struggle over the identity of the United States itself.

In December, Border Patrol agents processed more than 71,000 migrants and asylum seekers who crossed the river into the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass. They formed part of a record number of more than 300,000 migrants processed along the entire border in that month. In response, on January 10, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered his state National Guard (a section of the army under the governor’s control) to fortify Shelby Park, a 47-acre patch of scrubby land by the river.

In a historical irony, the park is named after a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender to the Union in the Civil War. When the Biden White House ordered that Border Patrol agents be let into Shelby, Abbott refused, setting up a stand-off between the state and federal powers over who polices the border. The Texas governor has also clashed with Washington over the use of razor wire, which the federal government argues is unnecessary and harmful. Activists of the Right have sided with Abbott: hundreds declared they would lead a convoy to support Texas and “take our border back”.

Travelling in from Mexico City, I arrive in Piedras Negras on a Friday night to find a rainy and windy Rio Grande, and meet Benicio Herrera, a hardware store owner walking his Labrador along the bank. When I ask about the fortifications on the US shore, he shrugs his shoulders. “There are two sides to this,” he says. “On one hand, the migrants have human rights. But on the other, we have never seen numbers like this before so there is going to be a reaction.”

Opinions on the migrant surge in Mexico are mixed. Over in a park by the bridge into the US, I talk to Cipriano Arguello, who’s selling potato chips and chicharrón (pork rinds), who is sympathetic to those crossing. “People forget where they have come from,” he says. “We are all migrants.” Watching over his juice stand in a nearby market, however, Francisco Vázquez says he supports the hardened measures. “They have to implement tactics for security,” he says. “They should have done this a long time before.” The Piedras Negras residents also have varied opinions on the convoy of activists making their way to Texas. Some refer to them as “patriotas” or “patriots”, while others label them the “anti-migrants”.

These mixed feelings reflect how migration over the US border has transformed in the last decade. The vast majority going over used to be Mexicans, sneaking in between the official bridges to find work. But now Mexicans make up less than a quarter, with the rest coming from around the globe, particularly Venezuela and Honduras, but also South Africa, China and Russia. Most of them enter Mexico through its southern border, before trekking through the cities and countryside to the north.

On the Saturday morning, I visit the Casa de Migrante, a Catholic shelter where migrants can get a bed. Sitting on the sidewalk, Francisco Lugo tells me how he fled Venezuela with his wife and four children, after he was threatened by a government-linked militia demanding money. He wants to apply for asylum, but like many plans to cross the river and make his application in the United States. Lugo knows nothing about the convoy but has heard about a military build-up. “God will help me find a good time when the water is low and we can go over the river,” he says.

Later, a Cuban man arrives at the hostel and reveals he had been kidnapped. A mechanic by trade in his late 20s, Minardo Escalona describes how he was abducted in the city of Monterrey, taking a taxi which handed him to the gangsters. He was kept for three days until his family in Cuba sent $2,000 by Western Union. “They give you scraps to eat, just to keep you alive to pay,” he says. “I’m glad I made it but I feel terrible that my family had to lose all that money.”

Gangsters, usually affiliated to the cartels, have been kidnapping migrants in Mexico for over a decade, but there has been an uptick in cases. It’s an especially cruel crime: wrenching money from the poorest and most desperate. But human smuggling in Mexico is a bloody and ever-evolving racket. In the Eighties, the smugglers, known as polleros or chicken herders, were local players who would take migrants over the border for a couple of hundred dollars. As the fences got higher and demand got bigger, networks have formed that stretch from American cities and down into Latin America. A Central American can now expect to pay about $15,000 to go from their home all the way to their destination in Chicago or San Francisco. The human smugglers work with the cartels, and that price buys immunity from kidnapping (or so they hope). Those who can’t afford or don’t want to pay, risk getting nabbed.

While cartels control most of the Mexican border, Piedras Negras is in the state of Coahuila, which has a heavily armed police force that has chased out the remnants of the Zetas cartel. However, Isabel Turcios, a nun who runs the hostel, says the police have simply taken over the business of shaking down migrants themselves. “They hunt them down and they get every peso they can from them,” she said. “It’s terrible.” I ask Turcios about the convoy and the barbed wire. “There are women and children crossing,” she says. “Why do they keep giving these people the incentive to go north and then punish them for it?”

As Saturday heats up, I go to the river and see the Texas National Guard speeding up and down on boats, each manned by two soldiers. I talk to a group of their Mexican opposite-numbers watching from the south side. An officer tells me their instructions can vary on whether to arrest migrants or let them through, but in recent weeks they have been working hard to round them up. “We do the work of containment of the migrants,” he says. “I feel bad detaining these people looking for a better life but that is what our orders are.”

These Mexican efforts are a large part of the reason that there are not many migrants actually crossing this weekend, as activists, cameras and politicians descend on the area. In January, US border authorities processed 176,000 migrants, a big drop from December although still a high number. But the pressure has not disappeared: there are already reports that, since the start of February, the migrant flows have shifted to the parts of the border in Arizona and California.

A decisive solution remains elusive. The successive governments of Obama, Trump and now Biden have all worked to get Mexico to slow down the migrant flow using a range of incentives and threats, but the crisis has only grown. And last week, this cooperation was threatened by a tangential matter. Three media outlets, including the investigative organisation ProPublica, released stories relating to an old Drug Enforcement Administration probe into a cartel that allegedly financed the 2006 election campaign of Mexican President Andrés Obrador. The President reacted angrily, accusing the US State Department of plotting against him, and said this could threaten how Mexico was containing the migrants. Biden was forced to personally call Obrador and made clear the two were “committed to continuing their productive partnership”.

Thus the situation on the ground remains critical but stable. Travelling with Mexican investigative journalist Juan Alberto Cedillo, I head north of Piedras Negras. As we trek along a dirt path, a police car speeds over to check who we are. We show our press IDs and move on. While Juan holds back, I head further into the hills and see a movement in the trees. Walking into the woodland, I spot the khaki of uniforms and see two soldiers crouched with a dog and their guns.

Unlike the troops in town, they aren’t friendly. They demand I hand over my phone and, when I refuse, they threaten to set the dog on me. They are tense, looking through my phone and accusing me of making a call to give their location away. When Juan rings, they put him on speaker and I say I am being detained. He quickly alerts a group of journalists who keep an eye on security. Eventually, the soldiers check by radio and confirm I’d been checked out by the police. I am allowed to walk away.

Early the following day, I make the journey everyone is here for, crossing the bridge into Eagle Pass and the United States. The convoy to “take our border back” had been staying at a ranch north of the city. There were reportedly a few hundred attendees, far fewer than some had hoped, or feared, and no violence. There had been similar, smaller convoys to Yuma, Arizona and San Ysidro, California. Governor Abbott, along with 13 other Republican governors, is holding a press conference inside Shelby Park but the convoy members aren’t allowed in. Most have headed home but there are still a few in downtown Eagle Pass.

Many of the convoy members are retirees in their 70s, and don’t at all fit the profile of ferocious MAGA insurrectionists. I talk for a long while with a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran from Texas and Frank Lite, a 60-year-old businessman from Tennessee. They are both strong conservatives, and say that while they are fine with legal immigration, the border needs to be secured. And they enthusiastically support the Texas governor’s taking the park, “1,000%,” as Lite puts it. “He should have done this three years ago.”

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Walking down the street, I talk to another group of retirees from the convoy, including a former airplane mechanic and his school teacher wife who drove a thousand miles from Florida, picking up others on the way. They all seem in a festive mood and talk about meeting good Christians while protesting to close the border. Outside Shelby Park itself, there is a counter-demonstration of activists protesting the National Guard’s seizure of the park. “Our river, our land,” says one banner. “Trump for prison,” says another. An elderly member of the convoy in a wheelchair lightly heckles them from across the road.

Jesse G. Herrera, 70, a retired poet in the counter-protest, says the park should be used by the residents. “It’s a city park. It’s not a state park. It’s not a federal park. It belongs to the people.” When I ask about the razor wires, he is dismissive. “It’s a waste of money. It’s not doing anything, it’s a joke. It’s political theatre.” Inside the park itself, TV crews are getting ready to film the governors. I find Jacob Tackett, an army veteran of Afghanistan from Virginia, and Nolan Meeks, who works for a body armour company in California. They flew down to document the event, thinking it would be far bigger.

Tackett said he was especially keen to verify the claims of whether there was a genuine stand-off between federal and state forces. And, after speaking to the troops, he said the reality was far more peaceful than reports made out. “The most poignant quote I got was from a company commander. His phrase was: ‘If you look at our Humvees, none of them have guns mounted on the trucks. What does that tell you?’” The supposed militarisation of the border is clearly an exaggeration, Tackett says. “If there were a stand-off, there would be guns mounted on trucks. And clearly that isn’t the situation. Clearly, the federal authorities were happy to have the assistance.”

Before the politicians arrive, the troops set up a backdrop in front of the river with Humvees and soldiers and barbed wire. The 14 governors arrive in a convoy of armoured vehicles, and then give short speeches that are live-streamed on Facebook. “Now that we have taken control of this area, for the past three days, there is an average of only three people crossing illegally in this area,” Abbott says. I walk back into Mexico along with Tackett and Meeks and watch the rest of the governor press conference from the Mexican side.

Looking down on Shelby Park, you can see what a small section of border it represents. Whatever Abbott has achieved here is no gamechanger. Tackett says that seeing the border for himself shows how much both sides distort the issue for their bases. “It’s very clearly a dog and pony show to drive donations,” he says. “There is a corrupted incentive structure from the conservative side of the house not to fix the problem either… The migrants themselves are the currency.”

Having spent two decades covering America’s southern border with Mexico, it’s hard to disagree with him. Forces deep within their political and economic systems lack the will or ability to solve an overwhelming problem, yet know fully well how it can be deployed to make hay on the airwaves. The result isn’t just a setting for hope and tragedy — but a stage for political theatre.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador claimed the migrants themselves had started the inferno, after burning mattresses in protest at their treatment. But witnesses denied this, claiming that they were stripped of possessions, including lighters, when they were processed. Whatever the cause, the fire, which claimed the lives of at least 38 victims, is a potent symbol of the dysfunction that reigns on the US-Mexican border.

The grim reality, of course, is that it is just one symbol among many. Two weeks before the fire, hundreds of asylum seekers, mostly Venezuelan, amassed on a bridge crossing and stormed past the guards on the Mexican side of the bridge — only to run into a thick line of armed officers on the US side. The attempted rush ended in failure.

Perhaps more than any other, the border problem is the most divisive issue in the United States. And of all the concerns surrounding it, the contested status of asylum provokes some of the most emotive responses. But amid all the bipartisan furore lies a simple truth: the effective collapse of the asylum system can be blamed on both Republicans and Democrats.

There are now almost 1.6 million asylum seekers in the US awaiting hearings, with an average wait of over four years. The number has increased seven-fold since 2014, rising steadily under Obama, Trump, and now Biden. A decade of internecine political battles has bent the asylum system out of shape, with measures being constantly introduced, rescinded, and challenged, in a splattering of judicial cases that reach all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Most recently, both Trump and Biden have failed to get a legal handle on the situation. A pandemic measure to expel people who have been in a foreign country with a communicable disease, known as Title 42, was first used under Trump in 2020, repurposing a clause from a 1944 health law. Despite Biden promising to throw it out, Title 42 is still used, and is applied arbitrarily in different areas on different days to different nationalities. Last summer, meanwhile, Biden revoked a previous agreement made by Trump in 2019, which stipulated that applicants wait in Mexico for processing, encouraging refugee camps to spring up in cartel-controlled cities. Since then, thousands of migrants have been stuck in Mexico, while the camps simply re-emerged over time. Migrants who do make it over can be flown or bused thousands of miles, only to be expelled over a different section of the border.

Those who manage to stay in the US face a different form of bureaucratic chaos. A private contractor was paid to put ankle monitors on some of those released, but was recently found to be misreporting its numbers. Elsewhere, asylum seekers are being released from detention centres without the documents they need to appear in court. “It’s in really terrible shape,” says immigration lawyer Vinesh Patel, who says it could mean the numbers of asylum seekers are even higher than the records show.

On the ground, hopefuls trying to cross are confronted by mixed messages and haphazard rulings. Outside a shelter in El Paso, I meet Anthony Zamora, a 33-year-old barber from Venezuela. In November, Zamora fled his home in Caracas after a government-backed militia threatened him for not paying extortion. “They are extremists,” he says. “They would kill me.”

Zamora travelled over land through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, where he arrived in Juárez and tried to use a US government app to apply for asylum. After weeks of it not working, he crossed the river and handed himself to border patrol agents to make his case. From there, he was flown 700 miles to San Diego, where he was ejected back into Mexico under Title 42. On the Mexican side, Zamora caught a bus back to Juárez and crossed again into El Paso. This time, he has successfully begun an asylum application. “Thanks to God, I have started the process,” he says. “I am waiting for my audience. I want to explain why I fled.”

This crisis has its root in the dramatic rise in those arriving at the border to claim asylum. During the Nineties and 2000s, the majority of those crossing the border without papers were Mexicans looking for work. The busiest corridor was the Sonora Desert, where the Border Patrol made the largest number of arrests, usually returning people to their homeland. Since 2014, however, the majority arriving are from across Latin America. Rather than trekking over the desert, they head to the Rio Grande, which is closer when you traverse Mexico from Guatemala. And an increasing number apply for asylum.

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Dating from 1951, US asylum law states that “any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States… irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum”. This can be lost in some news coverage of the border, which frequently discards the nuance between economic migrants and asylum seekers, the latter of whom are purportedly fleeing for their lives and freedom. This line can already be blurred in the first place when people are running from both bullets and hunger.

Today, the influx of asylum seekers from Latin America is partly a consequence of a swing back to authoritarian governments in the region over the last decade. The most severe case is Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro’s regime has jailed hundreds of political prisoners and where GDP plummeted by roughly three-quarters between 2014 and 2021, leaving millions malnourished. Since 2015, more than seven million people have fled the country, an exodus even greater than that from Syria. Cuba and Nicaragua also have authoritarian governments and correspondingly high numbers of asylum seekers.

The past decade has also seen a significant uptick in gang and cartel violence. These groups, from Mexico to Venezuela, don’t only traffic drugs but work hand-in-glove with national police to rig votes, steal oil, and help smuggle people across the border — including those running from the gangs themselves. Known as coyotes or polleros (chicken herders), people smugglers have networks that reach across the US and throughout Latin America. They move people over deserts, across rivers, around the border in boats, and under it through tunnels.

In the last decade, those heading north have also gradually become more aware of their right to claim asylum. The UN Refugee Agency has campaigned widely, handing out pamphlets on the road. Activist groups have also grown and helped organise migrant caravans of people marching northward. Smugglers themselves will also promote the fact that people can claim asylum, offering to take migrants over the border where they can hand themselves into Border Patrol. Overall, migrant smuggling in Mexico is now a huge business, making an estimated $14 billion a year.

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Back in the US, when the asylum seekers finally get a day in court, most are turned away. This is because asylum laws favour those who are persecuted for being a religious or ethnic minority or for their political views, rather than those fleeing gangsters. According to one recent analysis, the rejection rate was 87% for Hondurans, 86% for Guatemalans, and 85% for Mexicans, while Venezuelans had a much higher success rate of 55%. “Venezuela and Nicaragua present more clear-cut cases of political persecution,” says Patel. But the rejections do not dissuade people from applying, especially when they can wait four years inside the United States for their hearing. Quite the opposite: this delay only encourages more people to come.

Meanwhile, despite Republican perceptions, the Biden administration is currently trying to make it more difficult for asylum seekers. It has, for instance, continued to liberally apply Title 42, with between 60,000 and 100,000 expelled under it every month in 2021 and 2022. And last month, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule that would make “certain noncitizens” ineligible for asylum if they transited third countries before reaching the United States. This could be a game-changer, effectively stopping anyone except neighbouring Mexicans or Canadians from asking for asylum. But it could also get thrown out in court, with advocacy groups arguing it directly contravenes the 1951 law. The Trump administration attempted a similar measure in 2019 and a judge struck it down. “Biden is becoming Expeller-in-Chief,” says Rubén García, who manages a migrant hostel in El Paso.”He is out Trumping Trump.”

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Perhaps the only way to fix this intractable crisis would be for politicians to have an honest debate. Do Americans want to honour the spirit of the Refugee Convention they approved in 1951 and make it function properly? Or do they want to change the law itself ? A choice needs to be made. The alternative — squeezing an already broken system — clearly isn’t working.

It is hard to make sense of such debates on the ground, though, far removed from the corridors of power. Outside a migrant hostel in the city of Tijuana, I meet Jose Luis Aguilar, a 27-year-old from El Salvador who fled his home with his wife and two children after he was shot by gang members. He was unsure how to apply for asylum and the hostel managers had stopped giving out information. “I am just trying to get by day by day,” he told me. “I thank God I survived and I pray we will find a way.”

Bitcoin Beach, with its old shacks and gleaming new hotels, is home to an eclectic mix from El Salvador, the United States and beyond. Its residents include investors and fishermen, YouTubers and surfers, former beauty queens and former mercenaries. It is more than just a beach club; it is a symbolic landmark of an 18-month-old experiment to promote the cryptocurrency in El Salvador, whose economy is otherwise driven by farming, sweatshops and migrant remittances.

Salvador’s Bitcoin project is championed by globe-trotting entrepreneurs, known as “Bitcoiners”, but is also a key policy of President Nayib Bukele, a 41-year-old former marketing executive who has revolutionised politics for San Salvador’s six million inhabitants. Bukele is most famous for his crackdown on gangs, having suspended civil liberties and incarcerated 1% of the population. But while he has taken an authoritarian approach on crime, in Bitcoin he has embraced a flagship of many libertarians — the controversial blockchain system for digital payment transactions created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin crept onto the world stage in 2008 and gradually rose in value, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars by the late 2010s. Amid various downturns and scandals (most recently the collapse of the FTX exchange), many dismiss the currency, but it still attracts investment and hardened Bitcoiners insist it will eventually replace physical cash. In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to declare Bitcoin a legal currency, alongside its use of the US dollar. All Salvadorans received the equivalent of $30 if they signed up to the state-approved “Chivo Wallet”, while Bukele spent $100 million from Salvador’s state coffers on the crypto, shortly before it crashed, immediately diminishing this investment to $66 million. Despite this, Bukele announced “volcano bonds” to raise money for a tax-free Bitcoin City near the Conchagua volcano on the Gulf of Fonseca. At the 2021 Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference in El Salvador, Bukele was introduced with a giant screen displaying an avatar of him in his trademark hipster beard as a flying saucer beamed him down to earth.

For all the fanfare, it’s hard to figure out the mechanics of Bukele’s scheme, such as how Bitcoin City will pay for garbage collection with no tax. It is also unclear what the incentives are, with critics claiming it is really designed to attract money launderers. Like the currency itself, the experiment seems to mean different things to different people, have varying applications (some useful, some shams) and is as much about the image as the product. In short, Bitcoin El Salvador is as cryptic as the virtual money itself.

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Likewise, it’s hard to classify exactly what Bitcoin Beach is. It is not an official district (and is not on Google Maps) but is part of an area called El Zonte. The Californian surfer, businessman and evangelical Christian Michael Peterson is credited with devising the concept in 2019, helping inspire Bukele to launch the currency nationally. Peterson had been visiting El Zonte for over a decade and conducted charity work through a non-profit called Missionsake. The Bitcoin Beach website describes itself as a Salvadoran initiative that Missionsake supports, and the beach as “a sustainable Bitcoin Economic ecosystem… where the majority of people do not have access to bank accounts”. However, while almost all businesses in the area accept the crypto, it’s unclear how many of their transactions use it; one vendor tells me it’s only a tiny amount and he uses those sales for savings.

The project headquarters can be found at Hope House, a white building emblazoned with an orange Bitcoin logo. There, I meet Jorge Valenzuela, a 33-year-old “coordinator” from Zonte. Valenzuela says Bitcoin Beach is registered as an educational and social project which has taught local youths to get a foot in the financial system. But he concedes there are other goals, too. “We can do transactions in Bitcoin and it works. But beyond this there is tourism, economy, new jobs, opportunities, many journalists coming here to see what is going on,” he says. “We have changed the country now. The country of pupusas. The country of waves. The country of Bitcoin. The country of good people. Now nobody is remembering a bad country.”

As successful Bitcoiners have shown, crypto can be promoted not just as a currency or investment but as a lifestyle choice, involving living by the beach, working remotely, and rejecting government interference. Down the road in a gated community, I meet some of those attracted to this newfound libertarian side of Salvador. Nicki and James are a pair of Bitcoiners who moved from New Zealand in early 2022. James was an early adopter of Bitcoin from an entrepreneurial family; Nicki worked in finance. They met during the pandemic as New Zealand’s lockdown restrictions were getting increasingly harsh, especially for the unvaccinated. “They made a two-tier society. You couldn’t go to a café. You couldn’t get your hair cut. You couldn’t do all those things,” Nicki says.

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Then, in November 2021, El Salvador became one of the first countries in the world to remove all Covid travel restrictions. Nicki and James sold up, said goodbye to their families and began a new life by the Pacific, as well as a new YouTube show. Like the few hundred foreign Bitcoiners in the country, they do a mixture of remote work and social media in addition to investing in crypto. As well as saving Bitcoin, they also spend it at the local stores, using apps that can facilitate rapid transactions. “It’s really important for us to utilise it in both ways,” says Nicki. “Eventually, it would be really great to see the fiat system go.” James sees their decision as political: “We literally moved our monetary choices and our time spent to another currency system in another country,” he says. “That’s a really strong vote in our mind.”

The most famous Bitcoiners in the area are Max Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert, formerly co-hosts of a financial news show on Russia Today. They are considered advisers to Bukele on Bitcoin, a badge that Keiser proudly announces on his Twitter handle to his half a million followers. Their podcast “Orange Pill” applauds Bukele, and discusses Bitcoin in terms laced with near-religious zealotry. “There is always a counterforce for everything in the universe, and Bitcoin is the counterforce to all this: that money-printing; those warmongers; those plunderers,” Herbert said in a recent episode. “Bitcoin cannot be stopped.”

One area where Bitcoin could certainly take off is with remittances, the money migrants send home from their work abroad, mostly in the US. In 2021, migrants wired $7.5 billion to El Salvador, representing more than a quarter of its entire GDP. They often send it in small amounts to their families, and pay high fees using transfer services such as Western Union. Bitcoin, with its blockchain technology, could massively reduce these.

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In the more deprived areas of the capital San Salvador, however, residents seem less enthusiastic. Flogging bananas on a stall in the Margaritas slum, Yamileth Gonzalez, 40, says she received her initial $30 with the Chivo Wallet but hasn’t used it since. “It’s fiddly. A hassle. I prefer cash,” she says, although she is a firm Bukele supporter. Meanwhile, less than 2% of remittances used crypto. The migrants sweating in fields and restaurants seem to lack the patience and trust to turn their earnings into Bitcoin. This isn’t too surprising: many cryptocurrency ATMs in the country appear to be broken. Standing on a street corner in San Salvador, I watch a line of people try to use one, only to walk away empty-handed.

Yet a few streets away, there are signs of El Salvador’s Bitcoin revolution taking shape. Outside Chivo Pets, a government pet hospital that charges in Bitcoin, a trail of dog owners bursts out of the waiting room and onto the street. Here, customers who pay in Bitcoin are charged massively reduced fees — just a few dollars for hundreds of dollars worth of treatment. One queuing dog-owner, Veronica Serrano, tells me she is not a supporter of Bukele but thinks that launching Bitcoin was a popular policy, despite people not using it much. “People like the idea of Bitcoin because it seems modern and futuristic. It seems like we are going forward,” she says.

This strikes me as a key motivation for Bukele, a marketing executive who is very tuned in to the image of his policies. In terms of its PR value, for Bukele, the country’s broken crypto ATMs are a sideshow. As long as places like Bitcoin Beach and Chivo Pets continue to succeed and dominate the headlines, there will always be a victory for him to sell.

In a twist of fate, however, García Luna is now himself on trial in New York, accused of pocketing millions of dollars from those same kingpins after helping them traffic tons of cocaine to America. The trial, which began on 17 January in a federal court in Brooklyn and is expected to last eight weeks, breaks new ground in the drug war. Since Richard Nixon first declared a war on drugs in 1971, the US has taken down a vast array of Mexican traffickers — most famously Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was convicted in the same Brooklyn courthouse in 2019. But never before has such a high-ranking Mexican official faced a US jury on drug charges.

Journalists and activists have for years pointed out that it is no use targeting the mobsters if you don’t go after their political protection. This case therefore marks a serious turning point for US law enforcement. But it also rings alarm bells. The level of corruption alleged by the witnesses goes beyond anything I’ve seen in my two decades covering Mexico’s drug war. At the very least, the trial is deeply embarrassing for Washington’s drug agents and politicians who schmoozed with García Luna. (There are photos of him with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder.) More seriously, the far-reaching allegations also suggest that, unless the United States can reduce the amount that Americans spend on illegal drugs — estimated at close to $150 billion a year in one study — this narco corruption may just carry on with catastrophic consequences.

What’s more, it is by no means guaranteed that the jury will convict García Luna. In his opening argument, defence lawyer César de Castro claimed the prosecution does not have hard evidence that his client led a double life as law enforcer and crime boss. “No money. No photos. No videos. No texts. No emails. No records,” De Castro said. “No credible, believable, plausible evidence Mr García Luna helped the cartels.”

Prosecutors are, however, using the testimony of so-called cooperating witnesses, including scarred and grizzly cartel operatives who could have made deals with prosecutors to take the stand. Some have confessed to killing multiple victims and were major traffickers. Before the trial started, the judge even had to rule that the defence could not ask them about potential acts of cannibalism — a practice that various gangsters have been found to engage in — because it might be “distracting”.

As the jury was selected, prosecutors rigorously made sure the candidates agreed they could believe such witnesses and convict someone on their evidence, even if it were not backed up by physical proof. If the jury were to find García Luna not guilty, it would be, as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Tuesday, “a fiasco — the agencies and government of the United States would look very bad”. There is a lot at stake.

When I met García Luna back in 2005, when he was a rising star as the head of a federal investigative agency dubbed as Mexico’s FBI, he struck me as underwhelming, largely because he mumbled and stuttered. But he was convincing in his argument that Mexican law enforcement had to change to meet the new challenges. This was a time when gangland murders in Mexico were on the rise and Mexican traffickers had usurped Colombians as the biggest gangsters on the continent, smuggling the lion’s share of cocaine, heroin and crystal meth over the Rio Grande.

The following year, García Luna rose to a cabinet-level role under President Calderón, who ordered soldiers and police on a national offensive against the cartels. García Luna revolutionised the federal police, increasing it from a force of 6,000 to 37,000 officers. He also tried to salvage its image, financing a TV soap opera called El Equipo, in which good-looking cops went on daring operations. Moreover, Calderón crafted the Merida Initiative with Washington to increase cooperation in the fight. Under it, the United States provided Mexican law enforcement with billions of dollars in equipment and training, including Black Hawk helicopters and wiretap gear. García Luna also forged strong relationships with agents from across the US security apparatus.

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At first, this new war on cartels appeared to bear fruit. In 2007, Mexican marines made the world’s biggest ever cocaine bust, a seizure of 23 tons off the Pacific coast. Kingpins who had long evaded justice were shot dead. Detained cartel suspects were made to record confession videos, like that of Tyson, in which they detailed serial murders.

But then violence erupted, with relentless firefights, execution-style hits and massacres. I covered much of this bloodshed — a grim period spent discovering bullet-ridden corpses on the street and watching too many mothers screaming in grief. By the time President Calderón left office in 2012, Mexico was suffering from a humanitarian crisis of mass graves and disappearances that remain unsolved. For his part, García Luna left Mexico for Florida to set up a security consulting company and rent a luxury beach house.

Seeing García Luna in the first days of the trial, he cut a transformed figure, silver-haired and beaten down by prison, where he has been since his 2019 arrest. Yet he also looked calm and alert to all the technicalities of the trial, occasionally smirking and blowing kisses to his wife. The first government witness was Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a hulking enforcer known as El Grande, a former police officer who was recruited by the Sinaloa Cartel. The fact that Villarreal was in the police before the mob is not a freak occurrence, but revealing of Mexico’s history: the country’s cartels grew from their humble beginnings as peasant farmers with the help of corrupt networks in the security forces. The career path between gangsters and police officers was like a revolving door.

Villarreal described seeing his boss, the kingpin Arturo “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva, meet García Luna in a safe house in the south of Mexico City and hand over bribe payments in duffel bags and cardboard boxes — worth more than a million dollars a month — on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. In return, García Luna allowed the cartel’s cocaine to travel through Mexico, busted its rivals and passed on police intelligence. “Everything ran perfectly. It was the best investment they made,” he said. One time, the cartel used this intelligence to steal two tons of cocaine from rivals, Villarreal testified, and split the profits with García Luna himself.

Such testimony was expected in this trial. But what Villarreal then described was remarkable. The cartel, he explained, would make false cocaine bricks and swap them with police for real cocaine that had been seized. Another time, the mobsters dressed up as police, arrested a rival and then handed him over to the real officers. On one occasion, the cartel kidnapped García Luna and brought him before The Beard because he wasn’t answering the telephone.

Villarreal also explained how the cartel’s close relationship with corrupt police actually succeeded in reducing Mexico’s murder rate for a period in 2007, just when Calderon’s offensive seemed to be going well. But then, he said, the deals inside the cartels fell apart and the violence soared. One of the biggest battles was between Beltrán Leyva and his childhood friend “El Chapo”, which ended with Beltrá Leyva being gunned down by Mexican marines.

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In 2019, I covered a stretch of El Chapo’s trial, which was more enthusiastically embraced by the New York media. Everyone wanted to be in the courtroom and see such an infamous mobster and his beauty-queen wife in the gallery. US cable networks ran regular segments on the trial’s revelations, whether it was El Chapo running through a tunnel naked to escape marines or his former lover taking the stand and crying while his wife chuckled. García Luna’s trial, by contrast, has garnered far less attention. But in some ways, the revelations are more important in showing how corrupted Mexico’s institutions are and why the country is so violent.

The trial might act as a deterrent to make Mexican officials think twice before blatantly taking cartel bribes. Mexican President López Obrador certainly looks upbeat when he talks about it in his morning press conferences, saying it shows how corrupt the previous administration was. Yet the trial also symbolises something uncomfortable about modern-day Mexico. It is notable, for instance, that the trial is in New York not Mexico City. Mexican judges have convicted generals and state governors for working with drug gangs, but not an official as powerful as García Luna — or a former president. And as long as the country’s security forces find more sophisticated ways of taking bribes, such as using intermediaries, this looks unlikely to change. Perhaps even more depressing is the fact that since García Luna has gone, the cartels have shifted to more perilous synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, which are driving a far worse rate of overdoses in the United States.

Everything has changed since, and not necessarily for the better. In his testimony, El Grande also talked about the glitter of narco wealth; how his boss The Beard had a fleet of cars, including a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and a Rolls Royce, and pets including a white tiger and black panther. Amid such opulence, achieving justice for the deaths on both sides of the border will be an extraordinary, if impossible, challenge. While the stories of El Grande, The Beard, and El Chapo may dominate the headlines, they are far removed from the bloody conflict that has consumed Mexico — and the decaying corpses still being dug up in mass graves.

This situation has radically changed since March, however, when President Nayib Bukele launched an unprecedented and brutal crackdown on gangs, involving mass imprisonment. “It’s a huge improvement,” Alas tells me, explaining that the maras on her block have disappeared. “Now we can go outside when we like. Our family can come and visit us. No president has cared about us here before.”

Alas’s comments reflect the widespread support for the anti-gang offensive and for Bukele: a December survey found 87.8% of voters approved of him, making him the most popular president on the continent, perhaps even the world. Such popularity contrasts sharply with the harsh rebuke of Bukele’s crackdown by human rights groups, journalists and members of the US Congress.

This gang offensive, though, is ruthless and violates human rights. Following a record 62 murders in a day, Bukele beseeched his legislative assembly to pass a State of Emergency on March 27, and ordered heavily-armed military units to move into the barrios — the poor neighbourhoods where most people live. “No terrorist involved in the wave of violence against the Salvadoran people will go unpunished,” Public Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro posted on Twitter, a favoured communication tool of the government. “We will take them off the street and put them behind bars.”

Since then, more than 60,000 people have been imprisoned — 1% of the entire population — adding to another 40,000 already in jail. It’s a mass incarceration comparable with some of the harshest regimes and wars in history — the equivalent of locking up more than three million in the United States in under a year.

Outside the Mariona prison, in the northern outskirts of the capital San Salvador, hundreds of family members are gathered, mostly mothers and wives, waiting to pass on packages of rice, cornflakes, soap and even prison uniforms to their loved ones. Javiera Maricela, 37, describes how police and soldiers called on her house in a farming village in April and took away her 20-year-old son, saying he would be processed and returned. She has had no contact with him since and does not know if he is still in that prison, let alone alive.

“The lack of information is torturous,” Maricela says. Like most of the detainees, her son is charged with a crime called “agrupaciones ilícitas”, roughly translated as “gang affiliation”, although it applies to those who help gangs as well as actual members. It carries a maximum sentence of 30 years, or 45 years for gang leaders.

Through a contact, I meet a prisoner who succeeded in getting his charges dropped and being released from Mariona. He describes how he was crammed into a cell with 162 inmates and the stink of faeces, had his ribs broken by guards, and frequently heard the screams of prisoners being tortured. During his month in jail, he says, he saw five corpses being carted out. Human rights groups have documented 90 deaths in prisons since the emergency was declared, although many believe the real number is much higher.

“Many of those captured are innocent,” says Samuel García, a former government official who has founded the Victims of the Regime Movement. “The families have proof but the regime doesn’t care. Bukele is very Machiavellian… What he is doing is illegal. He has broken the rule of law.”

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Despite this, the crackdown remains popular and has certainly had an immense impact on reducing crime. For decades, the two main gangs, the MS-13 and Barrio 18, brazenly controlled barrios, towns and villages across El Salvador. New members committed murders as part of their initiation and continued to kill to elevate their status in their “clique”, or gang chapter. And it was not only other gangsters who were gunned down. Civilians could be murdered for simply walking on the wrong street. I recently spoke to one woman who was gang-raped when she travelled from a Barrio 18 neighbourhood where she lived to visit her mother in MS-13 turf. In the worst atrocity, in 2010, maras torched and shot up a bus killing 17 people.

I have interviewed dozens of gang members in visits over the years; you could often find them openly hanging out in the centre of neighbourhoods. But since the state of emergency, their presence has been greatly reduced: Maras are largely in prison, have fled, or are underground. The number of murders, as a result, has plummeted. Last year, El Salvador’s government reported that there were 496 homicides — a murder rate of about 8 per 100,000, which is lower than the United States for the first time on record. Back in 2015, El Salvador suffered 105 murders per 100,000, making it the most homicidal country on the planet.

“It’s like if you have a patient with cancer, the doctor has to use chemotherapy,” says Tito Elias Ponce, who works in a government agency for barrio outreach. “These criminals are like a cancer for El Salvador.” When I meet Ponce, he is working with youths painting up walls of a slum. As well as wielding the stick, Bukele offers the carrot of rehabilitating poor areas, building football pitches and community centres.

Nearby, I spot a 23-year-old soldier from the motorised infantry who has pulled over at a stand to buy pupusas, a popular Salvadoran food. The soldier claims that the troops are welcomed in the barrios and he denies that innocent people are being carted off. “Some of them may not be full gang members but they are involved in some way,” he says. “We have found messages on their phone or something. Of course, the mothers will protest. For a mother, her son is always an angel.” This claim that no innocent people are swept up seems dubious considering the sheer scale of the arrests. Detainees are stood before judges in mass closed hearings, so it is unclear how convincing the evidence is. Meanwhile, citizens are urged to inform on gang members, which could encourage people to finger anyone they have a beef with.

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One reason the crackdown is so popular is that Salvadorans are fed up with gang extortion. Unlike Mexican and Colombian gangsters, maras are not big players in drug trafficking but make their money shaking down everyone from bus drivers to grocery store owners. The emergency has reduced extortion, according to reports, but lingering shakedowns remain a part of daily life. I meet a taxi driver whose base used to pay both the main gangs, but now only pays one, whose member actually drives a taxi there. “I am paying these criminals half the amount I used to,” he says “But at least that means I have more money in my pocket.”

The second reason so many Salvadorans support the offensive is more deep-rooted, a consequence of them living most of their lives in warlike conditions. Between 1980 and 1992, a civil war between a series of Right-wing US-backed governments and a Left-wing guerrilla movement tore the country apart. Young refugees largely fled to Los Angeles, where they formed gangs to protect themselves in violent inner-city neighbourhoods. And when they were deported, they turned to crime in their shattered homeland and found plenty of willing recruits among the war orphans and scarred veterans. El Salvador’s new rulers promised peace, democracy and respect for human rights. But the country was drowned in the blood of gang warfare.

Bukele, the son of a wealthy businessman of Palestinian descent, first joined the party of the former guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. I interviewed him in 2017 when he was mayor of San Salvador and he spoke of rehabilitating the barrios and rescuing young men from a life of crime. He won the presidency on a populist platform, railing against the corrupt elites, and formed his own party to smash the power of the old guard in the midterms.

By 2021, Bukele had halved the homicide count, but he is accused of doing this by reviving a truce with the gangs. According to reports by the independent news outlet El Faro, the truce gave gang leaders better treatment in prisons and allowed the gangs to carry on with their shakedowns while they dialled down the murder rate. It was only after this truce broke down with a spree of killings that Bukele launched his State of Emergency. Bukele denies this pact, though many Salvadorans I spoke to don’t care much if it is true; they simply want less violence.

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Yet it remains to be seen if the drop in murders now secured by the State of Emergency will hold in the long run. The gangs may be in hiding now but they could regroup, and perhaps turn to guerrilla tactics. It is also tough and expensive to keep almost 2% of the population behind bars. To achieve this, Bukele is constructing a new mega prison, baptised the “Centre for Confinement of Terrorism”, which he claims will hold 40,000 inmates.

Meanwhile, the external criticism looks unlikely to make Bukele shift course. US Congressman James McGovern called the crackdown “draconian”, while Amnesty International warned of “a human rights crisis”. Elsewhere, the US Treasury has sanctioned several officials close to Bukele on corruption allegations, freezing their bank accounts and banning them from entering the States. But there is not much more leeway for Washington to pressure Bukele. Sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have not stopped human rights abuses there. What’s more, the idea of a return to a more interventionist US foreign policy in Latin America inspires wrath on both the Left and Right these days.

On the flip side, other Latin American governments are taking note of Bukele’s approach. Over the border in Honduras, President Ximora Castro, the country’s first female leader, has launched her own partial state of emergency to fight gangs. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has largely abandoned his call for “hugs not bullets” to bolster the army.

Outside a San Salvador church, I watch a dozen mothers light candles and pray for their loved ones behind bars. They share stories, their faces full of torment from not knowing whether their sons will ever return. I wonder if support for this mass incarceration shows a tyranny of the majority, and these are the victims. Or if the benefits could outweigh the injustices. Or if one evil has simply been replaced by another evil. But the truth is, Bukele has only arisen because of a failure to deal with an immense problem of organised crime that is a central issue for most people here. And unless liberal governments in Latin America can find a better solution that works in practice, not just rhetoric, we will surely encounter more authoritarian populists and more mega prisons in the years to come.

Ye Gon was making his fortune, say US and Mexican prosecutors, by importing the flu medicine pseudoephedrine from Chinese labs and selling it to Mexican gangsters who cooked it into crystal meth to traffic to the United States. A fan of high-stakes poker, Ye Gon was then jetting to Las Vegas, where he lost $125 million at tables (a casino was later ordered to hand over much of this to the US government) and bought a million-dollar home for a casino hostess. After a lengthy legal battle, Ye Gon was extradited back here to Mexico, where he sits in a high-security prison on drugs, organised crime, money laundering, and weapons charges.

At the time, when I covered the story, Ye Gon appeared to be a passing novelty. Importing chemicals from China contrasted with the cocaine and heroin trade I was investigating, in which you can go to the mountains and witness the peasant farmers harvest coca leaves and opium poppies. It’s apparent now, though, that Ye Gon was a pioneer, and that Mexican cartels have followed his lead to reshape their entire industry — with perilous consequences for Americans.

Since that record bust, Mexican traffickers have gradually shifted the core of their business from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs — those created using man-made chemicals. These include meth and illegally-made fentanyl as well as others, such as ketamine. Synthetic drugs are cheaper to produce and more lethal, with fentanyl many times more powerful than heroin. To churn out these synthetics, cartels followed Ye Gon’s lead to forge an unholy alliance with shady elements of the Asian chemical industry.

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The scales gradually tilted until 2018, when US agents on the border seized more crystal meth than cocaine (both considered “uppers” and party drugs), and 2021, when they also seized more fentanyl than heroin (both considered “downers”). The trend has accelerated in 2022, with US agents nabbing 14,000 pounds of fentanyl, which was seven times the amount of heroin, and 175,000 pounds of meth, two-and-a-half times the amount of cocaine.

Marijuana was once a big cash crop for Mexican traffickers, but border seizures have plummeted since 2012, when US states began legalising recreational weed. Further south, Colombia is still producing enormous amounts of cocaine, but much is now going to the booming European market. Meanwhile, the biggest shipments to, and profits from, the United States are in synthetics. This paradigm shift has transformed the logistics of Mexican drug trafficking.

Traditionally, drug trafficking relied on plantations of poppies and coca leaves, which are vulnerable to aerial crop spraying. Today, the mass production of synthetic drugs involves two behemoths of globalisation: supply chains of cargo ships, and the pharmaceutical industry. Pacific cities such as Manzanillo, Mexico’s biggest container port, have become bloody trafficking hubs. Pill mills can be anywhere, from quiet Mexican suburbs to right on the border itself.

The cartel shift to synthetics coincides closely with the soaring rise in US drug deaths. Back in 2007, about 27,000 Americans lost their lives in overdoses. By 2021, the number had quadrupled to 107,000 deaths. The majority, 71,000, involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The second highest, 32,000, involved “psychostimulants” including meth. Traffickers are also mixing fentanyl into cocaine and heroin, causing more deaths with those. The rise in overdoses is especially sharp over the last five years, just as busts of fentanyl on the border have soared.

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But beyond the stats is the human pain. Most of the victims are in the prime of their lives and some are teenagers. Millions of parents, siblings, children, and friends bear the loss.

There are various forces behind the US overdose epidemic. Pharmaceutical giants dished out too many legal opioids that fuelled addiction, as courts continue to hear. Shutting down industries in the Rust Belt drove workers to despair, and the pandemic and lockdown were terrible for mental health. But it is hard to deny that changes in the supply of illegal drugs — from cocaine and heroin to synthetic meth and fentanyl — are a major factor behind the ballooning death toll.

Like everything in American life, the overdose epidemic gets dragged into partisan politics. Republicans have sought to take a hard line, lobbying the White House to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and Mexican cartels as terrorist groups. In their midterm attack ads, Republican candidates tied fentanyl deaths to illegal immigration. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed hardest for “harm reduction” programmes, especially in deep-blue cities like San Francisco. But the level of open drug abuse there has drawn fire from both Republicans and moderate Democrats.

After covering the human catastrophe of narco violence here in Mexico for two decades, I have mixed feelings about the latest political row. I have long been a critic of the War on Drugs, which has failed to stop the drug trade while creating a huge black market for ultraviolent cartels. When US states began legalising marijuana, I celebrated it, thinking that the cartels and drug violence could slowly become a thing of the past.

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But the rise of synthetics and the sheer level of overdose deaths have rattled my thinking. It is evident that Mexican traffickers, who work with corrupt officials here, are indeed pumping ever more perilous drugs northward. When cartels mainly moved cocaine and cannabis there was an argument, at least, that they were providing Americans with products they demanded. But with the perilous fentanyl, which some people take unwittingly, there is validity to the claim they are flooding poison over the border. The question remains, however, as to what can be done about it.

In Manzanillo, I sit and watch the vast container ships come into the bay from across the globe and line up to unload their cargo. Last year, the port handled more than 3 million TEU’s (20-foot container units) — a vast amount of cargo for synthetics and their precursors to be hidden in. In a restaurant in the port, I meet up with the owner of a freight company who brings goods in from China. Working in the port for decades, he says smuggling has always been rife but has evolved over time. Today, Mexico’s two most powerful mafias, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, operate there and are always looking for shippers to move their products. “This is the gateway to China and all of Asia,” he says. “They have to be here to get access to chemicals.”

Opioids or precursors can be hidden under a false bill of lading and disguised as a legitimate chemical, he explains. Customs inspectors have to bust open a container and run a test, and while they are doing that, other loads can get through. It can also be hard to keep up with all the different substances. The International Narcotics Control Board lists hundreds of precursors for synthetic drugs, and they are likely scratching the surface. Scientific papers say there are more than 1,400 variants of fentanyl, and that “every year new fentanyl analog compounds, or fentanyls, appear”.

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Smugglers also have another technique, the shipper explains, which they call “remoras” or suckerfish, in which they bring in the contraband alongside legitimate cargo. Before the ship gets into port, the contraband is thrown over the side and taken ashore in small boats. It would, therefore, be difficult to stop the chemicals even if Mexican officials were all honest — which they are not. The shipper explains that intermediaries take bribes and deal with customs so that containers can pass straight through. “I can’t see this changing,” he said. “Only a dictatorship or invasion would stop this.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, claims to fight corruption, and over the last two years he has put elite marine military units in charge of the ports to clamp down on trafficking. “It is translating to more security, less contraband, more decommissions of drugs, above all fentanyl and chemical drugs,” AMLO said in November visiting Manzanillo. “It used to be silver or lead,” he went on, referring to the silver of a bribe or the lead of a bullet. “Now this has changed.”

However, the quantity of drugs being seized on the US border signal that fentanyl and meth are still coming through Mexico in vast quantities. Furthermore, AMLO’s position on cartels and crime is muddled. On the one hand, he has boosted the power of the military, created a new National Guard, and kept soldiers on the streets. On the other hand, he has talked of the need to avoid fighting cartels, and to have “hugs not bullets”.

AMLO’s call for peace is understandable considering the carnage in Mexico. Since President Felipe Calderón launched a military crackdown on cartels in 2006, there have been firefights reminiscent of civil wars, more than 300,000 murders, mass graves, and thousands of disappearances. But in practice, “hugs not bullets” has meant allowing some gangsters to act with impunity. In 2019, after soldiers arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of kingpin “El Chapo”, on an indictment for trafficking drugs including crystal meth, hundreds of gunmen took to the streets of the city of Culiacán. In response, AMLO ordered Guzmán’s release. By bowing to cartel intimidation, AMLO has raised the spectre of a country that is militarised but where powerful gangsters still flout the law.

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Washington has also put pressure on China to stop the chemicals at the source. In 2019, China classified all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances, fulfilling a promise to President Donald J. Trump. However, a US congressional advisory group concluded that Chinese chemists were getting round the ban. “Chinese traffickers are using various strategies to circumvent new regulations, including focusing on chemical precursors, relocating some manufacturing to India, rerouting precursor shipments through third countries, and leveraging marketing schemes to avoid detection,” says the report from 2021 by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

But given China denies its responsibility for the drug epidemic, what can be done about it? If Beijing really clamped down, it could probably reduce the supply in the short term. But there are other countries where precursors could be made. Moreover, as former DEA agent Leo Silva tells me, the cartels are looking to take their drug production to the next step. “These guys are now recruiting chemistry professors from universities so they can actually produce fentanyl in labs,” he says. “Their goal is to create the precursors in Mexico so they can also stop getting the precursors from China and dealing with them… So they can produce more, and keep more profits.”

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