HUNTER: Drug cartel civil war has deadly implications for Canada

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Four decapitated corpses hanging from a bridge are the latest symbol of a civil war tearing apart the violent global drug powerhouse, the Sinaloa Cartel.

And the bloodshed has dire implications for Canada, where the cartel has been allowed to fester and grow in a twisted branch plant endeavour to fuel the world with fentanyl.

At the heart of this fratricidal conflict are the sons of caged drug baron El Chapo, now rotting in Colorado’s Supermax federal prison.

Not everyone in El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel was enthusiastic about the nepotistic ascension of his boys. The result? Chaos and amped up bloodshed. The decapitations were just a quartet of the 20-odd people killed in less than a day in a gangland settling of accounts.

The capital of Sinaloa, Culiacán, has become the frontline for the civil war between Los Chapitos and La Mayiza. So much violence that residents have boarded up their windows, and schools have been closed.

Sinaloa has made billions from drug smuggling on a global basis. Its control of the fentanyl trade has packed morgues from Miami to Montreal. Now, the battle has taken a sinister turn with the El Chapitos aligning with long-time rival, the  Jalisco New Generation Cartel, The New York Times reports.

Experts called the alliance a “risky move” with the potential to turn Jalisco into the Amazon of crime.

“It’s like if the eastern coast of the U.S. seceded during the Cold War and reached out to the Soviet Union,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, of the Brookings Institution, told the Times.

“This has global implications for how the conflict will unfold and how criminal markets will reorganize.”

There were more analogies about the earth-shattering developments and their implications.

“It’s like bringing Messi to your football team,” security analyst Eduardo Guerrero said. “Combining both forces will mean having an enormous global production capacity.”

So far, the Chapitos have exchanged turf for support from Jalisco. The alliance has also been fueled by the Trump administration’s ramped-up efforts against the cartels and squeezing of Mexico to stem the deadly tide of fentanyl.

Los Chapitos, formerly the richest criminal organization in the world, are strapped for cash. A 30% hike in seizures, disruption in the production of fentanyl and the staggering death toll have grievously wounded the cartel.

“Los Chapitos were gasping for air, they couldn’t take the pressure anymore,” one cartel source told the Times. “Imagine how many millions you burn through in a war every day: the fighters, the weapons, the vehicles. The pressure mounted little by little.”

And because the cartel was the biggest, they’ve drawn an outsized amount of attention from Mexican police, the army and U.S. authorities.

“It’s a good thing to dismantle these groups, but it’s almost impossible to achieve a sustained disruption in drug flows,”  said John Creamer, a retired American diplomat.

“You can never truly put a stake through the heart of an entire cartel. You can disrupt and create chaos for them, but the drug trade always bounces back. That’s what makes the drug war so frustrating.”

And in Mexico, the body count continues to soar. Estimates pegged the death toll of the war at more than 1,300, with an additional 1,500 missing.

Already, the cartels have deep roots in Canada and, in particular, the filthy business of fentanyl trafficking. That drug has sent more than 50,000 Canadians to the cemetery, and the epidemic shows no signs of abating.

Like a lot of transnational criminal organizations, the cartels discovered that Canada was a good place to do business. It was safe, penalties laughable and immigration? Very, very accommodating.

Expect to see new battlefronts in the Sinaloa bloodbath soon. Canada will certainly be among them.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HUnterTOSun