How Organized Crime Captured A City In Mexico

The visit is arranged beforehand. There is little lingering at the door: come in, come in, don’t stand out there. The businessman sits down in a chair and offers the sofa. “Water?” He brings two bottles.

“Three weeks ago, they killed a woman right next door. It was in the morning,” he says. A woman who was there wondered why the ambulance had not arrived. “And another woman who was with her said, ‘No, they’re waiting for her to die’… They’ve killed paramedics too, just for treating victims,” explains the businessman, who gives neither his name, nor the nature of his business, nor the neighborhood where he lives, nor his age — nothing. Violence is the currency of the Mexican city of Cuautla, in eastern Morelos, and the man avoids every possible risk. In the kingdom of extortion and retaliatory gunfire, every precaution is justified.

Cuautla has become a national emergency in Mexico, a vivid example of the country’s criminal dysfunction. It is a city shaped by the unchecked influence of criminal groups, which have infiltrated local government while ruling through violence and intimidation.

In May, as part of the federal Security Cabinet’s Operation Swarm against institutional corruption, authorities arrested the backbone of the municipal administration. From the mayor to the treasurer, including the municipal secretary and the chief administrative officer, key officials were taken into custody. One target escaped: the official in charge of markets and the wholesale food distribution center, who remains at large.

The arrests stem from the alleged collaboration of the local government team with a criminal organization linked to the Sinaloa Cartel and Unión Tepito. The group reportedly controlled street vending, the local slaughterhouse, markets, and the cadastral and property-tax offices, among other sectors.

The problem extends beyond the timeframe and scope of the federal government’s efforts under Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. Cuautla reflects a nationwide problem. It is not an exception but rather the rule in many large and small municipalities across Mexico, where powerful political-criminal alliances impose or tolerate systems of extortion and the siphoning of public funds and local economic activity. In this way, criminal organizations prosper and spread across entire regions. What they do in one municipality is repeated in the next. And if not by them, then by others.

The arrests in Cuautla are not isolated cases. Authorities have also detained, in connection with the same matter, the former mayor of Yecapixtla and the current mayor of Atlatlahucan —neighboring municipalities — as well as a mayoral candidate in Atlatlahucan and the former mayor of Ayala, another nearby town.

It all began in an avocado grove. Or at least the latest chapter in the criminal cycle did: the rise of a criminal group, pressure from cartel bosses, the infiltration of local institutions and, finally, public scandal.

Long accustomed to compromising images of its politicians, the state of Morelos learned in February last year that a regional crime boss known as “El Barbas” — apparently linked to the Sinaloa Cartel faction operating out of Guasave and Los Mochis — had been meeting with mayors and other officials from the eastern part of the state, where Cuautla serves as the regional hub. There was even a video of one such meeting, held in the summer of 2024, shortly after the latest local and state elections.

Gathered in an avocado grove in Totolapan, near Cuautla, El Barbas appeared alongside all those arrested in Morelos last month: Cuautla mayor Jesús Corona, of the coalition between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), National Action Party (PAN) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); the mayor of Atlatlahucan, from the same coalition; and Irving Sánchez Zavala, the former PAN mayor of Yecapixtla. Several Cuautla officials also attended, including the chief administrative officer, the municipal secretary, the treasurer and the official in charge of the markets.

Someone recorded the meeting. Someone kept the footage. Then, in February 2025, it was leaked. Authorities opened an investigation, building the case with intelligence reports and witness testimony. A little over a year later, in May, they arrested almost everyone who had attended the gathering.

The arrests have raised a host of questions in Morelos, though not so much about the credibility of the allegations — which had been the subject of local gossip for years — as about the realization that the problem cuts across party lines, spans the political spectrum and long predates the current administration.

After all, Corona himself has served twice as mayor of Cuautla, the first time under the banner of the Morena party, from 2019 to 2021. And then there is the Sánchez Zavala family — three brothers and their father — who, under either the PRI or PAN banner, have dominated politics in Yecapixtla for more than a decade. As a former federal official in Morelos, interviewed by EL PAÍS in recent days, put it: “It’s an interparty organized-crime issue. I don’t think any party or government from the last 15 years is exempt.”

The dealings between criminal organizations and local governments, which change hands every three years, create tensions that build up in overlapping layers. Sooner or later, these arrangements tend to unravel. These arrangements also govern the management of the illegal economy: the extortion of restaurants, bars and factories, as well as the retail drug trade, where competition is fierce. In both spheres, violence is the preferred means of settling disputes.

In Cuautla these days, a former senior local official with first-hand knowledge of the region’s shifting power dynamics over the past 15 years put it bluntly: “The problem began when they were allowed in.” He was referring to the criminals — and to the local bureaucracy, a source of revenue in Mexico every bit as lucrative as drug trafficking.

The great decline

There is always a before and an after, however blurred the dividing line may be. In Cuautla’s case, that line can be traced to the final years of Corona’s first term in office, in 2020 and 2021: the beginning of its great decline.

A source familiar with local politics — who has at times advised federal authorities and requested anonymity — says: “That was when street vending really began to get out of control, a lot of bars opened and stayed open until the early hours, and attacks also started to happen.”

Street vending and bars are not, in themselves, a problem. The issue was who was pulling the strings behind them. Drug sales flourished in the bars.

“Extortion also grew a lot [under the cover of street vending], and everyone was saying it was the Unión Tepito,” the source explains.

At the time, Cuautla and eastern Morelos — a corridor linking the state with Guerrero and Puebla — were in a period of transition. In January 2022, local media published a photograph taken years earlier showing then-governor Cuauhtémoc Blanco, of Morena’s coalition, alongside the two leading criminal figures in eastern Morelos: Irving Solano, known as “El Profe,” and Raymundo Castro, alias “El Ray.”

Also pictured was Homero Figueroa, known as “La Tripa,” who was arrested in Puebla a few weeks ago, shortly after the politicians were arrested in May. During Blanco’s years as mayor of Cuernavaca, La Tripa worked for the city’s water and sewerage system. He and his group, the Comando Tlahuica, had discovered that water could be a lucrative business.

Their logic was simple: seize control of the administrative apparatus and collect residents’ water fees and tanker-truck sales themselves.

By the time that photograph was taken, in December 2018, “El Profe was also trying to take control of the municipal slaughterhouse,” says the source cited earlier, referring to the facility where hundreds of butchers supplying Cuautla and the surrounding area slaughter livestock and purchase meat. Millions of pesos changed hands there every month.

“El Profe and El Ray had their suppliers and forced the butchers to buy from them,” he explains. “Soon after they took control of the cadastre and property tax collection area of the municipality.”

Although the photograph appeared to suggest that both criminals remained at the height of their power until 2022, their heyday had in fact ended much earlier. El Ray was arrested in 2019 and was murdered in prison later that year. El Profe was captured in 2021 and is serving a decades-long prison sentence.

After Corona left office, Rodrigo Arredondo, also from Morena, won the mayoralty of Cuautla. Barely a year into his term, El Barbas arrived on the scene from Sinaloa.

According to a report published by Reforma in late May, citing the investigation triggered by the video of the meeting with the crime boss, El Barbas teamed up with a Unión Tepito leader known as Milton. In Cuautla, the group operated under the name Gente Nueva.

But his leadership was contested, and the power vacuum left by the previous criminal order continued to generate friction. Drug dealers from the earlier era continued operating in the bars of Cuautla and the surrounding area.

“Then they started fighting with the Unión Tepito people,” the source continues.

And the disputes went beyond drug dealing: there were battles over the slaughterhouse, transport routes and extortion rackets. The result was a mounting death toll. In 2023 and 2024, Cuautla recorded more homicides than ever before.

The overlapping layers of criminal groups operating in the region turned Cuautla into a madhouse, a criminal free-for-all. Everyone knew that Unión Tepito operatives were active there; everyone had heard of El Barbas. And everyone assumed that, in between, smaller-time criminals were also trying to get in on the action and make a profit. It became a fever: everybody wanted a piece of the pie.

A businessman from Cuautla recalls a story a police officer told him a few weeks ago.

“A patrol car came across two young men on the highway late one night. Their motorcycle had broken down. The officers stopped and searched their backpack and found two notes inside,” he says. “They were messages they were supposed to deliver to two businesses — a taco stand and a consultancy — telling them to pay protection money.”

According to the businessman, the two youths, both 17, were to be paid 500 pesos each for delivering the notes — about $27.

Extortion is the most visible consequence of the situation in Cuautla and eastern Morelos more broadly, and also the one that causes the greatest harm to ordinary people. From January to May, authorities recorded 313 victims of extortion in the municipality, according to figures from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP), more than double the number recorded during the same period a year earlier.

The figures lend themselves to two interpretations. The first is that the crisis is enormous — worse than ever. The second is that it was already severe before, but that more victims are now coming forward. Beyond that lies another uncertainty: what impact will the severing of one tentacle of the criminal hydra have on a crime as easy to commit as extortion?

Few businesses in the municipality have escaped receiving threatening notes in recent years, messages along the lines of: “You have 15 minutes to call, or you’re fucked, you son of a bitch,” followed by a phone number.

Small scraps of paper left on a counter, in the hope that fear will compel a shopkeeper or business owner to pick up the phone, make the call and become ensnared in the web of organized crime.

The worst part is that no one really knows who is behind what — whether it is criminals embedded in local government or independent operators. Many business owners choose to pay even when they suspect the extortionists may be impostors; they can be dangerous too. Others choose to shut down altogether.

The businessman, who used to run a shop in the city center, did exactly that. The threatening note reached only his second business, but he says the city center ”had deteriorated too much.”

The present

Unless El Barbas — still a fugitive — eventually proves otherwise, the latest criminal cycle in Morelos appears to have been cut short before reaching full maturity. The arrest of La Tripa effectively brought the previous one to a close; the dismantling of El Barbas’s institutional network has dealt a potentially fatal blow to this latest iteration.

The problem is that the criminal playbook is already well established. The strategy of capturing spheres of institutional power has become a standard feature of organized crime. Morelos, and eastern Morelos in particular, has also seen how this dynamic extends beyond municipal governments. One need only look at the chain of killings linked to the leadership of the Association of Users of the Cuautla River (Asurco), a farmers’ organization that has long benefited from royalties paid by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) for its use of the river’s water.

In February 2022, gunmen murdered Francisco Vázquez, chairman of the association’s oversight board. In 2024, Asurco’s then-president, Antonio Domínguez, survived an armed attack at his home. Domínguez, who had also served as mayor of Ayala, a municipality adjacent to Cuautla, stepped down from his position after the attack. He was succeeded by Carolina Plascencia. In September 2025, Plascencia was murdered on a highway.

The circle closed further last week with the arrest of Domínguez and a former associate from his time in Ayala — his municipal secretary. Authorities allegedly found weapons and drugs in their possession.

This sequence of events illustrates the consequences of the struggle for control of the association and its financial resources, even if important pieces of the puzzle remain missing. It is still unclear why Plascencia and Vázquez were killed, why Domínguez was targeted in the first place, or why he has now been arrested.

The senior local official familiar with the region’s shifting power dynamics over the past 15 years argues that the arrest of La Tripa — and his interests and knowledge of the regional water business — ultimately led to Domínguez’s downfall. Local media outlets in Cuautla have reported that the alleged crime boss has entered the Attorney General’s protected-witness programme, although that has not been officially confirmed.

The 2019 murder of activist Samir Flores should be viewed within the same brutal struggle for power and resources that has shaped the region. A resident of Temoac, near Cuautla, Flores belonged to the People’s Front in Defence of Land and Water, which opposed the Morelos Integral Project — a scheme involving two thermoelectric plants, a gas pipeline and an aqueduct serving the area and neighbouring states, and one that also benefited Asurco and the municipality of Cuautla financially. Despite the public outrage sparked by his killing, those who ordered it were never identified. The trial of the only suspect ended with his acquittal in March.

The difficulties in securing justice in this case, as in the others, stem not only from the systemic shortcomings of prosecutors’ offices but also from the strength of the region’s criminal networks.

“Small criminal groups have sprung up in every municipality, without exception,” says the source familiar with local politics in and around Cuautla, who has at times advised federal authorities.

In September 2025, he recalls, authorities arrested a former treasurer of Temoac, known as La Patrona or La Jefa, along with 10 members of the local criminal cell Los Aparicio, who were suspected of involvement in the Flores case. Temoac’s mayor, a relative of La Jefa, had stepped down from office months earlier after surviving an armed attack.

Cuautla and eastern Morelos now find themselves at a crossroads. The apparent end of the most recent criminal cycles raises pressing questions about what comes next. Are new leaders already emerging, waiting only for the next leaked photograph or video to reveal themselves? Have the arrests of public officials and criminal figures achieved anything, or have they merely cleared the way for successors?

The businessman quoted earlier is not especially optimistic. His account is a catalogue of shuttered businesses and executions, of people who paid and others who chose to leave. The decay has reached the point where extortionists distribute threats as casually as advertising flyers.

“They just come and leave the notes, exactly like that,” he says.

With public life corrupted from the top down, the restoration of local institutions appears to be Cuautla’s only real path forward.

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