Teocaltiche is a municipality in rural Jalisco, with a population of just under 40,000, near the border with Aguascalientes and Guanajuato. It’s a town that thrives on farming and, in the last decade, increasingly on the monthly remittances sent back home by residents who emigrated to the United States. Teocaltiche is also one of the lands where the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has established its roots, producing bodies dumped in the streets, subservient authorities, and social terror.

Teocaltiche has been abandoned to its fate, ignored by the government of Pablo Lemus of the Citizens’ Movement (MC) in Jalisco, as well as by President Claudia Sheinbaum, residents denounce. Desperate residents are threatening to organize a self-defense group and take the laws they have been denied into their own hands, an old formula already practiced for decades in the neighboring states of Michoacán and Guerrero, which has only contributed to adding fuel to the arsenal of the Mexican countryside.

On Tuesday, a group of hitmen in a pickup truck pulled up alongside the car of the municipal commissioner, Ramón Grande Moncada, and opened fire on him. It was 8 p.m., and the police chief was driving with his wife. Grande Moncada died; his wife, wounded, survived. It was the latest episode in an escalation that has given gravediggers more work than usual in recent months.

The event, narrated this way, is not unlike the executions of police officers, politicians, businessmen, or workers witnessed daily in every corner of Mexico. In Teocaltiche, however, the state Security Secretariat took control of the local police force in the face of the violence that erupted and suspicions that the CJNG was trying to control the town’s agents. Since February 18, the state police have maintained a special surveillance operation. That day, eight police officers and one civilian, their driver, disappeared while traveling to Guadalajara to undergo a routine security check.

A day later, the bodies of four of them were found on the side of the road that connects Teocaltiche with Jalostotitlán, a 25-mile stretch. The bodies had been dismembered to the extent that the remains of four people were scattered in 13 different black plastic bags. Nothing has been heard of the remaining five kidnapped people. The police found a cell phone belonging of one of them and the van in which the officers traveled to Guadalajara, in a neighborhood of Teocaltiche. Investigations suggest this was a settling of scores by the CJNG, because a sign was left next to the bodies accusing the officers of collaborating with the Sinaloa Cartel.

Over the following months, state supervision in the town didn’t seem to change much. On April 9, a few days before Chief Grande’s murder, hitmen arrived early in the morning at the home of another police officer, Luis Ernesto Chávez Regino, 31, pointed their pistols at him, forced him into the yard of the house in the El Tanque neighborhood, and emptied their magazines. Before the state police arrived, on February 2, Officer Sugey Areli López Guzmán died after an on-duty shooting. Two other officers were wounded.

The bullets haven’t only hit the police force. The civilian population has also suffered casualties. On April 7, four people — three men and an elderly woman — were gunned down in a house in the El Barrio neighborhood. Residents heard shouts, an argument, gunshots, and, finally, saw a group of men fleeing the scene in a pickup truck. It’s estimated that some 20 people have been killed since the state police arrived in the municipality in February. Before that: massacres in bars, soldiers ambushed, killings between armed groups…

Violence has thus become routine, but the murder of the commissioner on Tuesday seemed to cross a line. The municipal administration’s Facebook account made a desperate plea for help: “The people of Teocaltiche cannot continue living amid fear, violence, and pain. Today we raise our voices with profound helplessness and indignation over the tragedies that have repeatedly struck our community. Enough of the deaths! Enough of the suffering of our families! Enough of being ignored!” the letter began. “We demand clear and forceful responses from the State and the Federation. We demand real protection for our people. We demand that peace, security, and dignity be restored to our homes,” it added.

The commissioner’s murder struck a chord in the city council that the killing of Juan Pablo Diego Alonzo Estrada, spokesperson for the Teocaltiche Front for Our People collective, had not touched. On the night of March 30, a group of hitmen broke into his home and riddled him with bullets. They also wounded his sister. The activist had participated that same month in roundtable discussions with the Ministry of the Interior to address the CJNG’s control of the municipality. State Governor Pablo Lemus blamed Alonzo Estrada for his own death because, he claimed, he had a record for hydrocarbon theft. It was “completely ruled out,” said Lemus, that he had been killed for his political activism.

The Teocaltiche Front for Our People organized protests this week against the string of murders. On Wednesday, they had called a press conference in the town square to announce the creation of a neighborhood self-defense group in response to “the unstoppable wave of violence that is hitting us and the indifference of the federal authorities.” However, the event was not held due to pressure from the police, who surrounded the square to prevent residents and the press from entering. “The state police once again demonstrated that they have dirty hands and that they have a lot to hide by not allowing us to share our testimonies,” the group denounced.

The Front also attacked Lemus for “pointing out the victims as criminals” and argued that “Jalisco has become a state ruled by infamy, impunity, and violence. Teocaltiche and other municipalities are proof of this. Terrorism, injustice, and fear reign in our communities.” Months earlier, Mayor Margarita Villalobos, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, had distanced herself from the violence, asserting that the issue was not “her responsibility,” but rather the responsibility of the Attorney General’s Office, and that her jurisdiction was limited to “making sure that the municipality has water and that the garbage is collected.”

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In his personal crusade against fentanyl—the latest chapter in the United States’ long-running war on drugs — Donald Trump is now setting his sights on La Familia Michoacana. Washington has accused the Mexican criminal organization, primarily based in Guerrero and Michoacán, of trafficking “fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine” into the U.S.; laundering the profits through the U.S. financial system; “poisoning” the American public; and engaging in “acts of terror and violence in Mexico.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced economic sanctions against the group’s two leaders — brothers Johnny “El Pez” and Jose Alfredo “El Fresa” Hurtado Olascoaga — along with two of their lower-ranking siblings in the organization, Adita and Ubaldo. The State Department has also offered an $8 million reward for their capture, while a federal court has charged them with drug trafficking.

The United States has declared war on the Hurtado Olascoaga brothers on multiple fronts. The announcement of sanctions was accompanied by a federal grand jury indictment in the Northern District of Georgia, charging El Pez and El Fresa with “conspiracy to manufacture and distribute controlled substances (specifically, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and fentanyl) knowing they would be imported into the United States,” as well as conspiracy to import and distribute those drugs. On Tuesday, the State Department put a price on their heads: $5 million for Johnny and $3 million for José Alfredo.

The U.S. sanctions represent both a symbolic and financial blow. The measures not only highlight La Familia’s profile as international drug traffickers, but also allow Washington to seize “all property and interests in property,” including any bank accounts the four cartel leaders may have registered in the United States. “The Trump administration will continue to use all available tools to target the cartels and other violent organizations that attempt to exploit our communities and harm Americans,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a press release.

The Treasury Department also identifies La Familia Michoacana — referred to in its statement as La Nueva Familia Michoacana — as responsible for human trafficking and the smuggling of undocumented migrants into the United States. It accuses the group of using violence “against its rivals and Mexican security forces,” including the use of “drones and bombs in addition to conventional firearms,” with “utter disregard for Mexico’s civilian population.” According to the statement, the cartel members also “terrorize local communities through kidnappings, killings, and extortion.”

As part of its broader offensive against Mexican cartels — whom Donald Trump blames for the public health crisis fueled by widespread fentanyl use in the United States — Washington designated six Mexican criminal organizations as terrorist groups in February. Among them was La Familia Michoacana. Mexico “is essentially run by the cartels,” said Trump. A day later, Canada followed in the White House’s footsteps.

This latest wave of U.S. measures against La Familia Michoacana marks a new escalation in the offensive launched in February, coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) along with the Departments of Treasury, State, Justice, and Homeland Security — supported south of the border by Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit. The operation signals a new era of cooperation between the two countries, which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has championed.

The U.S. pursuit of La Familia Michoacana is not new. In November 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) accused the group of drug trafficking and sanctioned the Hurtado Olascoaga brothers. The Treasury Department’s latest announcement expands the spotlight to include two more of their siblings. Ubaldo is described as “a senior leader” involved in drug trafficking and extortion, who oversees the group’s hitmen and has “illegally mined and extracted mercury and uranium for the organization.”

Adita, meanwhile, is identified as a financial operator responsible for laundering the cartel’s profits through “used clothing stores along the Rio Grande Valley” in Texas. “This trade-based money laundering scheme includes the purchase of used clothing in the United States and their shipment to Mexico, where the used clothing is sold,” explains the statement. OFAC also accuses her of smuggling American firearms into Mexico.

Trump’s measures aren’t aimed solely at La Familia Michoacana. His administration considers the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — the two most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico — as the primary drivers of fentanyl trafficking into the United States. At the end of March, the U.S. intelligence community released a report in Washington highlighting the growing role of “independent producers” of the potent opioid.

Intent on blaming Mexico for the fentanyl crisis, Trump has placed a heavy strain on the bilateral relationship. Since the billionaire took office in January, Sheinbaum has handed over 29 drug lords, deployed more than 10,000 troops to secure the shared border, seized record amounts of fentanyl, and authorized U.S. surveillance in Mexican airspace.

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Don Neto called his room in Guadalupe Victoria prison, a penitentiary surrounded by a plain of farmland halfway between Durango and Torreón, “the forgotten cell.” In 2011, after two decades in the Altiplano prison, the health problems that afflicted him at 81 years of age precipitated his transfer. The aging Sinaloa drug lord thought his days of starvation, eating a pittance of cactus every morning for breakfast, and not getting medication for his numerous ailments were behind him. His calculations were wrong, and the warden of his new home forbade him from going out into the yard for fear of being attacked by other inmates. His daughter Esther protested: “Since he arrived, he doesn’t know if it’s day or night, because he remains immersed in darkness. They don’t even let him read the Bible.”

Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo always displayed old-school discretion. He let his partners, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo “the Boss of Bosses” and Rafael Caro Quintero, “the Narco of Narcos,” co-founders of the Guadalajara Cartel, the Sinaloans who rewrote the rules of drug smuggling, hog the spotlight. During his four decades in prison, he hasn’t spoken a word. Last Saturday, having served his entire sentence, he regained his freedom for the first time since April 1985. Then, his final minutes as a free man were spent in a mansion on the Puerto Vallarta coast, owned by the head of security in the Jalisco city of Ameca. It was already obvious that his days were numbered, and he retreated to the Pacific to say goodbye. There, the army arrested him for the kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena and Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala. Freedom has found him again at the age of 95, in another luxury home, this time many miles from the sea, on a hill in Atizapán de Zaragoza, in the State of Mexico.

The little that is known about Don Neto’s life comes from his daughters and police investigations. His daughter Esther was interviewed by Ricardo Ravelo in 2011 for the magazine Proceso, shortly after he had secured a transfer to Guadalupe. That year, he was sentenced to 40 years after 26 years of incarceration without a conviction. By then, the drug lord was already an ailing old man begging the Mexican government for mercy. Esther complained to Ravelo about her father’s poor health and how the prison wouldn’t allow him to go out for surgery. She said he was a “very hard-working and responsible” man, that he denied killing Camarena — and she believed him — and that he was just a rancher whom the prison system had deprived of even the most worldly pleasures.

A decade ago, Julio Scherer crossed paths with Fonseca Carrillo in the Altiplano. “Don Neto, the oldest inmate and the oldest man in Almoloya, offers the image of a man who is leaving. His dull eyes resemble his listless voice. He looks at me, and I don’t know if he’s looking at me,” the dean of Mexican journalism later wrote. Scherer, who was in the prison interviewing some of its most notorious inmates for his book Maximum Security (2001), asked him to talk. Don Neto responded, monosyllabically:

— No.

Scherer got a lucky break. The Sinaloa drug lord refused, but he found his daughter, Ofelia, also locked up for drug trafficking. She told him about an absent father who, during her years of freedom, she saw once or twice a year, “on vacation.” They had more contact when Fonseca Carrillo was imprisoned in Altiplano. “I would tell him, laughing, ‘Now you can’t tell me you’re not here or that you’re busy or that you don’t want to see me.’ He would tell me, laughing too: ‘Now you can come whenever you want,’” Ofelia recalled.

In both interviews, 10 years apart, the two women portrayed a reserved, distant, and unloving man — ”Now that I’m here, the last time I saw him, all he gave me was a hug without the slightest affection,” Ofelia said, resigned. She didn’t even complain. She didn’t like to talk about her life, and at most, occasionally, she’d let slip an anecdote from her youth in the mountains of Sinaloa. Ravelo asked Esther:

— Has your father spoken to you about death?

— No, he hardly ever talks about it.

Veteran before the Guadalajara Cartel

Esther denied that the family was wealthy — “our life is modest” — and claimed they hadn’t inherited the fortune their father amassed during his years as a drug lord. In 2016, Fonseca Carrillo was transferred to the home of one of his brothers to serve out his sentence under house arrest, in a luxury residence in a residential neighborhood in Atizapán where the average price of a property exceeds $1 million.

Half an hour from Mexico City, you can spot it from afar: among bare hills, the Hacienda de Valle Escondido is dotted with trees as a status symbol. It’s one of those neighborhoods with security at the gate, where any visitor is considered suspect until proven otherwise, and without an invitation from its residents, you aren’t allowed in. Don Neto’s house is under federal guard.

Fonseca Carrillo was born in 1930 in Santiago de los Caballeros, a mountain town in the municipality of Badiraguato, with a larger population in the cemetery than above ground. Badiraguato witnessed the birth of the generation of smugglers who would change the rules of the business and cement the laws of modern drug trafficking: in addition to Don Neto and Caro Quintero, Juan José Esparragoza “El Azul,” Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the Beltrán Leyva brothers. The Sinaloa drug trafficking family tree has short branches: Fonseca Carrillo is also the uncle of Amado and Vicente Carrillo, Sinaloans who would later become leaders of the Juárez Cartel. Some versions say it was Don Neto who sent them north to take over the organization.

In the Golden Triangle — the mountains of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua — marijuana and poppy cultivation have always existed. They provided the livelihood of many ranches. And where there are crops, there is smuggling. At 20, Don Neto was already making his way in the rudimentary business as the right-hand man of Pedro Avilés, “The Lion of the Sierra.” With the ravages of Operation Condor, which led the army to burn entire crops and imprison farmers, the younger smugglers moved to Guadalajara. There, Don Neto, Caro Quintero, and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo would found what history knows as the Guadalajara Cartel.

They modernized their processes, established ties with Colombian cartels to transport their cocaine from South America to the United States, diversified their investments, and became respectable businessmen. They left the ranch behind and crashed the private party of the Guadalajara bourgeoisie. For a few years, their alliances with high-profile politicians and police officers made them untouchable. The DEA, however, was on their trail.

An agent, Kiki Camarena, infiltrated the organization. He discovered El Búfalo, a ranch spanning thousands of acres in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert planted with 8,000 tons of a new type of marijuana. The Mexican authorities knew: it was impossible for a crop of that size to go undetected, but cartel bribes lubricated the state machinery. With the help of pilot Alfredo Zavala, Camarena photographed the plantation from the air. Faced with the evidence, captured by a foreign agent, the government had to intervene. The army burned the entire marijuana crop in November 1984.

Less than four months later, the Guadalajara Cartel kidnapped Camarena and Zavala. They were brutally tortured and mutilated for weeks. A doctor kept them alive to prolong the interrogation. A month later, their bodies were dumped in a ditch around 100 miles from Guadalajara. It was the final nail in the coffin. First, Caro Quintero, whom the DEA considered the mastermind, was arrested in April 1985. A few days later, Don Neto. Finally, in 1989, Félix Gallardo. The organization splintered, and others, such as the Sinaloa Cartel, emerged from its ranks.

Don Neto was 55 at the time, much older than his companions. He was already a veteran when they joined forces. When he was first arrested in Mexicali in 1955 for trafficking opium gum, Félix Gallardo hadn’t even turned 10, and Caro Quintero was around three. Now, he’s the only one of the three at liberty. Félix Gallardo, wheelchair-bound, nearly deaf, and blind in one eye, will complete his sentence in 2029 in Mexico. Caro Quintero, extradited to the United States, spends his days in a Brooklyn prison, uncertain whether the Prosecutor’s Office will seek the death penalty.

Although President Claudia Sheinbaum assured that there is no extradition order against Fonseca Carrillo, the DEA still has him on its fugitive list. His file, over a grainy, opaque black-and-white photograph, reads: “Armed and dangerous.” It seems a bit outdated. Don Neto, today, is a mass of illnesses: blind, deaf, a survivor of several heart attacks, among a host of other ailments. One wonders if his luxurious residence still has the Bible he was denied in prison. A huge mausoleum he commissioned has been waiting for him for years in the Santiago de los Caballeros cemetery: a copy of the Parthenon in Athens, in a village in the Golden Triangle.

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