Written in baroque letters, the inscription on the grenade launcher confirmed a peculiar friendship: “In memory of your friend Nazario Moreno FM 12-25-2005.” The date suggested the weapon was a Christmas gift; the initials, FM, pointed to an old criminal brand born in Mexico’s Central Pacific, La Familia Michoacana. Nazario Moreno, after all, had been the leader of the first group to use that brand name, its actual creator, commander of a powerful criminal hybrid with enormous propaganda capabilities, which had established a stronghold in the mountains and on the coasts of Michoacán, and employed techniques as savage as its nemesis at the time, the Los Zetas cartel.

There was another legend on the grenade launcher, which also identified its wielder, “Commander Ubaldo Hurtado.” Authorities had found the weapon when they searched the vehicle in which Hurtado was traveling, as evidenced by an internal document from the State Attorney General’s Office of Mexico, to which EL PAÍS has had access. The agency does not say where or how the arrest took place. It only indicates the date, November 22, 2012. It adds that Hurtado was also carrying an AR-15 rifle and a 30-round magazine. It is unknown whether the man, who was 59 at the time, was detained or released. At least the police took photos of everything, images they included in their files.

Thirteen years on, the inscription on that grenade launcher has been revealed as the most obvious link between the first and second iterations of La Familia Michoacana, the old and the new, elevated this week — the new one — to the criminal top tier, alongside the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). The United States Department of Justice has announced drug trafficking charges against Johnny and José Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga, both sons of Ubaldo Hurtado. The United States justice system accuses them of trafficking heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl, and is offering rewards of $5 million and $3 million for information leading to their whereabouts.

It’s unclear how Ubaldo Hurtado and Nazario Moreno, alias “Chayo,” one of the most enigmatic criminals in recent Mexican history, met. Chayo, who died in 2014, built the old Familia Michoacana in the early 2000s, following an evangelical logic, a cult of his personality and beliefs. He saw himself as a Robin Hood and demanded loyalty bordering on devotion. His battles with Los Zetas raised the level of brutality to new heights in Mexico, a semiotics of severed heads, displayed as messages of crime, a reality still present in the country.

Did the two men, Ubaldo and Nazario, meet during those battles? Or was this Commander Ubaldo, in fact, another of his sons, who bears the same name, and had simply lent his father his weapon? Whatever the case, it seems clear that this bond united both families in an exercise of criminal inheritance, reinforced in the last decade. Although it continues to use the same name, La Familia Michoacana is now a distinct organization. It operates primarily from Guerrero and the State of Mexico, less so in Michoacán. Its business comprises two fronts: international drug trafficking and mafia control of dozens of municipalities in both states.

Born in March 1973, Johnny is the leader of La Nueva Familia Michoacana and the eldest of the Hurtado Olascoaga brothers. Discreet and a lover of deer hunting, according to official documents reviewed by this newspaper, he is nicknamed “El Pez,” although it is unclear where the nickname comes from. It could be an extension of one of the family businesses, a restaurant near Arcelia, Guerrero, where the specialty was fried mojarra. El Pez was born and raised there, in Arcelia, one of the main municipalities of Guerrero’s Tierra Caliente, connected by hundreds of gaps to the Pacific coast, the Michoacán mountains, and the colder areas near Toluca, in the State of Mexico.

There are few photos of El Pez, none recent. What there are are images of the criminal group’s ranches, which belong primarily to him and his brother José Alfredo, “El Fresa,” the organization’s second-in-command. In March, authorities in the State of Mexico seized 21 properties, some of them extravagantly luxurious, with exotic animal heads hanging on the walls, or even whole, stuffed animals placed on tables — a tiger, for example — decorating the hallways, but also lakes, swimming pools, and enormous pantries.

The size and luxury of these properties give an idea of the economic capabilities of La Nueva Familia Michoacana, a group that experts on the country’s criminal dynamics place only behind the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG on the criminal power lists. “La Nueva Familia Michoacana is the third most important macro-criminal group in the country,” David Saucedo told this newspaper in February, when the U.S. designated La Familia and six other criminal groups as terrorist organizations. Another specialist, Eduardo Guerrero, added that the group has a presence in more than a third of the country’s 32 states and that its “financial prosperity” reflects its “rapid growth.”

“They call him ‘El Fresa’”

In November 2024, Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Luis R. Conríquez, two of the greatest exponents of regional Mexican music, released a song together, titled Le apodan El Fresa (They call him El Fresa.) Although it wasn’t the first song the music industry dedicated to the youngest of the Hurtado Olascoaga brothers, it marked a qualitative leap in the group’s criminal narrative. La Nueva Familia has been on the authorities’ radar for more than 10 years. At times, the Mexican army’s intelligence apparatus has followed them daily. But, for some reason, they’ve always flown lower than the rest of the cartels.

The song by Conríquez and Los Tucanes is not too far from what others recount, a prose poem about the moral quality of the protagonist, sprinkled with kind epithets: party-loving, loyal, generous, always surrounded by beautiful women… That these artists sang it catapulted the group to stardom in the criminal imagination, a fantasy that matched reality this week with the statement from the U.S. Department of Justice. The promotion also came accompanied by accusations against the other two siblings, Ubaldo, born in 1979, and Adita, born in 1975.

El Pez and El Fresa belong to different generations. Nine years younger than his much less discreet brother, El Fresa is a millennial. Spotify features playlists with songs dedicated to him by more than a dozen artists. In a track by Calibre 50, Strawberryfish, the band sings, “Yes, I treat myself to luxury because there’s money to spend.” Last year, at the Tejupilco fair in the Tierra Caliente region of the State of Mexico, El Fresa attended a concert by two other regional music singers, Remmy Valenzuela and Edén Muñoz, where he even had his photo taken.

This casual, approachable attitude, comparable to that of Los Chapitos, the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, transcends leisure time. Two and a half years ago, after the massacre of 20 people in San Miguel Totolapan, a town neighboring Arcelia, including the mayor and his father — who had also been mayor — El Fresa recorded a video from one of his ranches, stating that he had almost been killed as well and had narrowly escaped. The government later denied this claim and said that, in fact, La Familia was responsible for the massacre.

Beyond the authorship, it was extraordinary that a criminal leader would appear on video to discuss such a situation, even admitting to the alleged murder of his attackers. “My brother gave me the scolding of my life, for being so confident, without people around,” he said in the video. It is unknown what El Pez said afterward about the video in question. El Fresa did not respond and since then, with the exception of the Tejupilco concerts in 2024, he has kept a low profile.

At this year’s fair in the municipality, held in the first half of April, Luis R. Conríquez was playing. The suspicion that El Fresa would attend the fair to hear his own song grew stronger. But then the controversy over narcocorridos arose, and Conríquez announced he would stop singing them. Given the renewed interest from authorities in the criminal leader on both sides of the border, it’s likely that Conríquez was unwittingly doing him a favor.

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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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“Looking for people for the 4 letters. Age doesn’t matter, teach them my race [sic],” reads one text, accompanied by a small yellow face emulating a military salute. This message is superimposed over a video showing the inside of a car, which is part of a convoy that appears to be patrolling a vacant lot at night. Various examples and variations of this production can be found on the social media platform TikTok. This content is created and disseminated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) or the Sinaloa Cartel, which use colloquial language, slang, music, hashtags, and emojis to communicate with young people to attract them to their ranks, according to a study by the Violence and Peace Seminar at the Colegio de México.

The research “New Frontiers in Digital Recruitment. Organized Crime Recruitment Strategies on TikTok,” conducted by the Laboratory of Hatred and Harmony in collaboration with the Civic A.I. Lab at Northeastern University, documents more than 100 active accounts in Mexico and reaffirms what has been reported in recent weeks: how cartels offer fraudulent job opportunities through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

The Teuchitlán case — the ranch discovered by relatives of missing persons in March in the center of the country — has shed light on this phenomenon, about which little was known until recently. “Multiple disappearances of young people in the Valley of Mexico have already been linked to this type of situation. They took a bus to Jalisco to go to work and, shortly after, were never heard from again,” the document states.

According to the results of this preliminary report, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel leads the use of TikTok as a recruitment and propaganda channel. Of the 100 accounts studied, 54% were linked to this criminal organization. The Sinaloa Cartel and the factions warring for control of the organization — Los Chapitos and La Mayiza — and the Northeast Cartel each represented just over 5% of the total.

The report explains that a digital ethnography was first constructed to identify words, hashtags, and symbols shared in recruitment posts on TikTok. This database was sent to Northeastern’s Civic A.I. Lab so that, through an interface, they could assist in gathering precise information about the accounts’ activity and their engagement metrics.

“Many of the accounts we analyzed were only active for a short period of time, either because they were shut down by the platform or deleted by the users themselves […] In terms of security, some of the accounts we identified belonged to minors. […] The accounts in our sample made explicit references to organized crime through the sharing of expressions, symbols, and songs,” explains another excerpt from the document.

Emojis that hide references to drug trafficking

The investigation mentions one of the most important elements that helped identify drug-related content was the systematic use of emojis, a digital icon used in electronic communications to represent an emotion, an object, or an idea, which made references to criminal life and its characteristics.

Some examples cited in the report include the ninja emoji (🥷🏼), used to represent people who work for cartels or recruit hitmen. Another is the pizza slice emoji, which appears frequently on accounts associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, specifically the faction of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons. This emoji was almost always preceded by the letters “ch” (ch🍕) to form the word “chapizza,” a reference to their nickname.

On the other hand, the rooster emoji has always appeared in content linked to CJNG recruiting accounts. The symbol represents Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho” — also nicknamed “El Señor de los Gallos (Lord of the Roosters) — the cartel’s top leader. Digital icons with the letters NG also referenced this criminal organization, which stands for New Generation, often used after the number 4, due to the letters that abbreviate the organization’s name.

“TikTok isn’t just entertainment. It’s also a space where organized crime builds identity, community, and promises of belonging. Of the 100 accounts in our sample, 47% engaged in explicit recruitment activities. The second most common type of account was propaganda [31%], that is, accounts that actively promoted the name of a criminal organization through music and other symbols,” the document states.

This modus operandi employed by several criminal organizations was confirmed during the Mexican government’s morning press conference on March 24, when Secretary of Security Omar García Harfuch presented a report on the Teuchitlán case. There, he identified José Gregorio, alias Commander Lastra, as one of the main people responsible for the CJNG’s recruitment activities in Jalisco, Nayarit, and Zacatecas. In this same report, the authorities announced that 39 TikTok accounts that recruited people for this cartel had been shut down.

The situation is worrying. The most recent assessments attest to this. A national analysis on the recruitment of children and adolescents by organized crime groups conducted by the Ministry of the Interior in 2021 — but publicly revived after the discovery of the ranch in Teuchitlán — reveals that seven out of 10 recruits at that age grew up in high-crime environments. The report also explains how organized crime groups employ minors, first to work as messengers, and then to climb a pyramid structure that culminates in the training of hitmen or other positions that involve very high levels of violence.

“TikTok has made it easier for organized crime to use this digital space to construct new identities that are expressed through shared images, emojis, hashtags, and songs. In this way, organized crime manages to permeate Mexican youth, with the promise of belonging to a group where they will be accepted and where they can receive better opportunities for their future development,” the document states.

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