Mexican Drug Cartels Have Turned Once-Thriving Guadalajara Into a War Zone

"MX" for Borderland Beat

By Nathaniel Janowitz from VICE News

A police officer stands guard outside el sabino, where recently authorities discovered the largest mass grave in Jalisco history. (photo: nathaniel janowitz/Vice News)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Early one morning in May 2019, a man stumbled naked through a middle-class neighborhood in central Guadalajara before collapsing on a street corner. He bore obvious signs of torture: His body was covered with cuts and blood. When police raided the nondescript house he’d escaped from, they found a horrific scene: nine living kidnap victims and the skulls of seven others.

Nearly two years later, there's little evidence of the gruesome events that took place at that quaint orange house on Rio Bravo street in an otherwise typical residential neighborhood in central Guadalajara. There’s a small sign saying Clausurado (“Closed”), a padlock secures the front gate, and a weathered flyer for a nearby sushi restaurant hangs off the door.

A neighbor, who declined to give their name, told VICE World News that they'd never heard screams or smelled odd odors, but they’d occasionally heard the sound of “a mechanical drill, like they were preparing something,” coming from the inside of the house. They were never quite sure who was living there, “like, all the time someone would go inside, and afterwards, other people would come and then some would go, and only at night.”

Only when the police came and quarantined the area, and as forensics vehicles lined the street, did the neighbor begin to hear the grisly details of what was an extermination house. The victims described how they were kidnapped and constantly tortured, then one by one others would be brought to a back room and strangled to death. Their bodies were then dismembered and disposed of at separate sites.

In the two weeks following, authorities found two clandestine graves connected to the house, one containing 25 corpses in the municipality of Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, and another with 30 bodies in the El Campanario neighborhood of the Zapopan municipality, which at that point was the largest grave in Jalisco history.

But it wouldn't hold that record for long. The discovery of the Rio Bravo house broke a dreadful levy, and a flood of similar kill houses and mass graves began to appear across the city.

THIS QUAINT ORANGE HOUSE ON RIO BRAVO STREET WAS A CARTEL EXTERMINATION HOUSE. (PHOTO: NATHANIEL JANOWITZ/VICE NEWS)​

Isabel Velarde drank an iced frappuccino in a coffee shop, wistfully recalling her teenage years in the early ’80s, when she'd stay out late with her friends in her hometown of Guadalajara, the state capital of Jalisco and one of Mexico's most populous cities. Back then, she and her friends had little fear of the renowned drug traffickers based there, known as the Guadalajara Cartel, because “they had codes.”

“No one bothered us. It was the opposite: They protected us,” said Velarde.

The oft-mythologized story of the Guadalajara Cartel was most recently featured on the Netflix series Narcos Mexico, which details how the demise of what's broadly considered the country's first modern drug cartel spawned numerous infamous and brutal kingpins, like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the Lord of the Skies.

But even after the eponymous cartel fragmented around 1990, the city of Guadalajara remained a relatively safe haven for narcos to live and raise their families, and especially to launder money. The influx of cash helped Guadalajara become Mexico's second city and an economic and cultural hub, like the Chicago to Mexico City's New York/Washington/LA hybrid.

The Guadalajara Cartel is history now, and a new cartel has taken on the state's name: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by its Spanish acronym CJNG. The rise of the CJNG over the past decade ties directly to the downward spiral of Guadalajara and the rest of the state into violent disorder. Since December 2018, Jalisco has registered more disappearances than any other Mexican state, accounting for more than 20 percent of all cases in Mexico.

“The government doesn't have order. There's no longer a rule of law,” said Velarde, visibly upset. “It's a narco-state.”

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