The video released by Al Jazeera lasts just 25 seconds but has once again reignited public debate. The footage shows at least 10 fighters in a forest, “coming back from a mission,” as one of them can be heard saying. The group of soldiers, who are Mexican, Colombian, and Panamanian — as acknowledged by the person filming — is allegedly part of Ukraine’s front line in the war launched by Russia.

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Maricopa County, in Arizona, has emerged as the “main epicenter” of illegal arms trafficking into Mexico, according to John Lindsay-Poland, coordinator of Stop US Arms to Mexico, an initiative that studies the illicit flow of weapons between the two countries.

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Amid the internecine war within the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the factions to have suffered the heaviest blows has been Los Chapitos, led by the sons of former cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. On the other side stands La Mayiza, headed by the successors to former kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Unlike their more aggressive and media-savvy rivals, La Mayiza’s leaders have generally operated with a lower profile and less direct exposure.

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The six-year term of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador ended in September 2024 amid a surge of violence in the state of Sinaloa — a crisis he blamed on the United States. Just a few months earlier, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the longtime leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, had been captured by U.S. authorities under murky circumstances.

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In July 2011, a 22-year-old woman arrived at the Calexico checkpoint on the Mexico–California border carrying a U.S. passport with a navy-blue cover. Her eight-month pregnancy and Sinaloa accent were hard to hide. A customs agent asked routine questions: where she had come from, where she was headed, and what she was carrying. Despite her answers and the document she presented, he sent her for a secondary, more thorough inspection. Other federal officers meticulously searched her belongings and the contents of her cellphones. Minutes later, once the rigorous procedure was complete, they allowed her into the country.

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It was all thanks to a small metal screw – an orthodontic mini-screw, to be precise – that was placed in the jawbone underneath José Antonio Jiménez’s gums. His wife, Priscila Murrieta, waited in the hallways of the Attorney General’s office in Mazatlán, a city in the south of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Meanwhile, the forensic dentist went in and out of a room. Of the bodies recovered from the mass graves in the small town of El Verde, Jiménez could be one of them. With moles and tattoos ruled out, only two bodies remained with similar characteristics. Both of the victims wore braces on their teeth.

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The music industry has once again been forced to dance to a tune set by drug trafficking. Ismael Zambada Sicairos, the subject of several narcocorridos (a subgenre of corrido, a type of Mexican ballad, that glorifies or narrates the lives of drug traffickers and organized crime), is now accused of being the head of a sophisticated criminal network that, through organizing concerts in Baja California and other front-business activities, allegedly served to launder money generated illicitly across the border by Los Mayos, the Sinaloa Cartel faction he has led for two years.

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On the day of his sentencing hearing in New York this summer, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada read a letter overflowing with remorse. After a decades-long career in drug trafficking, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel said his goodbyes with a mea culpa for everything he had done, without expanding greatly. Given his expected influence over the regional underworld, he dared to send a message to young people. “Choose a different path,” he said. “There is no honor in violence nor anything lasting in crime; they only bring pain and loss.” It is not known whether his second-born son knew about his father’s letter. But it is fairly clear that, if he did, he paid it no heed.

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