Sinaloa Cartel
The Sinaloa Cartel, often described as the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Western Hemisphere, is an alliance of some of Mexico’s top drug traffickers. The coalition operates in concert to protect themselves and more loosely to keep their businesses going smoothly. It relies on connections at the highest levels, corrupting portions of the federal police and military to maintain an upper hand on its rivals.
The cartel’s tentacles stretch from New York City to Buenos Aires and most every major city in between. It has successfully penetrated government and security forces wherever it operates. It prefers the bribe to the bullet and the alliance to the fighting, but it is not above organizing its forces to overrun areas that it wants to control by force. Its central bond is blood: many of its members are related or have become related by marriage. However, the cartel also often acts more like a federation than a tightly knit organization. The core of the group, the Beltrán Leyva Organization, split from the cartel in 2008. The Sinaloa Cartel has since created new alliances with former enemies in the Gulf Cartel and the Familia Michoacana. More morphing is to be expected as these alliances, even those formed by blood, are tenuous.