In January 2024, the city of Reynosa, Mexico, a border town of over 700,000 people sitting directly across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, was completely shut down for nearly 2 weeks. Not by a hurricane, not by a government crackdown, by a cartel war so violent that civilians refused to leave their homes, businesses closed their doors, and gunfire echoed through the streets day and night.
Armored trucks rolled through neighborhoods, IEDs were buried in dirt roads on the outskirts of town. And somewhere above it all, drones loaded with explosives buzzed through the air being piloted not by a military, but by a drug cartel fighting another drug cartel for control of the same city. And here’s the part that should really get your attention.
Both sides in that war carry the same name. They both call themselves the Gulf Cartel, but I assure you the real story here isn’t just about a turf war. The real story lies in how one of the [music] most powerful and oldest criminal empires in Mexican history completely destroyed itself from the inside out. How an organization that once controlled billions of dollars in drug routes created the most feared paramilitary force in Latin America and survived decades of government pressure ultimately became its own worst enemy.
In the media, they barely talk about it. They cover the Sinaloa Cartel, they cover CJNG, but the slow-motion collapse of the Gulf Cartel, that story doesn’t get told enough. We’re going to fix that today. Because amidst all the chaos in Tamaulipas, the Gulf Cartel did something extraordinary. It managed to fracture into so many rival factions that the US Drug Enforcement Administration officially declared in 2025 that it is, quote, no longer a unified cartel.
An organization that once threatened to destabilize an entire country is now a collection of armed gangs fighting over what’s left of a once enormous empire. So, how did we get here? How does a cartel that powerful fall apart so completely? And what does the war in Tamaulipas look like right now on the ground? Let’s get into it.
But before we get into the civil war itself, I need you to first understand who the Gulf Cartel actually was cuz without that context, none of what comes next makes any sense. The Gulf Cartel’s origins trace back to 1984 when a man named Juan Garcia Abrego assumed control of what was then a relatively small drug trafficking operation in the northeast Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Garcia Abrego was smart, methodical in a way that most cartel bosses of the era weren’t. He understood that the real money wasn’t just in moving drugs. It was in controlling the corridors through which drugs moved. And Tamaulipas sitting right on the Texas border with crossing points at Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and Miguel Alemán, that was the golden corridor.
If you control Tamaulipas, you control one of the most valuable stretches of real estate in the entire narco world. By the early 1990s, Garcia Abrego had done just that. The Gulf Cartel became one of the most powerful criminal organizations in all of Mexico moving massive quantities of cocaine northward into Texas and beyond. The US government took notice.
In 1996, Garcia Abrego became the first drug lord ever to be placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Shortly after, Mexican authorities arrested him and he was extradited to the United States. The first Mexican national ever extradited for drug trafficking. Now, losing your top boss would [ __ ] most organizations, but the Gulf Cartel, they didn’t collapse.
[music] They adapted because waiting in the wings was a man who would take the cartel to heights Garcia Abrego never imagined and plant the seeds of its eventual destruction at the exact same time. His name was Osiel Cárdenas Guillén and they They call him El Mata Amigos, the friend killer, for nothing.
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén took control of the Gulf Cartel in 1997, and he did it the only way he knew how, through betrayal and blood. He had his own associates killed to eliminate rivals for power. He was paranoid, ruthless, and brilliant in equal measure. And once he was in charge, he immediately set about transforming the Gulf Cartel into something the drug world had never quite seen before.
In 1997, Cárdenas Guillén did something unprecedented. He recruited 31 deserters from Mexico’s most elite special forces unit, the Grupos Aeromóviles de Fuerzas Especiales, known as the GAFES, and built them into a private paramilitary army. These weren’t ordinary street soldiers. These were expert sharpshooters, trained in rapid deployment, capable of operating in virtually any environment, fluent in military tactics, communications, and counterintelligence.
He called them Los Zetas. Now, understand what this meant. For the first time in Mexican cartel history, a drug lord had taken actual military-trained operatives and weaponized them not for the state, but for organized crime. Los Zetas brought a completely new level of violence to the drug trade. Beheadings, mass kidnappings, roadblocks that shut down entire cities, tactics straight from a military playbook deployed in the service of a cartel.
Corrupt federal police officers joined their ranks. Former Guatemalan special forces were recruited. Even some ex-US Army soldiers allegedly cycled through their network. At their peak under Cárdenas Guillén, the Zetas made the Gulf Cartel genuinely terrifying, not just in Tamaulipas, across multiple Mexican states.
Rivals thought twice before challenging them. Law enforcement officers thought twice before investigating them. Even the Sinaloa Cartel, that run by El Chapo, had to develop its own paramilitary response, a group called Los Negros, just to compete. But, here’s where things get interesting and where the seeds of destruction were quietly being planted.
In 2003, the FBI and Mexican authorities moved on Cárdenas Guillén with a $2 million bounty from the US State Department. He was arrested and in 2007, he was extradited to the United States, where he would eventually be sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. Now, while all this was going on, something critical was happening inside the organization.
The Zetas had spent years growing, growing in numbers, in territory, in power, and most importantly, in ambition. They weren’t just enforcers anymore. They had started running their own kidnapping operations, their own extortion rackets, their own drug trafficking routes. They were making their own money, building their own loyalty networks.
And when Cárdenas Guillén was extradited and leadership of the Gulf Cartel passed to figures like Antonio Cárdenas Guillén, Osiel’s own brother, and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, those new leaders looked at the Zetas and realized something uncomfortable. The people they were relying on to protect them had gotten too big to control.
The new Gulf leadership tried to rein in the Zetas, tried to cut their power, tried to remind them who was boss. That decision triggered a catastrophe. In 2010, the unthinkable happened. Los Zetas formally broke away from the Gulf Cartel and declared themselves an independent criminal organization. The armed wing had eaten the hand that created it.
What followed was described by analysts as one of the most violent periods in the history of Mexican organized crime. And that is saying something given what this country had already witnessed. The Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas went to war across Tamaulipas, [music] Nuevo León, and Veracruz simultaneously.
Massacres, ambushes, mass graves. Entire towns caught in the crossfire as two former allies who knew each other’s playbooks inside and out try to destroy one another. To put that into context, this wasn’t like two rival crews from different cities fighting over a block. These were people who had trained together, bled together, built operations together.
They knew every safe house, every corrupt police contact, every trafficking route the other side used. When they turned on each other, the intelligence they held was a weapon as lethal as any gun. The Gulf Cartel, desperate to survive, did something that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier. They reached out to the Sinaloa Cartel, their long-time rival, for support.
And Sinaloa, seeing an opportunity to weaken both groups in the east, agreed to a temporary alignment. But ironically, even with external support, the Gulf Cartel never fully recovered from the Zeta split, losing their military arm and losing the one thing that had made them uniquely dangerous. And the internal damage, the chaos, the arrests, the killings, had fractured their leadership structure in ways that couldn’t be easily repaired.
This reality, along with the constant government pressure that followed Mexico’s 2006 declaration of war on cartels, prompted something that no one inside the Gulf Cartel had planned for: the emergence of factions. Now, listen closely cuz what I’m going to say next brings everything together. When you remove a strong central leader from a criminal organization, and especially when you do it multiple times in rapid succession, what you get isn’t an organization that dies.
What you get is an organization that splits, and each piece of that split still has guns, money, territory, and ambition. They just no longer have a shared boss telling them to stand down. That’s exactly what happened to the Gulf Cartel throughout the 2000s. As leadership turned over again and again through arrests, killings, and extraditions, different geographic factions within Tamaulipas began developing their own identities, their own command structures, and the names started multiplying.
Los Metros originally formed in Matamoros, but eventually establishing dominance in Reynosa and the northern border corridor. Despite their names’ origins, they claimed the strategic prize of Reynosa, sitting directly across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, one of the most valuable drug and human smuggling entry points into the United States.
Grupo Escorpión, operating primarily out of Matamoros, right across from Brownsville, Texas. The Escorpiones functioned as the Gulf Cartel’s primary armed wing in that plaza, maintaining a fearsome reputation for violence that would eventually put them in international headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Los Ciclones, a third faction with its own territorial claims within Tamaulipas, adding another layer of complexity to an already chaotic criminal landscape. Los Rojos, an earlier splinter group tied to the original Cárdenas Guillén family, though their influence had been severely reduced through years of fighting with the Metros.
And then there were smaller regional groups. Los Dragones, various plaza-level cells, all nominally connected to the Gulf Cartel brand, but in practice operating with significant autonomy. You see, the Gulf Cartel by this point had become less of an organization and more of a franchise, and the franchisees had stopped paying fees to a central office that no longer existed.
In July 2021, something remarkable happened, or appeared to happen. The warring Gulf Cartel factions, exhausted from years of internal bloodshed, reportedly signed a truce. The Metros, the [music] Escorpiones, the Ciclones, the Rojos, all agreed, at least on paper, to stop killing each other. Now, here’s the part that might actually interest you.
The truce lasted roughly 2 months before it started crumbling. In September 2021, just weeks after the ceasefire was announced, a man identified as Jose Alfredo Hernandez Campos, known as Comandante Calamardo, and believed to be a leading figure within the Metros faction, was found dead. Whether his killing was an internal power play, a violation of the truce by rivals, or something else entirely was never officially confirmed, but his death sent the message that was heard across Tamaulipas. The peace was fragile, and
fragile [music] things break. But did the ceasefire fully collapse immediately? No. Instead, it did something arguably more dangerous. It created a false sense of stability while tensions continued building underneath the surface. Skirmishes continued in rural areas, local commanders tested boundaries, accusations flew between factions about violations of agreed-upon territorial lines. And then came 2023.
In 2023, the fragile equilibrium finally shattered. Violence spiked across Tamaulipas in a way that hadn’t been seen in years. Reynosa, Matamoros, San Fernando, the highway corridors connecting these cities, all of them became active conflict zones as the Gulf Cartel factions threw aside whatever remained of their ceasefire arrangements and went back to war.
Now, we know cartel violence is unfortunately common in Mexico, but this No. No, this was different in its scale and its brazenness. These weren’t isolated shootings or targeted assassinations. These were coordinated military-style operations in the middle of civilian population centers. October 2023. Reynosa, criminal groups simultaneously set up blockades at five separate locations across the city, shutting down major thoroughfares while engaging in shootouts with police.
Citizens were trapped indoors, highways were blocked. It was, for all practical purposes, a military siege carried out by a criminal organization against a city of hundreds of thousands of people. And then came the moment that put the Gulf Cartel’s internal war on international radar in a way nothing else had.
March 2023, Matamoros. This is the incident that the world actually paid attention to. Four American citizens, two of whom were later found dead, two others kidnapped, were attacked by members of the Escorpiones faction in Matamoros. They had crossed the border for a medical procedure. They were not involved in drugs, not involved in crime, not involved in anything that should have made them a target.
But in the chaos of a cartel war in a city where the Escorpiones operated with near total impunity, they were in the wrong place at what had become a permanent wrong time. The incident triggered something the Gulf Cartel’s leadership, to whatever extent centralized leadership still existed, understood was existential.
The kidnapping of American citizens on Mexican soil was the kind of thing [music] that brought US government heat at a level that made normal law enforcement pressure look mild. In a move that was either genuinely remorseful or purely strategic, probably both, Gulf Cartel figures handed over five alleged members of the Escorpiones faction to Mexican authorities, claiming these were the individuals responsible.
Whether justice was truly served in any meaningful sense is a separate debate. What it demonstrated was that even within the Gulf Cartel’s fractured structure, certain lines when crossed publicly enough still produce some kind of response. But even if that response placated the immediate international pressure, it had zero impact on the underlying war.
The factions kept fighting. Here’s something no one actually talks about when they cover the Gulf Cartel conflict. The way this war is being fought has evolved in ways [music] that should genuinely alarm anyone paying attention. For years, Cartel warfare in Mexico meant gunmen in trucks, armored vehicles, and rifle battles on highways and in rural areas.
That’s still happening, but the Metros versus Escorpiones conflict introduced something new to Tamaulipas that represented a disturbing escalation. Drones? Not surveillance drones, not the kind used for filming narco corrido music videos, explosive-laden drones deployed as weapons against both rival cartel members and, critically, [music] against law enforcement.
The Escorpiones faction began using makeshift landmines and IEDs buried along road dirt roads to stop rival incursions. Standard military tactic applied to cartel warfare, but then they took it further. They began attaching explosives to commercially available drones and flying them into targets.
And at least one confirmed incident involved a drone attack on a convoy of Tama lipas police armored vehicles, a direct strike against government security forces using aerial weaponry. The Metros weren’t far behind. A large explosion in Reynosa that authorities initially tried to attribute to improperly stored fireworks was later linked to cartel explosive activity.
To put into context just how significant this development is, the use of explosive drones against police represents a level of asymmetric military capability that blurs the line between organized crime and insurgency. This is not a gang war in any traditional sense. These are militarized factions using battlefield tactics in a border city that sits minutes away from American soil.
If you take the time and do your homework, you could find out that analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security and the New Lines Institute have both flagged this drone escalation as one of the most concerning developments in cartel warfare in recent memory. Specifically because of how close to American soil it occurred. January 23rd, 2024.
That’s the date you need to remember because on that day Reynosa, a city of over 700,000 people directly across the border from McAllen, Texas, essentially stopped functioning for nearly 2 weeks. Starting on January 23rd and continuing for close to 14 days, Reynosa was engulfed in the most intense sustained violence the city has seen in years.
Sporadic but relentless shootouts, road blockades erected and torn down and erected again, the sound of gunfire at unpredictable hours. Civilians staying home not because they were told to, but because stepping outside felt like a genuine risk to their lives. This wasn’t a single battle. It was a sustained campaign, a territorial offensive by one faction or coordinated response to an offensive by another that turned a major Mexican border city into something resembling an active conflict zone for almost two weeks straight. And here’s
the disturbing detail. For most of those two weeks, life in McAllen, Texas, just across the river, continued more or less normally. Americans went to work, went to school, went to restaurants. Directly across the international bridge, a cartel war raged. The proximity of this violence to American territory is not a hypothetical.
It is a geographic reality that the residents of border cities live with every single day. But amidst all of that chaos, one specific incident captured just how dramatically the technology of this war had shifted. In late 2024, law enforcement sources shared footage with journalists that have been filmed in Rio Bravo, Tamaulipas, a city that sits a short distance south of Donna, Texas.
In the video, members of the Escorpion faction of the Gulf Cartel can be seen arming the drone. A narcoballad plays in the background. The drone is being prepared for what appears to be a combat mission. Why does this matter? Because Rio Bravo is not deep in the Mexican interior. It is right on the Texas border.
[music] The fact that cartel members were comfortable enough, bold enough to film themselves preparing explosive drones for combat operations in a city that close to the United States says something about the level of territorial control these factions believe they have. Statistics show that by the end of 2024, the use of weaponized drones have moved from an occasional tactic to a regular feature of Gulf Cartel faction warfare.
The learning curve on drone warfare in criminal organizations has been steep. And other cartels, including CJNG, were watching and adopting similar approaches. Now, while all this was happening inside Mexico, something was shifting on the American side of the equation. Something that would ultimately have consequences far beyond Tamaulipas.
In February 2025, the US State Department formally designated the Gulf Cartel as a foreign terrorist organization and especially designated foreign terrorist entity. This was not a routine law enforcement measure. This was a fundamental reclassification, a declaration that treating the Gulf Cartel as a drug trafficking organization alone was insufficient.
They were being labeled as terrorists. And understand what that means legally, a foreign terrorist organization designation opens up a completely different set of tools for American law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Financial transactions with the group can be prosecuted as material support for terrorism.
The legal framework for going after their networks, including American citizens who do business with them, expands significantly. Why did it happen? Because the March 2023 Matamoros kidnapping, along with years of accumulated evidence about drone strikes on police, IED use on public roads, and the systematic terrorizing of civilian populations had made the political calculus impossible to ignore.
When American citizens are killed and kidnapped in the city on the Texas border by Cartel faction, the pressure to respond beyond normal law enforcement becomes overwhelming. The Gulf Cartel had, through its civil war, made itself a target for the kind of designation that Mexican cartels have historically tried to avoid because it escalates the nature and resources of the response against them.
So, where does all of this leave us right now? According to multiple sources, including the DEA’s 2025 assessment and analysis from groups like Insight Crime and the New Lines Institute, the Gulf Cartel today exists in a state of managed fragmentation, which is a diplomatic way of saying it’s still at war with itself.
But, the war currently exists within a loose ceasefire framework that nobody fully trusts. The two main factions, Los Metros out of Reynosa and Grupo Escorpión out of Matamoros, Moros, are not actively engaged in the kind of open warfare that shut down Reynosa in January 2024. But, not actively engaged [music] in open warfare and that peace are very different things.
Border analysts and Mexican security sources describe the current situation as a tenuous ceasefire, one maintained not out of trust, but out of mutual exhaustion and the recognition that sustained open warfare draws exactly the kind of government and international attention that makes criminal operations harder to run.
Few areas have reported genuine stabilization. Most observers note that the underlying territorial disputes, the competition over smuggling routes, and the personal vendettas accumulated through years of fighting have not been resolved. [music] They’ve been temporarily suppressed, but even if the ceasefire holds longer than previous ones, it has already had a measurable impact on the region.
Tamaulipas remains the only Mexican state currently under [music] the US State Department’s highest travel warning, do not travel, a designation reserved for places considered as dangerous as active war zones. That advisory is not updated based on faction ceasefires. It’s updated based on structural conditions. And the structural conditions in Tamaulipas have not fundamentally changed.
Now, here’s something that makes the Gulf Cartel situation even more complicated and something the coverage of this war often glosses over. The Metros and Escorpiones aren’t just fighting each other. They’re also dealing with pressure from an external enemy that emerged directly from the Gulf Cartel’s own history, the Northeast Cartel, known in Spanish as the Cartel del Noreste or CDN, is the direct descendant of Los Zetas.
After the Zetas themselves fragmented following their split from the Gulf Cartel, the CDN emerged as the dominant successor group in the Nuevo Laredo area and parts of Tamaulipas, and they are not friendly toward the Gulf Cartel factions. Records indicate that the Metros have been engaged in battles with the Northeast Cartel for control of municipalities in the corridor between Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo.
Based on current reporting, those areas appear to now be firmly under Northeast Cartel control, meaning the Gulf Cartel has effectively ceded significant territory, not just through internal conflict, but through the expansion of a rival that was literally born from their own organization. To put that into perspective, the Gulf Cartel created Los Zetas.
Los Zetas became the Northeast Cartel, and the Northeast Cartel is now taking Gulf Cartel territory. The organizational tree of the Gulf Cartel’s destruction leads directly back to decisions made by Osiel Cárdenas Guillén in 1997 when he built the Zetas in the first place. The only question left to answer now is if the Gulf Cartel is this weakened, why hasn’t another major cartel, CJNG or the Sinaloa factions, simply swept in and taken their territory? And the answer to that question tells you everything about where Mexican Cartel power currently
sits. The short version, everyone is busy fighting their own civil wars. CJNG just lost El Mencho in February 2026 and is navigating his own succession crisis with El 3, Juan Carlos Valencia González, the man you asked about earlier, now believed to be at the helm of an organization dealing with internal power struggles and heightened government pressure.
CJNG is fighting the United Cartels and Michoacán, battling the Mayitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel across multiple states, and managing the blowback from El Mencho’s death all simultaneously. The Sinaloa Cartel is in arguably the most dramatic self-destruction in cartel history. The civil war between Los Chapitos and La Meiza has produced over 4,000 dead or missing since September 2024 alone.
And in a twist that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago, Los Chapitos have now allied with CJNG, their historical enemy, to fight against the Mayitos. The entire Western Mexican criminal landscape is being redrawn in real time. Meanwhile, the Northeast Cartel, the most direct outside threat to Gulf territory, is itself dealing with the aftermath of multiple leadership losses and government pressure.
The result is a criminal ecosystem so chaotic, so multilaterally violent, that no single organization currently has the bandwidth to mount takeover of Gulf Cartel territory in Tamaulipas. They’re all too busy bleeding. Other analysts have noted that this moment, this simultaneous fragmentation of multiple major cartels, actually represents one of the more dangerous periods for civilians in Mexico.
When one powerful organization controls territory, it has an incentive to maintain some degree of order because disorder is bad for business. When multiple weakened factions are fighting for the same territory, that incentive disappears. You get chaos, not control, and chaos kills civilians. But even if they wanted to copy what they’re doing in Reynosa and Matamoros, they’re not likely to replicate the specific conditions that produced this conflict cuz those conditions are unique to Tamaulipas in a way that can’t be exported. What can be exported is the
suffering, and that’s what gets lost when we talk about this war in terms of factions and tactics and territorial control. The people of Tamaulipas, Reynosa, Matamoros, Ciudad Victoria, San Fernando have been living inside this conflict for years, not as combatants, as hostages, as involuntary witnesses to a war they didn’t choose and can’t escape.
The do not travel advisory that American tourists see before they book a trip is not an abstract warning for the Tamaulipas taxi driver who still has to go to work in the morning. It’s not a policy statement for the school teacher who has to figure out what to day is safe enough to open her classroom. It is the permanent background noise of their daily lives.
The calculation every single day of whether the war will touch them or pass them by. The IED buried in the road outside a village in San Fernando that killed two people in January 2025 was not aimed at rival cartel members. It was planted along the road that anyone might use. The drone dropped on a police convoy in Tamaulipas endangered everyone in the surrounding area.
The two-week siege of Reynosa in January 2024 didn’t just inconvenience cartel rivals, it shut down the economy of a city of hundreds of thousands. If you do the math, the human toll of the Gulf Cartel civil war in lives lost, in people displaced, in economic activity destroyed, and psychological damage to communities that have lived under this pressure for over a decade is staggering.
And it doesn’t make international headlines the way a major bust or kingpin capture does. It just accumulates quietly on the Mexican side of a river that separates two countries with wildly different experiences of the same conflict. Now, listen closely cuz this part matters whether you live near the border or not.
The Gulf Cartel’s primary business has always been moving product, drugs, and increasingly people across the Texas border. The specific crossing points controlled by the Metros and the Scorpionis feed directly into the American supply chain for fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin. And the competition between these factions is not just about which one gets to operate the smuggling corridors, it’s about which one gets to charge the fees to everyone else who wants to use them.
Based on DEA reporting, the strategic position of the Gulf Cartel’s factions at several key crossing points has long given them an advantage for smuggling drugs into the United States, as well as high-powered weapons and cash back into Mexico. The weapons that flow south, purchased legally in American gun stores and trafficked across the border, come back in the form of the armored vehicles, the IEDs, the .
50 caliber rifles, the drones that the factions use against each other and against police. The American drug market doesn’t just consume the product of this war. In a very real sense, it funds both sides of it. And then, there’s the human smuggling dimension. As the conflict has intensified in Tamaulipas, the Gulf Cartel factions have increasingly turned to migrant smuggling as a revenue stream that can operate alongside, or even instead of, drug trafficking when heat on the narcotic side gets too intense.
The corridors that move fentanyl move people. The same networks, the same corrupt officials, the same border infrastructure. The January 2024 unrest in Reynosa, the two-week siege, happened directly across from McAllen, Texas. The drones filmed in late 2024 near Donna, Texas, were on the Mexican side of the border by a very short distance.
The conditions that created those incidents aren’t contained on one side of the Rio Grande. They press against the border constantly. The border is not a wall that stops the consequences of this war. It’s a line on a map. The Gulf Cartel’s gone for good, but we don’t think their story is done being written.
And here’s something no one actually talks about. While the formal designation of the Gulf Cartel as a foreign terrorist organization was transformative in legal terms, the problem isn’t finished, not even close. In fact, the designation may have the paradoxical effect of making the factions more dangerous in some respects.
Organizations with nothing to lose behave differently than organizations managing a business. When you label a group as terrorist, some of the informal channels through which criminal organizations are sometimes managed, negotiations with local officials, tolerance agreements, the kind of pragmatic arrangements that reduce violence even if they don’t eliminate crime, become legally and politically impossible.
The space for management narrows. What fills that space is often more violence, not less. Based on current reporting and analysis from security institutions, the most likely near-term trajectory for the Gulf Cartel’s internal conflict looks something like this. The tenuous ceasefire between Metros and the Scorpions continues to hold imperfectly and incompletely until some triggering event, a leadership killing, a perceived territorial violation, a government operation that disrupts the balance, breaks it again. When it breaks, the
violence returns, and then exhaustion sets in and another ceasefire is negotiated, and the cycle repeats. Meanwhile, the Northeast Cartel consolidates the territory it has already taken. CJNG stabilize and the El Golf 3’s leadership will fragment further depending on how the succession crisis resolves, will eventually look toward Tamaulipas with interest, cuz those border corridors are too valuable to ignore forever.
Whether the Gulf Cartel factions weaken as they are can resist external pressure while simultaneously managing their internal divisions is genuinely uncertain. What is certain is that the conditions producing this violence, the poverty, the corruption, the demand for drugs on the American side, the flow of weapons from the American side, the absence of legitimate economic alternatives in Tamaulipas, none of those conditions have changed.
So, the war continues, not always at the intensity of January 2024, not always with the brazenness of drones over Rio Bravo, but it continues. Every day, the Gulf Cartel was once [music] called the most powerful criminal organization in Mexico. Its boss was considered untouchable. Its military wing was trained by the state itself. Its territory sat at one of the most strategically valuable stretches of the American border.
And today, today it is officially, per the DEA, no longer a unified cartel. It is factions fighting factions, former allies running IEDs at each other, drones deployed in cities where hundreds of thousands of people are just trying to live their lives. The story of the Gulf Cartel is not a story about drugs, it’s a story about what happens when power concentrates, when the wrong decisions are made at the wrong moments, [music] when a military arm grows bigger than the body it was built to protect, and when the absence of real institutional accountability,
both inside the organization and in the governments that should have dismantled it, allows a cancer to grow until the body turns on itself. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén created Los Zetas to protect his empire. Los Zetas destroyed that empire and birthed a Northeast [music] Cartel that is now eating what’s left of it.
The factions that emerged from the Gulf Cartel’s collapse are now fighting each other over the ruins. And in Tamaulipas, in Reynosa, and Matamoros, and in the towns between them, people wake up every morning in the middle of that story. Not as characters, as survivors. That’s the real story of the Gulf Cartel’s civil war, and now you know it.
