Here’s an insightful portrait of the criminal organizations in Ciudad Juarez, their histories, and their geographic domains, from InsightCrime.org1:
If you ask most Juarenses, “the war” began in 2008. The Sinaloa Cartel, taking advantage of schisms in the Juárez Cartel, launched an assault on the city. Their first target was the local police, who they correctly believed were the core of the Juárez Cartel’s military wing, La Línea. Later targets included the Barrio Azteca, a powerful prison gang and another key Juárez Cartel ally.
The next few years were a blur of bloody battles and bodies on the streets. Between 2008 and 2011, over 10,000 people were killed in what the media, academics, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) began calling the “murder capital of the world.” In addition to the criminal organizations, whose ranks swelled to well over 10,000 on the streets and the city’s prison, over 7,000 federal police and military forces joined the fray, scrambling the criminal map.
By 2013, violence was down fivefold from its peak in 2010, and most experts were declaring the Sinaloa Cartel the “winners.” But that pax mafiosa did not hold. By the mid-2010s, the violence began to creep up again, and while it did not reach its 2010-levels, it pushed Juárez to the top of the country’s most violent municipalities list, where it has remained ever since.
Authorities blame the recent violence on the dispute over the methamphetamine market. When InSight Crime asked Municipal Security Secretary César Omar Muñoz how he knew the murders were related to local drug peddling, he said the information came directly from several of the suspected murderers who his team had interviewed. Chihuahua state Security Minister Gilberto Loya corroborated this analysis with what he said was his own first-hand information. The analysis also corresponded with what InSight Crime heard repeatedly from NGOs that monitor security in the city.
You can’t tell the players without a program.