LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Last summer, the U.S. announced a major coup in the war on drugs - the arrest of Ismael Zambada, perhaps Mexico's biggest drug lord. Zambada, known as El Mayo, is now awaiting trial in the United States. In Mexico, his arrest has unleashed a regional war that has killed more than a thousand people. More than a thousand are missing, too. NPR's Eyder Peralta reports from the state of Sinaloa. And a warning - this story is about six minutes and has graphic descriptions of violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUM BEATING)
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Culiacan used to be a totally different city. It had a vibrant nightlife full of clubs and big bands. But all of that ended when this war started last September. All the bands split up, and now musicians play on street corners for the traffic. Jose Guadalupe Tapia Beltran (ph) used to play with one of the biggest bands in Culiacan.
JOSE GUADALUPE TAPIA BELTRAN: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "Now who are we supposed to play for?" - he says. "The guys who used to pay for the music are now killing each other." Tapia is 85 years old. He spent his life playing music. His band, Los Conyunquis (ph), lived large. They were hired by the big drug dealers to play parties and to write songs about their exploits.
TAPIA BELTRAN: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "And now we make noise on the streets to be able to eat a taco." Tapia grabs his sticks. These days, there isn't even much traffic.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMS BEATING)
PERALTA: But he plays anyway.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMS BEATING)
PERALTA: Guillermo Ibarra Escobar, who teaches public policy at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, says for decades before this conflict began, the Mexican government and the cartels had a symbiotic relationship, meaning...
GUILLERMO IBARRA ESCOBAR: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: ...That there was a political understanding between the authorities, business leaders, police and drug dealers that made sense. The cartels were allowed to operate freely, and the politicians and businesses enjoyed some profits. But beginning around 2008, those understandings began to crumble and fissures began to emerge in the Sinaloa cartel. And then last summer, in an operation led by the United States, Mexico's biggest drug lord, El Mayo Zambada, was lured into a meeting in Sinaloa. He was bounded on a plane and flown to the U.S., where he was thrown in jail.
IBARRA ESCOBAR: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "It was an ambush in a place where Zambada had an impunity deal with everyone," he says. So the operation was a bombshell that challenged every bit of the alliances that had been formed for decades.
IBARRA ESCOBAR: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "The operation," says Ibarra, "was a mistake." Because it happened at a time when organized crime was ascendant, when they had burrowed their way into all parts of society and government. And so Zambada's capture unleashed a ruthless war that's upended everything from the economy to life itself.
(SOUNDBITE OF OBJECTS BANGING)
PERALTA: And the signs of that war are everywhere. Military helicopters fly overhead. There are nearly daily gun battles, sometimes in the middle of cities. And across the region, parents look for children who have gone missing.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: I meet Maria Isabel Bernal at a field about 45 minutes from Culiacan. She and her civilian search group are digging through a huge septic tank. Days ago, they got a tip from a survivor that organized crime groups had been stuffing bodies inside a municipal septic tank. One of the searchers pushes a stick through the muck.
UNIDENTIFIED SEARCHER: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "Maybe it's a boot," he says. This was their fifth day of search. They had already found five full bodies, which floated to the top of the tank when they opened it.
MARIA ISABEL BERNAL: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "But we know there are fragments of other bodies down there," she says. They figured the only way to get them out is to suck all of the wastewater and scum out of the tank and sift through it.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK ENGINE RUMBLING)
PERALTA: They do it with a vac truck, which fills up its tank and then dumps the contents onto a nearby field, where volunteers use a rake to sift through the slush.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAKE CLINKING)
PERALTA: The smell of human waste and decomposition burns your lungs. But every once in a while, they do find something - a pair of ribs, something that looks like finger bones, then a whole shoulder blade. Bernal looks on with no emotion. She's been on searches like this since her son went missing in 2017. It's a torture she has learned to live through.
BERNAL: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "Sometimes you wish it's your son, but at the same time, you really hope it's not." Violence is nothing new in Sinaloa. This is the land where cartels publish videos of them beheading their rivals with small knives, making sure they suffer, making sure the video is horrific enough to put fear into hearts. Over the years, Bernal has seen a lot. It used to be that the narcos used to fight each other in the mountains.
BERNAL: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "Now," she says, "they pick up people who have nothing to do with them." The man who called them on this search, she says, was a civilian. He told them he was stopped at a checkpoint, shot once and left for dead inside the septic tank. He waited 24 hours before he dared to crawl out and call for help.
BERNAL: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "We've lost all feeling," she says. "We've lost our values."
BERNAL: (Speaking Spanish).
PERALTA: "This war," she says, "has killed our love for humanity."
Eyder Peralta, NPR News, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico.
(SOUNDBITE OF KAKI KING'S "NIGHT AFTER SIDEWALK") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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