The lessons of a shootout in Sinaloa

THE GUN battles on the streets of the Mexican city of Culiacán was, once again, a tale of organised crime against the disorganised state. It started as an attempt by soldiers and other armed law enforcers to arrest a prized target: Ovidio Guzmán López, whose father, Joaquín (aka “El Chapo”), once ran the Sinaloa drug gang and is serving a life sentence in an American prison. Chapo Junior now leads one of the gang’s factions, along with his brother. But soon after the security forces nabbed him on October 17th, reinforcements from the family business arrived. As lorries burned and bullets cracked, bystanders cradled children and fled. At least eight people died in the shootout. Outnumbered, the soldiers let Chapo Junior go free.

This was a novel kind of failure for Mexico’s authorities. Shootouts have been commonplace since 2006, when the then-president, Felipe Calderón, mobilised the army to fight drug gangs. The state has also suffered its share of humiliations, not least the escape from a Mexican prison of El Chapo in 2015. But never has the government buckled so publicly in the face of organised crime.