But a month of testimony at the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican kingpin known as El Chapo, has suggested the cartels are less like the Gambinos or General Electric and more like something out of “Game of Thrones.” Cartel leaders have not only shifted frequently over the years, but the groups themselves have also changed shape in an almost constant series of alliances and breakups.
According to the several witnesses at the trial, Guzmán started in the trafficking trade in the late 1980s while working under the wing of a more senior crime lord, Juan José Esparragoza, who ran what was known as the Guadalajara drug cartel. At the time, Guzmán was surrounded by a modest entourage of family and friends: his brother, Arturo, known as El Pollo (Spanish for “the chicken”); his cousins, the three Beltrán-Leyva brothers; and his first employee, a pilot named Míguel Angel Martínez.
Almost from the start of his career, Guzmán had trouble with the Tijuana drug cartel, which controlled most smuggling operations at the Mexican border with San Diego. Eventually, a war broke out with the Tijuana traffickers when Guzmán, disobeying protocol, got caught moving cocaine through their turf without permission.
In 1991, witnesses have said, that war resulted in one of the first major shake-ups in the world of the cartels. After studying the conflict, a powerful trafficker named Ismael Zambada García broke away from the Tijuana group and allied himself with Guzmán. Known as El Mayo, Zambada brought along another drug-world veteran: Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who at the time was running the Juarez drug cartel.
Guzmán and Carrillo Fuentes had not, at that point, worked together much, but they knew each other from cartel parties, witnesses have said. But Carrillo Fuentes was closer to Zambada. (The two once spent $50 million, jointly buying a jumbo jet in which they smuggled drugs.) He also had his own inner circle of associates. Among them was his brother, Vincente Carrillo Fuentes, who oversaw his team of assassins, witnesses have said.
By 1992, this alliance of three — Guzmán, Zambada and Carrillo Fuentes — formed the core of what became the Sinaloa drug cartel. While each man had his own crew and separate business interests, they often pooled resources. Sometimes, witnesses said, they used the same pilots or invested together in ton-size cocaine deals.
“We were one group,” Zambada’s brother, Jesus Zambada García, testified at the beginning of the trial.
For the next five years, the cartel’s structure was more or less the same. But in 1997, Amado Carrillo Fuentes unexpectedly died while having plastic surgery. Not long after, one of his top deputies, Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte, shot himself in the head while being chased by police. Gonzalez didn’t die, but his injuries left him with amnesia. He was forced to retire, witnesses have said.
To fill the vacuum, Vincente Carrillo Fuentes was promoted to run his brother’s business and soon found himself in a power struggle with Guzmán, a witness said this week. According to the witness, Tirso Martínez Sanchez, Guzmán sought to control a lucrative train route that moved cocaine across the border to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. The train route regularly earned the cartel’s leaders hundreds of millions of dollars. But Guzmán wanted to cut Carrillo Fuentes out of the profits, Martínez said.
Complicating matters, Carrillo Fuentes’ other brother, Rodolfo, soon struck up a partnership with a rival cartel, the Zetas, which mostly operated along the Gulf of Mexico. Initially, witnesses have said, the Zetas and the Sinaloa traffickers worked well together. But their relationship soured in 2002, when a high-ranking Sinaloan gunman killed the brother of a top Zetas leader and then sought refuge with Guzmán’s allies, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers.
Though the Zetas wanted the assassin, prosecutors said, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers refused to hand him over. Another war eventually broke out, pitting Guzmán and the Beltrán-Leyvas against the Zetas and the Carrillo Fuentes brothers.
Amid the war, witnesses have said, Guzmán dispatched assassins to execute Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes. Indeed, in 2004, Carrillo Fuentes and his wife were gunned down as they exited a movie theater in Culiacán.
That same year, the cartel’s structure changed again as Vincente Carrillo Fuentes quit the group, leaving Guzmán and his last initial partner, Ismael Zambada, in charge. At the time, prosecutors said, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers also rose in the ranks — though that did not last long.
By 2007, in fact, Guzmán was warring with the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, according to Jesus Zambada García. Though the origins of the war remain somewhat obscure, Zambada said it erupted partly over the brothers’ role in the seizure of an enormous shipment of cocaine that was coming out of Panama.
Guzmán’s fight with the Beltrán-Leyva brothers was extremely violent, Zambada said, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people. It was also extremely complicated. The Beltrán-Leyvas, for example, struck up an alliance of convenience with the Zetas. That was awkward given that their onetime enemy, Vincente Carrillo Fuentes, was still closely connected to the group.
But such were the ways of the cartels, which regularly split apart, took new shapes, then split apart again before re-forming.
It was enough to drive one witness, a Colombian lawyer named German Rosero, crazy.
By his own account, Rosero had worked with Guzmán and his Sinaloan partners for nearly a decade, but decided to cut ties with them when the struggle with the Beltrán-Leyva brothers started heating up. From his perspective, the constant wars and changes seemed both tiresome and dangerous.
“I frankly didn’t want to work anymore,” he told jurors last month. “I didn’t want to be in the middle of their wars.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.