Sinaloa residents, tired of war, debate Trump’s proposal

“It’s the last option we have,” said Oliver Zamora, a 23-year-old meat seller. “We’ve tried everything else and nothing has worked. What else is left to do?”

We spoke to more than two dozen people in Sinaloa last month, and most expressed a vision totally different from the national consensus. For them, the Mexican government has repeatedly failed in its efforts to control the cartels, so they said they were willing to consider a US attack on the groups if it allowed them to live safely.

The residents of Sinaloa are not the only ones contemplating US intervention. In interviews last year, agents within factions of the Sinaloa Cartel scoffed at the idea of ​​US military action, doubting that the Trump administration would actually do anything. But last month, four cartel members said the groups were now taking the threat seriously.

They described stockpiling weapons and bolstering defenses in preparation for a U.S. attack, including by installing lookouts that scan the skies and purchasing rocket-propelled grenades and anti-drone systems that could shoot down a U.S. drone. The four cartel members spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from their bosses.

“There is a lot of paranoia,” said a senior regional coordinator for a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel called Mayitos, which is aligned with one of the cartel’s founders, Ismael Zambada García, known as “El Mayo.”

Mexican authorities have recently shown some success in their fight against criminal groups. Last month, security forces killed Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” leader of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, the main rival of the Sinaloa Cartel. But El Mencho’s death revealed the vast reach and power of his cartel, unleashing a wave of retaliatory violence in at least 20 of the country’s 32 states.

On Saturday, Trump mocked President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico at a summit meeting of 12 Latin American countries focused on defeating cartels and other criminal groups in the region, saying she had rejected his help. The Mexican representatives were not at the meeting.

“It’s good that President Trump is saying publicly that when he proposed sending US military to Mexico, we said no. Because that’s the truth,” Sheinbaum said Monday during his daily press conference. Police operations in Mexico, he added, are carried out exclusively by Mexican security forces.

Daily life in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, has changed dramatically since July 2024. Then, one of the sons of imprisoned drug trafficker Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, betrayed his father’s former partner, El Mayo, splitting the Sinaloa Cartel and sparking a fierce battle that continues to this day.

At the height of the violence, people on the outskirts of the capital said they barricaded themselves in their homes, sometimes for weeks, as gunfire crackled on dirt roads. Bodies were dumped on the sides of the roads, gunfights broke out in exclusive neighborhoods and burned tractor-trailers blocked the roads.

The violence has persisted. Just in January, two legislators were shot after leaving the state Congress in downtown Culiacán. Ten workers at a Canadian-owned gold mine were kidnapped; Seven of their bodies were later found. A faceless body was recently found in a shopping mall.

Agustín Coppel, CEO of Coppel, a major department store chain, noted the “enormous” economic toll that violence has taken on the state.

“People don’t go out at night,” he said. “Almost everything is closed and there is almost no one on the streets. At night it is like a general strike, until car thefts and other crimes decrease.”

The state of Sinaloa lost almost 10% of its gross domestic product between 2024 and 2025, according to estimates by Coppel and other business leaders.

“That means a lot of businesses have closed and a lot of jobs have disappeared,” Coppel said. “There is talk of more than 2,000 companies that closed. In sectors such as hotels, tourism and restaurants, sales have fallen around 50%,” he stated. Even his own chain of Coppel stores in Culiacán has seen a 25% drop in sales, he added.

Sheinbaum has sent more than 12,000 soldiers, the largest influx of security forces into Sinaloa in years, if not ever, leading to the arrest of dozens of high-ranking cartel members and the destruction of many drug laboratories.

“Our strategy is to tighten the network,” said Gen. Guillermo Briseño Lobera, commander of Mexico’s National Guard, pointing to a recent decline in homicides in the state as evidence that the strategy was working. “People can move through the streets more calmly, but it is clear that in the medium term a final phase of continuous security operations will still be necessary.”

Residents said the violence had subsided somewhat, but a sense of fear was still broad and deep.

At least twice a week in Culiacán, families of missing people comb hillsides and bushes in search of unmarked graves. On a recent weekday, a van carrying members of a search team drove two hours out of town to conduct another dig.

During the trip, several spoke cautiously about the prospect of American attacks. They said the Mexican government had failed to contain the cartels: what was there left to lose?

“Yes, Trump’s idea is kind of crazy, because how are you going to come to another country to try to impose order?” said María Isabel Cruz Bernal, who leads a group of mothers searching for their missing children. “But I think the citizens here ask for it because we have no peace, we have no control.”

According to the group’s records, more than 18,000 people have disappeared in Sinaloa since 2006. More than 5,500 of those people disappeared in the last 20 months.

“There is no one to turn to,” said María de los Ángeles Campos Sierra, mother of two children who disappeared 14 years ago. In other parts of Mexico “there are not many people who support it, but I think here the victims feel the opposite.”

Three cartel agents said the idea of ​​a U.S. military attack on Mexico seemed to become much more plausible in January, when television broadcasts showed U.S. forces attacking Venezuela to stop President Nicolás Maduro.

Now suspicion runs deep among some of them. Some said they feared their own ranks had been infiltrated by Mexican and U.S. government informants. Conversations have become more cautious and moves more calculated.

“Now everything has to be done with great precision, almost millimeter by millimeter,” said a cartel agent. “Every move must be surgical, because the situation right now is very dangerous.”

Worried about a U.S. attack, members of both factions of the cartel said both sides had beefed up defenses around top leaders and fentanyl labs. They have expanded their arsenal to include drone jammers, which can cost up to $40,000 each, and can disrupt the signals that drones depend on to navigate, forcing them to land or crash.

A 19-year-old meth cook aligned with the Mayitos faction said newly hired lookouts had been sent to the Sierra Madre mountain range, east of Sinaloa, to monitor the skies for suspicious planes.

He said those lookouts also stopped unknown vehicles, questioning drivers, even those in FedEx vans.

Some Sinaloa residents have questioned what a US intervention would achieve. Several said they feared it could instead inflame violence.

“I think it would get ugly, I think it would get a lot worse,” said Rocío Torres, 19, a nutrition student. “There are a lot of innocent people here.”

Others said they simply rejected the idea on principle. The United States, they said, should stay out of Mexico.

“They should attack the problem from within, not from without,” said José Valde Pino, 66, a retired teacher. “We are not the problem. They have the highest rate of drug addicts in the entire world.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.