Culiacán: There’s a funeral party loading in at the La Lima cemetery in northeast Culiacán, the sounds of la banda like New Orleans jazz. Behind chili-red walls, three burials are being processed here with three different bandas. We hang back, next to the grave of a young narco where someone this day has placed an open bottle of Coke with a glass as tribute, a visual pun on cocaine. There are an awful lot of bottles of Coke around.
Glorifying the criminal class and its exploits in varying gradations of blood-spatter, narcocorrido ballads have much in common with rap if you overlook the old-timey accordion sound and rhinestone-cowboy get-ups. Buchanan’s whisky (or “botellas de 18”) are to the narco as Cristal is to Jay-Z, and so on. With narcocorridos banned from public play in Sinaloa, it explains why narcos fly these $25,000-an-hour musicians or corridistas around to play private parties or serenade favorite females. And why traditional mariachi bands such as the one pictured are increasingly hurting, waiting out the night in threadbare costumes inside street stalls on Culiacán's Bulevar Francisco 1. Hoping a car or truck will pull over and ferry them to a fiesta, too. El Chapo's mother told me of her son, "El siempre ha sido fiestero. He’s always been a partier. All the time. And much of a dancer. He loves to dance. He’s very joyful. He likes la banda a lot. And mariachi.” For more on El Chapo in Sinaloa, read one of the best Sinaloa cartel books, the Amazon Kindle Single (US $2.99) In the Thrall of the Mountain King: The Secret History of El Chapo, the World’s Most Notorious Narco (Esclavizado por el Rey de la Montaña: La Historia Secreta del Chapo, el Narco Más Famoso del Mundo).
Cocks were found in 2014’s multi-pronged raid of El Chapo's Culiacán safe houses hiding cash and drugs, cartel employees passing the time training fighting cocks for local derbies. Cocks are also known to be kept in Mexican jails. Inside the ring of Culiacán’s Fresno Hipódromo, the men cradle their prizefighters like babies, lashing lethal steel blades to clawed feet. Administering literal mouth-to-mouth, forcing air into tiny lungs to clear the dust. Spitting water into little beaked faces to lower body temperatures, revive spirits. Get the feathers really flying.
A cooperator who ran Chapo’s Chicago and L.A. train routes admitted at Chapo's criminal trial in New York to losing some $2 to $3 million on cockfights. At the highest private levels, bets start at $160,000 for a mere fifteen-minute one-on-one match-up, red versus green. The stakes tonight at Culiacán's Fresno Hipódromo are more piddling, bets maxing out around $1,500. The major wagers happen at Culiacán’s late fall cattle fair, where Chapo’s sons and nephews used to show some face but no longer, the heat now scorching. Men like Chapo would never be seen at a palenque like this; they’d be in rented digs nearby making bigger wagers, a widescreen TV receiving a videocam transmission (see picture). Hearing the reward for Dad is $5 million after his 2015 jailbreak, Chapo’s son Alfredo crows on Instagram he’s thrown more money down on a cockfight--and is rewarded in 2018 with a slot on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted list.
A rooftop Jesucristo not far from El Chapo’s House No. 3 in Colonia Libertad, El Chapo's principal hideout in Culiacán, a fancy manse on a dirt road in a scruffy working-class neighborhood. “People are praying for him,” Chapo's sister Armida was telling me as his trial raged in New York, a dusky Da Vinci Madonna and hitherto elusive presence in the press. Chapo Guzmán's own Wikipedia entry, surely tampered with by zealot members of his mother's Pentecostal Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús denomination, for a long time placed Chapo’s birthday as December 25, the same as Jesucristo himself (and a date that also seeped into his DEA files). Chapo had many members of the church praying for his acquittal. A law clerk for Chapo's defense who has the shoulder-sweeping Magdalene hair of Sinaloa would sing for him in jail, says his sister Bernarda. His favorite hymn, “Eran Cien Ovejas” (“100 Sheep”). The one about the shepherd who goes back to find the lone lamb who strayed off the path.
Jesús Malverde was the Robin Hood-styled Sinaloan bandit finally hanged for his pains right across the street from this shrine near Culiacán’s train tracks. Susi, who sells El Chapo baseball hats here, says Chapo’s been around a couple of times, lighting candles. On his knees praying: “He came in an ordinary car with only one man." Full-dress six-piece norteño bandas show here at midnight to play for Malverde. Hired to thank him for some good turn. In 1979, Malverde’s burial site had lately been taken up by traffickers as a place to beg favors when Culiacán decided to drop a government building right on top. As the story goes, the bulldozer broke just as it was about to hit the significant pile of rocks. (So many miracles.) Thanks to such protests as the breaking of every last window in the new building, the government donated land and funds for this far more elaborate warren of rooms 100 meters across the road, a neon cross stuck on top so narcos can better find the place.
At the Malverde shrine.
Miguel Ramos, a luxe-stuff store in the Plaza Forum mall—its doorman with an MP5 submachine gun strapped across his chest —is where the mero meros, the boss men, and their sicarios (armed guards and occasional hit men) buy the Ferragamo satchels with wrist-straps they use to carry their cash. Because a simple wallet isn't big enough. The mall is geographically situated in the city’s vaunted Desarrollo Urbano Tres Ríos, Three River Urban Development district, a shimmer-quilt of office buildings, car dealerships, and two-story shopping “plazas” with nightclubs and restaurants and casinos. These plazas have been advancing since the nineties down both legs of the letter L formed by three boulevards (two in parallel), with the Forum mall as their nexus. The district’s spiritual fulcrum.
Around here, they say they like their women with a cinturita de gallina, the waistline of a hen, if hens had waistlines and weren't all rump. A "buchona" is someone with the fashionable Pocahontas hair, who has found the narco who will give her this pumped-up rump. Fund her plastic surgeries in addition to that hi-rise apartment on the Isla Musala and clothes from the Forum mall. In the catalogue of procedures, the most popular is the lipogluteo combo, the polenta siphoned off the waist and slapped atop the tush to startling effect. The waistline is an even more profound parentheses if you lose a couple ribs. A ribectomy! Not what it’s technically called, but that’s the gist. And if there’s not enough polenta to go around, silicone implants will do. Culichis splash out more for plastic surgery than anyone else in Mexico. As in the rest of Latin America, it is as much about showing you have money. That you can afford all new construction on your personal property.
At PANAMA, a combination bakery-biosphere populated by las buchonas and the narco niños.
The Galeries Triunfo opened in Tres Ríos in April, 2017, three floors of crazy geared to the narco wife who knows not what to do with his money. The place spills at the gills with why-not whatnots, an oversize bull or horse with mirrored-disco-ball skin for those missing life on the rancho. The Sinaloa cartel is very much part of the community— compared with, say, the Russian-rich deserters buying up London. They stick around. Narco activities are the fizzing font of rare high-paid work in Sinaloa regardless of education level, the entire biome benefitting from the kind of extravagances traffickers two-stepping on the lip of a volcano get up to, the luxury SUV portfolios, nightly sushi smorgasbinges, houses with Tara staircases, water-slide swimming pools, and city-view Jacuzzis. Their spaces tricked out with statues of pirates and gilded beasts of the jungle if what’s in shops is a mirror reflection. American drug dollars stuffed down the craw of a grateful local economy.
Teenage breakdancers launch themselves right into the intersection of Álvaro Obregón and Francisco Villa where a light’s about to change, and that’s half the thrill as they face off against the snorting, rumbling rhino SUVs for a take of 1,500 pesos a night. Between sets, one of them, David, is saying Christmas and New Year see a lot more shootings here. People firing into the air at midnight surely—as is tradition. “Yes, and in front of them, too,” he clarifies, smiling widely, incredulous at the innocence of a gringa who so rarely sees any guns out and about. Social scientists marvel at the acculturation of just a few decades, the normalization of violence. A contagious myopia. The truth is, there’s a fearful non-reporting of the violent crime that is only increasing especially among the young, ages 12 to 23. They seem to have the most gung-ho relationship with the possibility of death, growing up with so much of it hanging in the smog.
At passing glance, they look like hookers, the local Pocahonti hiding behind big black sunglasses, lounging about on office chairs under beach umbrellas. Only occasionally waving down an armored rhino SUV with no plates. El Chapo’s texts and ledgers reveal their big customers call in advance to say they’re coming in. The $10s and $20s from dope sales up north require consolidation to bigger bills as the money travels onward to pay the Colombians or goes to live in stash houses. The cartel coordinates periodic dollar dumps at these casas de cambio, on a rundown stretch of Culiacán’s Calle Benito Juárez. Entirely illegal, most of them, and yet like so much else, as accepted a part of the landscape as the sun in today’s cloudless sky. The ladies put a human face to the bizarre casas, empty storefronts that are merely a two-way-mirrored cashier’s window with with a calculator in the trough below and no seeming customers. No posted rates. No operating permits on display here.
Morning at Culiacán's Jardines Del Humaya, a gangster Giza famed for its Cyclades skyline of Greek-domed chapels, its mausoleums aping the Taj Mahal, a medieval castle—all in awkward conversation with several modern townhouses among them. In 15 years, this cemetery has doubled in size. The backhoes and earthmovers are working overtime, the masons getting rich off rampant annihilation. Whole sections populated by an under-30 crowd. These are the homes they’ll never enjoy—and with all the mod cons: terraces, parking lots, air-conditioning, kitchens, bedrooms, rest rooms, wifi. Perhaps not incidentally, they make a great place for a relative to hide out or stash stuff (money, los drogas), some with space inside for 18-plus people. (Dead people. Still.) A place that will never feel filled to capacity
An entire aisle at the Galeries Triunfo store in town is given over to fake food, fake French pastries and so on. It is bewildering, Japanese in its unappetizing strangeness. But at the Jardines Del Humaya cemetery, all is revealed: whole meals of plastic laid out on the cool marble floors so the deceased won’t starve, families enjoying their lunches just outside, at fold-up tables. Sinaloans don’t want their loved ones missing out on anything. Most of the graves don’t even have names to discourage vandals (if shame even enters into the decision, and it probably doesn’t). Looking for anyone in particular? There are only blown-up portraits and a handful of dates on display, perhaps some initials if you’re lucky. These folks weren’t. Dead before the age of thirty, most every one. And not just dead but: Murdered in some orgy of sadism and bloodspurt. Pairs of brothers. A father and child. One aisle appears to be entirely young women.
Portrait of the wife and children of Chapo’s onetime partner El Güero Palma inside their Jardines Del Humaya tomb. The Corinthian-columned building is one husband’s forgiving acknowledgement that for those narcos shut up in prison, any man’s family is another man’s prey. Released from an Arizona jail in 1986, Güero Palma found wife Guadalupe had taken up with his brother-in-law, who now induced her to withdraw a purported $7 million from a bank, then cut her throat and sent her head to Palma in a cooler (throwing Palma’s two children off a bridge on video to boot). All this to please boss-of-all Félix Gallardo, still peeved at Palma for a perceived theft of some 300 kilos of cocaine. Palma now partnered with Chapo as revenge. The mural in a dome reveals itself to the camera despite dark tinted windows intended to thwart gawkers. Inside, somebody keeps the candles lit all these years later. (And, as rumored, sprays Guadalupe’s perfume in her memory; I did smell it.)