Beyond ‘El Mayo’ and Drug Cartels: A Podcast with Journalist Luis Chaparro

Luis Chaparro is a longtime border journalist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He specializes in reporting on criminal organizations, corruption, and binational affairs. He’s written for many publications in Mexico and the United States. And he’s one of the only journalists in the borderlands who consistently reports on and analyzes organized crime in Mexico. In July, I immediately went to Chaparro’s Substack newsletter, Saga, when the big news hit that Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and a son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, notorious leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, had touched down at a small airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, under the custody of U.S. law enforcement.

In this podcast, Chaparro and I discuss not only the El Mayo story, with its many twists and turns, but also how the notion of a “drug cartel” has become old fashioned, since these are now massive, multinational criminal enterprises, controlling markets for everything from avocados to water. We also talk about the dangers faced by reporters in Mexico, especially those who try to document the corruption of politicians and businesses who participate in criminal organizations. And Chaparro talks about the incoming Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and compares her stance on the DEA and its “kingpin strategy” in Mexico, in comparison to policies of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The latter has an extremely frosty relationship with the agency, which investigated whether he received drug money during his 2006 presidential campaign.