Alfonso Gutiérrez Loera, a cousin of El Chapo's who was captured in 2008, has been sentenced to 21 years in prison for organized crime and weapons-related offenses.
It's another blow to Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, yet this doesn't fit in with the media's current agenda of hyping alleged collusion between the government and the Sinaloa organization, so few media outlets are even reporting it. To be sure, the Sinaloa cartel is hardly going to collapse because the authorities catch one of Chapo's punk cousins, but it is a blow nonetheless, as he is yet another Guzman family member to be sentenced, and family means everything in the Sinaloa drug trade.
You're definitely right about the underreporting of this arrest. So far I've only seen a decent story in Rio Doce and zero coverage in foreign media...
ReplyDeleteSo what's your take on NPR's report a while back regarding less intense persecution of Sinaloa cartel operatives w.r.t. to other organizations? I don't believe either that this has been a matter of policy under Calderon, but for whatever reason, low-rank infiltrations, logistics, etc., the numbers at least suggest the Sinaloa cartel to be less affected as a whole by Calderon's crackdown.
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