It's published by Time so it's probably not fake news.
The left doesn't seem to want to cover it because they don't want to stop the flow of drugs, slaves, votes and money coming across the boarder.
https://time.com/5705358/sinaloa-car...xico-culiacan/
Incase, no make that when the article mysteriously goes 404.
From time:
In Mexico’s big cities, drug cartel gunmen normally act like phantoms. They hide in safe houses or amid communities, suddenly striking with an assassination or a gunfight, and then disappearing again. Residents know they are there and are scared, but most the time, they can’t see them.
But on Thursday in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, the cartel gunmen were everywhere. They openly drove in trucks with mounted machine guns, blockaded streets flashing their Kalashnikovs and burned trucks unleashing plumes of smoke like it was a scene in Syria. They took control of the strategic points in the metro area, shut down the airport, roads, and government buildings and exchanged fire with security forces for hours, leaving at least eight people dead. In contrast, everyone else had to act like ghosts, hiding behind locked doors, not daring to step outside.
And in this unusual battle, the Sinaloa Cartel won. Their uprising was in response to soldiers storming a house on Thursday and arresting Ovidio Guzman, the 28-year old son of convicted kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. In February, the U.S. Justice Department announced it had indicted Ovidio Guzman on trafficking cocaine, marijuana and meth. But after hours of cartel chaos, Mexico’s federal government gave soldiers the go ahead to release him. It capitulated.
Picture
[Burnt vehicles used by gunmen smolder on an intersection, one day after street battles with security forces, in Culiacan on Oct. 18.]
I’ve covered Mexico’s drug violence for 18 years, written two books about the subject, and seen many extraordinary episodes. In Sinaloa, the cradle of drug traffickers, I’ve repeatedly been on the crime beat chasing bullet-ridden corpses and into the mountains to Guzman’s opium-growing village. But Thursday was different. It wasn’t gangster action; it was a mass insurrection.
“There was panic, terror, the city was under siege,” says Vladimir Ramirez, a political scientist in Culiacan, who like many has continued curfew into Friday. “People slept wherever they were at. Businesses are closed, nobody wants to go out.”
This change has not come overnight. It is the result of a bloody trend of cartelsdeveloping insurgent tactics over many years. The use of burning vehicles to block roads was taken from militant protesters; cartels use it to stop the movement of troops and put pressure on the government. The cartels have armed up with stolen military weapons and an endless stream of rifles from the United States. Cartels from the Texas border to Guadalajara have learned to protect their leaders with rings of gunmen who can cause trouble to stop their capture.
Yet it was still shocking on Thursday to see how fast the cartel moved and how brazenly the gunmen stayed on the streets. Residents took dozens of photos of the armed thugs that circulated on social media, amplifying the threat. And it was almost a side note that there was a simultaneous prison break in which 51 inmates fled.
Picture
[Cartel gunman just hanging out in the streets, October 17]
“The Sinaloa Cartel demonstrated a tremendous ability to mobilize rapidly and take effective control of the city,” says Raul Benitez, an expert on Latin America’s armed conflicts. “They showed that in Sinaloa, they are the ones who run things".
In Mexico’s big cities, drug cartel gunmen normally act like phantoms. They hide in safe houses or amid communities, suddenly striking with an assassination or a gunfight, and then disappearing again. Residents know they are there and are scared, but most the time, they can’t see them.
But on Thursday in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, the cartel gunmen were everywhere. They openly drove in trucks with mounted machine guns, blockaded streets flashing their Kalashnikovs and burned trucks unleashing plumes of smoke like it was a scene in Syria. They took control of the strategic points in the metro area, shut down the airport, roads, and government buildings and exchanged fire with security forces for hours, leaving at least eight people dead. In contrast, everyone else had to act like ghosts, hiding behind locked doors, not daring to step outside.
And in this unusual battle, the Sinaloa Cartel won. Their uprising was in response to soldiers storming a house on Thursday and arresting Ovidio Guzman, the 28-year old son of convicted kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. In February, the U.S. Justice Department announced it had indicted Ovidio Guzman on trafficking cocaine, marijuana and meth. But after hours of cartel chaos, Mexico’s federal government gave soldiers the go ahead to release him. It
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