The aggressive advance of the CJNG outside of Mexico: it seeks to snatch territories from the Sinaloa Cartel

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has achieved expand its activities to various parts of the world, among them (but not limited to) Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, as well as in the so-called Northern Triangle that integrates the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. According to a document signed by Vanda Felbab-Brown, an organized crime expert and investigator for the Brookings Institution.

In his article Felbab-Brown points out that the CJNG has well-established external relations globally and that it maintains confrontations with another Mexican criminal group, the Sinaloa Cartel.

“The CJNG is aggressively moving into new territories abroad where it seeks to overtake or displace the Sinaloa Cartel. In various parts of Latin America, competition between them has amplified violence or triggered new conflicts.”

The CJNG not only does it have a presence in most of the states of the Mexican Republic, because only in the country already dominates 28 of the 32 stateshowever, also has incidence in other Latin American countries. It also dominates the wholesale distribution of drugs such as fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine in the United States.

Felbab-Brown pointed out that, within US territory, the CJNG carries out differentiated actions because, contrary to what happens in Mexico, they do not participate in shootings or attack police officers in the United States, acting in a more moderate and peaceful manner.

However, in the rest of the American continent the CJNG tends to generate conflicts derived from its competition with the Sinaloa Cartel, since tries to gain dominance of the regions by eliminating its competitors.

“The involvement of the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG has often directly instigated violence, as the two cartels seek to displace one another or insist that their local drug trafficking allies and proxies deal exclusively with them.”

The article documents that since 2010 the cartels of Mexican origin arrived in Colombia where they began to gain presence and also began to manage not only trafficking but also the production, processing and local trafficking of illegal substances.

The confrontations between the two Mexican cartels extend until 2019. The meetings generated acts of violence in an already tense environment.

“The CJNG sought to persuade small and large Colombian criminal groups, such as The Urabeños, to stop selling to the Sinaloa Cartel. To counteract the momentum, the Sinaloa Cartel increased the presence of its main emissaries in the country.

Even though that him CJNG failed to displace the Sinaloa Cartel, it did cut their operations, but their clashes have generated local conflicts in Colombiasince both criminal groups have promoted the cultivation of high quality and highly profitable cocaine.

International problems involving Mexican cartels are not new, it should be remembered that last July the presidents from both Mexico and USAAndrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden respectively, met and announced the creation of an operational task force with the intention of combating fentanyl trafficking between countries.

In Ecuador the violence derived from the Mexican cartels has led the government of that country to declare state of emergency in at least 3 provinces coastal areas where there are records of drug trafficking: Esmeraldas, Guayas and Manabí. In addition, there are reports that Ecuador’s largest gang, known as the chonerostransports cocaine exclusively for the Sinaloa Cartel and faces with Ecuadorian allies of the CJNG.

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