Elaborate shrines to fallen drug traffickers dot the streets, and bouncy balladschronicling the lives of gangsters boom from restaurants, bars and luxury cars.
Behind City Hall, black-market money changers make a living turning dollars into pesos, while at a nearby cemetery, architects design two-story narco tombs — complete with air conditioning and flat-screen televisions.
For decades, drug trafficking has dominated the economy, culture and sometimes the politics of this city of nearly a million people tucked between the Sierra Madre and the Pacific.
And it used to be mostly at peace, thanks to an unspoken pact between residents and the Sinaloa cartel, the group that controls trafficking in the region:
Civilians looked the other way as long as the narcos kept their fights off the streets.
That social contract shattered one afternoon two weeks ago when in the span of minutes scores of cartel fighters appeared in the middle of the city wielding high-powered weapons.
Vehicles burn during a clash between cartel gunmen and police and soldiers in Culiacan on Oct. 17.
Here's the story on a fantastic place to celebrate.
The assailants were responding to an army operation to capture Ovidio Guzman Lopez, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel and the son of famed drug boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
To pressure the army to release its leader, the cartel took hostage a city that it had always claimed to protect.
“It was a rupture,” said Isaac Guevara Martinez, a social psychologist who studies violence at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. “This had never happened before. And now nobody knows what to think.”
In other parts of Mexico, criminal groups often prey on residents. In Tamaulipas, Guerrero and Michoacan, cartels routinely kidnap civilians and levy hefty “protection” payments on businesses.
But the Sinaloa cartel had always behaved in a different manner. Though cartel members appear to have no qualms about breaking laws — or killing anybody in their way — the group’s founders fostered an at times paternal relationship with locals.
In Badiraguato, a mountainous municipality east of Culiacan where many of the country’s most powerful drug traffickers got their start growing marijuana and poppies in the 1970s, the narcos built churches and roads and brought electricity to poor villages that the government had largely left behind.
It was when those farmers started making links with cocaine producers in South America in the 1980s that real money started flooding into the region. Residents didn’t have to be in the drug business to profit from it. Cash flowed through local economies, and as traffickers moved into Culiacan and other cities, they continued to cultivate reputations as benevolent benefactors.
Jardines Del Humaya cemetery in Culiacan has gained notoriety for its lavish mausoleums for cartel members.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
A man prays for his well-being and for his family at the Jesus Malverde chapel in Culiacan. Malverde is known variously as the generous bandit, the angel of the poor and now as the patron saint of drug traffickers.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
“There is a lot sympathy for them,” said Guevara, noting the widespread popularity of narcocorridos. “It’s something we have in our blood.”
But it is one thing to listen to a song about a cartel gunslinger battling authorities, and another to live it.
“I always sensed they were here,” said a woman named Gloria who declined to give her last name out of fear. “But it was so different to see it.”
She was working as usual Oct. 17 at a small market across the street from a military housing complex when she heard a loud explosion followed by three or four minutes of automatic gunfire. Cartel fighters had surrounded the complex and were threatening to harm families unless authorities freed Guzman.
She hit the ground and frantically began texting family members, several of whom were trapped by shootouts in other parts of the city.
By the time the siege was over, 13 people were dead, including three civilians, and Guzman was free again.
“It was good that they liberated him,” Gloria said of Guzman. “It was the best they could have done.”
Her opinion was widely shared here in Culiacan.
“Imagine what would have happened,” said Adriana Rojo, a gas station worker who spent the siege huddled with nine people inside a men’s bathroom as soldiers and cartel members exchanged gunfire a few blocks away.
If the standoff had continued, she said, “it would have been even worse.”
In other parts of Mexico, many are furious about the bungled operation, which they say sends a dangerous message to criminal groups. Here the public outcry has been limited to a few public figures who have urged the government to redouble its efforts to capture Guzman or other leaders of the cartel.
Most residents seem wary of more conflict and eager for things to return to the way they were. Last Sunday, hundreds donned white and held a march calling for peace.
If peace means a city ruled by drug traffickers, so be it.
Around town, speakers blast the dozens of narcorridos that have already been written about the events of Oct. 17. One is titled “The Rescue of Ovidio Guzman.” Another is called “Hell in Culiacan.”
“In a few minutes, the streets were like a video game, with hooded, well-armed men ready to fight,” one song goes.
On a recent hot morning, a construction worker was plastering over the dozens of bullet holes that scarred the tan walls of the modern home where Guzman was briefly captured. The home was back in cartel hands now, and with a little paint, it would look like nothing had happened.
Special correspondent Steve Fisher in Culiacan contributed to this report.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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