Monterrey, Mexico – In July 2024, following the arrest of cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in Texas, activist Maria Isabel Cruz and her colleagues started to notice a troubling trend.Zambada was the cofounder of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most powerful criminal networks in Mexico. Authorities in the United States applauded his capture as a “direct strike” in their campaign to dismantle the cartel.But for Cruz and her fellow activists at Sabuesos Guerreras, a collective that searches for missing people in Culiacan, Sinaloa, it was the start of a gradual rise in disappearances.On September 9, that trend accelerated. A power struggle broke out within the Sinaloa Cartel, causing a surge in murders, femicides and missing-person reports.Homicides in Sinaloa rose from 44 in August of that year to 142 in September. The swell of violence continued into the following year. In 2025, 1,657 people were killed.Meanwhile, Sabuesos Guerreras estimates that the number of disappearances has reached 5,800 since July 2024, though that is likely an undercount.For Cruz, whose own son disappeared in 2017, the spike in deaths and disappearances raises questions about attacking cartel leadership alone.“I don’t know if there’s really a strategy,” Cruz said. “They’re fighting the leaders, but everything at the bottom remains, and it’s the ordinary people wh …
