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Cartel

Peso Pluma Is Mexico’s Top Music Star and Perhaps Sinaloa’s Greatest Laundromat

The fallout from the leaflets has been swift and chaotic. Peso Pluma’s team has remained tight-lipped, neither confirming nor denying the accusations.

Jan 14, 2025 • Katarina Szulc

Fame and Fatality? The Dark Side of Clout in Cartel-Ridden Mexico

Unlike traditional narco-celebrities, whose stories were immortalized through corridos, influencers create their own mythologies in real time…

Jan 2, 2025 • Katarina Szulc

Trump Targets Mexican Cartels: Terrorist Label Threatens U.S.-Mexico Relations

What happens when cartel leaders, armed to the teeth, start treating U.S. agents as enemy combatants? Or when Mexico’s government decides cooperation…

Dec 27, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

The Sinaloa Cartel is Working to DIY Fentanyl Precursors, Cutting China Out

Cooking fentanyl is as easy as baking a cake but making N-Phenethyl-4-piperidone isn’t as simple

Dec 2, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

Cartel violence shuts down the streets muting Sinaloa’s heartbeat

“We used to play four or five nights a week, making 2,000 to 5,000 pesos a night. Now, we’re lucky if we make 500 pesos in a day. But we will overcome…

Nov 1, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

Sinaloa

The Sinaloa Cartel is Working to DIY Fentanyl Precursors, Cutting China Out

Cooking fentanyl is as easy as baking a cake but making N-Phenethyl-4-piperidone isn’t as simple

Dec 2, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

Cartel violence shuts down the streets muting Sinaloa’s heartbeat

“We used to play four or five nights a week, making 2,000 to 5,000 pesos a night. Now, we’re lucky if we make 500 pesos in a day. But we will overcome…

Nov 1, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

Sinaloa’s Ghosts: Cartel chaos fuels a surge in disappearances, leaving families in the dark

The dead don’t stay buried and the disappeared never truly leave, families become symbols of the human cost of cartel warfare and the failure of the…

Oct 21, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

Mexican drug cartels have marked territory in Canada by running fentanyl superlabs

In an exclusive interview with a Sinaloa cartel member in Vancouver, B.C., I heard the extent of fentanyl production in Canada

Aug 15, 2024 • Katarina Szulc

Recent posts

If Fentanyl Is a Weapon, Why Not Target the Supply Chain?

If the cartel becomes the only villain, we get a war that looks dramatic and feels decisive while leaving the chemical tap wide open upstream.

Dec 16, 2025 • Katarina Szulc

23:23

No Medal? No Problem. Ryan Wedding Celebrates 2002 Olympics With a $13 million Hypercar.

Nov 27, 2025 • Katarina Szulc

How a Foreign Crime Syndicate Built a Business Empire Across Mexico

Washington formally designated the HYSA Organized Crime Group, an Albanian-led network it says has spent more than a decade embedding itself inside…

Nov 20, 2025 • Katarina Szulc and Eric Czuleger

Canada’s Olympic Golden Boy to Top-Tier Fugitive

The Wedding investigation sketches a stark map of North America’s criminal ecosystem — Canadians operating under Mexican protection, Colombians running…

Nov 19, 2025 • Katarina Szulc

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