How drug gangs threaten the World Cup

It’s been more than five years since Daniel Flores Fernández disappeared. But telling the story now, his father Héctor still wells up. It happened when Daniel was just 19, living with his pregnant girlfriend in the Mexican city of Guadalajara. Early one Saturday in May 2021, men linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) stormed his apartment, snatching Daniel from his girlfriend and unborn child. Half a decade on, he’s still missing. Héctor has since learned that his son is being held prisoner at a CJNG “safe house” somewhere in Guadalajara, where unwilling recruits are forced to work for Mexico’s most violent drug gang. “All I can do is hope that he comes back to me one day,” Héctor says, dabbing his moist eyes with a thumb. “The pain is tremendous.”

Daniel’s story is darkly familiar. Around a third of Mexico is ruled by cartels like the CJNG, while more than 130,000 people are missing nationwide. But what’s different about Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco state in the west of the country, is that it is now welcoming thousands of football fans. The World Cup has just started, and the city’s gleaming Akron Stadium is hosting a number of games. Cartel violence has unsurprisingly thrown these plans into doubt — and, even if the security forces do manage to keep order, the scourge of the drug gangs will linger long after the final whistle blows.

The Akron Stadium. (Ulises Ruiz/AFP/Getty)

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has dominated the state for years. Emerging in 2010, after the so-called Milenio gang broke up, it’s since expanded across Mexico and beyond. Today it boasts a presence in some 40 countries. Its big earner is drugs: the cartel pulls in billions of dollars annually trafficking fentanyl, meth and cocaine to the US. Jalisco’s geography is key to this bonanza. Importing chemical precursors through ports such as Manzanillo, in the neighbouring state of Colima, the CJNG then smuggles finished narcotics north to America’s southwestern border.

With wealth has come violence. The Jalisco cartel is now infamous for staging brazen attacks against Mexican government officials; that the CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, more commonly known as “El Mencho”, remained at large was deeply embarrassing for President Claudia Sheinbaum and her government ahead of the World Cup. Further pressure came from Donald Trump, who pushed his Mexican counterpart to “go after” the cartels, ominously warning that he’d put US boots on the ground if she didn’t.

Things came to a head in February, when Mexican special forces swooped on El Mencho. He was fatally wounded, Mexican officials say, following a shootout at a remote mountain property near the town of Tapalpa, about 100 miles southwest of Guadalajara. But that coup, aided by US intel, soon sparked cartel reprisals across Jalisco. Gunmen torched cars and blocked roads, including at the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta, where terrified tourists were left cowering in their hotel rooms. The violence left 25 National Guards dead in Jalisco alone, with bloodshed taking place within 10 miles of the Akron Stadium.

With the World Cup approaching, Sheinbaum urged calm, claiming that Mexico could ensure there was “no risk” to supporters travelling to Guadalajara. Héctor Flories isn’t convinced. We speak in his Guadalajara home, as the smell of gas wafts in from a nearby restaurant. “We want them to come,” Héctor says of World Cup visitors, a picture of his son’s smiling face emblazoned on his t-shirt. “But [the government] can’t even have security for their own people, let alone people coming from other countries.”

In theory, Guadalajara has plenty going for it. A booming tech industry has earned it the title of the “Silicon Valley of Mexico”. Intel and Bosch are just two global firms to have a presence here, drawn to the steady flow of computer science graduates from the city’s several universities. In truth, though, it’s tequila, not tech, that puts the city on the map. The eponymous town of Tequila, just an hour from the state capital, is the cradle of an industry that produces up to 500 million litres of booze each year. It all comes from the rows and rows of blue agave plants that thrive in Jalisco’s volcanic lowlands, with profits from the drink running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jalisco’s agave fields should be a tourist draw. (Ulises Ruiz/AFP/Getty)

Yet the party town has a sinister side. Across Guadalajara, extortion is a major problem. For obvious reasons, no hard figures exist, but national surveys suggest there are hundreds of thousands of extortion attempts against Mexican businesses each year. Guadalajara is no exception. From tortillerías to car washes, “ cobro de piso ” (“floor charge”) is just another cost of doing business. Pity anyone who doesn’t — or can’t — pay up. There are roughly 1,500 murders a year in the Guadalajara metropolitan area, with many down to cartel brutality.

As if that weren’t bad enough, CJNG also raises mone…