Inside Mexico’s Failed El Chapo Raid

Inside Mexico’s Failed El Chapo Raid

Jason McGahan reports on Latin America for The Daily Beast

The government denies it, but the Mexican navy opened fire with helicopter gunships on civilian homes in a mountain village, sending 700 families running for cover.
The goings-on in the mountains and forests that blanket the Pacific Northwest of Mexico can often be as impenetrable as the terrain itself. Back in the 1970s, anti-drug agents demarcated an area of the Sierra Madre Occidental as the Golden Triangle, after the heroin-producing region of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos in Southeast Asia.Like a separate republic within the republic, the Golden Triangle of Mexico was forged on generations of poverty, suspicion of strangers, and official neglect. Chroniclers of the drug trade in this area of Mexico have long observed the visual contrast between the cattle trails and dirt tracks of poor ranchers, and the armored SUVs and satellite dishes of the armed men with two-way radios. The portion of farmers who cultivate illicit cash crops like marijuana or opium-poppy in the Triangle—23,000 square miles spread across the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua—can exceed 80 percent.

The Daily Beast

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