“Who controls that corner controls how trafficking goes into California, which was a Chapo Guzman stronghold that he took over from the Arellano Felix organization,” Coulson said. “That’s a key strategic point, because of such a huge uptick of trafficking into Southern California.”
The massacre of seven men near the Mexico-Arizona border came in a previously quiet area increasingly used as a drug-trafficking corridor, and a U.S. expert said Friday the attack in the newly valuable territory could be the work of rivals of the once-dominant Sinaloa cartel trying to exploit the arrest of the gang’s leader.
Analysts have expected rival cartels to try to move in on Sinaloa territory in response to the Feb. 22 capture of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the apparent death in December of one of his top lieutenants in a shootout with federal police.
The ambush-style attack this week happened in a rural area near Sonoyta, Mexico, close to the U.S. border crossing at Lukeville, Arizona. The crossing is frequently used by U.S. travelers to reach the Gulf of California beach town of Puerto Penasco.
The seven men apparently were attacked by rival drug traffickers as they delivered drugs. Their bodies were found inside or near a pickup truck Wednesday night. Authorities say an eighth man was found wounded on a nearby hill and he told state police the victims had just dropped off marijuana Tuesday when gunmen opened fire with automatic rifles on their pickup truck.
All of the men are believed to have been from the state of Sinaloa, the home of Guzman’s cartel.
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