Cartel Babies: Encyclopedia of Knowledge grows out of decades of reading, observation, and concern. Its foundation is not my imagination alone, but a broad body of open-source material and lived context.
The research behind these modules draws from four main pillars:
• Public reporting and investigative journalism on Mexican cartels, drug routes, corruption, and state response, including long-form articles, documentaries, and reputable news outlets.
• Academic work on Mexican history, narco-economics, policing, organized crime, and the social impacts of prohibition and drug policy.
• Nonfiction books and testimonies by journalists, former officials, and citizens who have written about life in cartel-impacted regions.
• On-the-ground observation, photographs, and conversations in Mexico over many years, reflecting daily life: roads, markets, rural communities, security presence, and the quiet ways people adapt and endure.
I chose to make my home in Culiacán, Sinaloa—not in an expatriate enclave or tourist corridor—because I wanted to live inside a traditional Mexican city, with Mexican families, streets, and values shaping my daily life. I keep my circle small, stay mostly at home writing, and avoid expatriate social scenes on purpose; that distance from an English-language bubble helps keep my head and heart anchored in the culture around me, rather than in a transplanted version of the country I left.
Out of respect for privacy and safety, individual names, precise locations, and identifiable details are deliberately altered or withheld. The goal is not to expose specific people or operations, but to present patterns: the logistics, environments, and pressures that shape life inside and around cartel ecosystems.
My understanding of Mexico is not academic alone. I have lived, traveled, and spent extended time in cartel-impacted regions, speaking with locals and workers who navigate these pressures daily. I have been approached to buy drugs, witnessed street-level dealing near tourist zones, and spoken with people for whom cartel presence is an unspoken part of survival.
On one occasion, a rental dispute led me to unknowingly confront a man with visible cartel ties on the rooftop of a compound in Culiacán. I had leased an apartment through an older intermediary with nothing more formal than an amount scrawled on the back of an envelope, and when I moved out, she refused to return my full deposit. At the meeting, the man who came to “resolve” it was dressed in black, heavily built, carrying radios, multiple phones, a knife, and a satchel, and everything about his presence and the conversation signaled that he was not an ordinary landlord. When I stood up to challenge him over the missing money, the friend with me became frantic, begging me to sit down and stop. We left with only part of what we were owed, and once we were safely away, he broke down in the car. It was a sobering lesson in how easily you can cross an invisible line without realizing who is on the other side.
On another night, while cycling home from the gym, I heard a burst of gunfire from a nearby field and almost collided with a man dressed head to toe in black—including a black fedora—gun in hand—sprinting toward a waiting car beside me. He shouted a stream of profanities as I stood on the pedals and pushed up the road to get away.
That field is an abandoned lot with derelict buildings and a power line behind it—a dark, secluded pocket of the city with no houses or regular foot traffic nearby. The next day, curious whether someone had been shot, I checked the newspaper and found reports of two gun killings in the city, though neither was listed at that location. Even in daylight, the place looks so eerie and exposed that I stayed out, despite a strong curiosity to see what might have happened there.
During a major operation to capture the son of a cartel leader, the gunfire from helicopters and ground forces came close enough that the sounds and burning tires were within about 500 meters of my home. The streets went still. For days, movement stopped, shops closed, and the city felt unnaturally quiet. I did not have a car then; I moved by bicycle through that silence, aware that what I was experiencing was only a faint echo of what many residents endure over a lifetime. These experiences do not make me an expert, but they ground my perspective in the reality that ordinary people in Sinaloa live with every day.
I have also seen the kind of targeted violence that becomes part of daily life in some regions. On one afternoon, less than 150 meters from my home, a restaurant owner was killed in front of customers by a man who entered wearing a motorcycle helmet, approached the counter, and opened fire. The attack lasted seconds. The shooter left as quietly as he arrived, disappearing with an accomplice before authorities could respond. I did not know the victim, but the shock of watching a business struck in broad daylight—people running, diving for cover, life resuming within hours—left a lasting imprint.
Friends, loved ones, and people close to them in Culiacán have endured carjackings, abductions, beatings, sexual assaults, extortion, robbery, and murder. Some have been taken at gunpoint and thrown to the pavement in broad daylight. Others have had relatives kidnapped, beaten, and released only after surviving hours or days of fear. Young people have disappeared after what began as an ordinary night out and been found later, killed and discarded. Construction workers have been gunned down on the job. Drivers have lost their trucks and their lives on the highway.
I mostly stay tucked away inside, writing—a visibly foreign outsider, often read as a mark—but the people I care about do not have that distance. Their experiences, and the stories they carry about friends, classmates, and family members, are a constant reminder that for many residents, this kind of violence is not exceptional; it is something they have learned to navigate, endure, and survive.
This work is not a how-to manual. It is an attempt to translate publicly visible patterns into a structured, ethical framework that helps readers understand the human, social, and environmental realities behind the headlines.