In a transcript of the police interrogation with Edgar Valdez Villarreal, alias “La Barbie,” he says disputes over control of Juarez led to Mexico’s current cartel war.
La Barbie blames Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, for breaking a ceasefire brokered between the major cartels in mid-2007, which would have distributed Juarez’s trafficking routes between the Zetas, the Beltrán Leyva, Carrillo Fuentes (or Juarez) and Sinaloa Cartels.
“It all started with Juarez”, Valdez says in the video. So far the battle between the Sinaloan Cartel and its four rivals have left an estimated 19,097 dead since December 2007, according to statistics from the Mexican government. Neither ceasefires nor hierarchies appear to be respected when it comes to Mexico’s DTOs, something that Valdez exemplified when he declared in his testimony, “I work alone”. A former enforcer for Arturo Beltran Leyva (himself a former commander in the Sinaloa Cartel), after Arturo’s death in 2009, Valdez turned against his old boss’s brother in hopes of seizing control of his own drug-trafficking routes.