[Bertrand Monnet est professeur à l’Edhec (école de commerce), titulaire de la chaire Management des risques criminels. A ce titre, il s’intéresse au cartel de Sinaloa depuis 2014. Il lui a fallu des années pour identifier des intermédiaires capables de garantir à la fois la fiabilité de ses interlocuteurs et sa sécurité. Cette enquête sur le fentanyl, qui a donné lieu à une série vidéo en trois volets diffusée sur Lemonde.fr, a nécessité de nombreux séjours au Mexique et un long travail de mise en confiance. « Les “narcos” ont accepté de témoigner par volonté d’afficher leur puissance sur la scène internationale », estime le chercheur.]

A trail at night, north of Culiacan. I have a meeting with a Sinaloa cartel manager. After waiting for a quarter of an hour at the GPS point previously communicated via WhatsApp, a long white GMC 4×4 approaches, all headlights on. A man wearing a bulletproof vest and Kevlar helmet stands in the dumpster, one hand on the handle of a 7.62-millimeter machine gun lying on the roof. Three other people, who we can also imagine are armed, are sitting behind him. Several silhouettes emerge behind the tinted windows of the passenger compartment.

The 4×4 brakes at the level of the Toyota pickup in which I am with a driver affiliated with the cartel. Out of the darkness, two hooded men armed with AK-47s and M4 assault rifles emerge onto the rear platform of our vehicle. “We follow them”, orders one of them as the GMC drives past us. After twenty minutes of travel, the convoy stops in a kind of basin between a forest and the moonlit meadow of a ranch. Just the crickets and short messages from our “escort’s” Motorola radios disturb the silence of the night.

A man in a field jacket approaches our pickup. He also wears a hood under which he has a cell phone taped to his ear to keep his hands free. “Most importantly, keep your phone turned off, he blurted out in a low voice. And you walk out when you’re told to. » About ten men inspect the area. Two of them point their rifles at the treetops and scan the sky for possible drones.

The “manager” I met finally comes out of the white GMC. Let’s call him Juan. His place within the cartel – a horizontally structured organization consisting of several dozen clans – makes him a reliable interlocutor: he directs the murderers (the Sicariosin the jargon of “narcos”) one of these clans based in Culiacán, a city of 900,000 inhabitants, the stronghold of this mafia organization, considered the most powerful in Mexico.

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