An Open Letter to Mayito Flaco

Dear Mayito Flaco,

The morning of September 2024 is when you decided to turn Culiacán into a headline.

That’s when you declared your war—against your rivals, against the city, against the idea that power is supposed to build something. You can dress it up as “strategy” if you want. But everyone living inside it knows what it is: a choice to burn.

And let’s stop pretending this is about anything else.

You want Culiacán because it means something. Because it carries weight your name never earned on its own. So instead of building legitimacy, you’re trying to scorch one into existence—like if you char the ground long enough, people will mistake the smoke for authority.

Culiacán isn’t a prize. It’s a place. A home. A thousand routines you don’t live and don’t understand. Men who belong somewhere don’t torch it to prove they can. Men who can’t build do. Men who need to be seen do.

So you order fires.

Not because it wins you a city—but because it makes you feel like you own the moment. Businesses turned to husks. Families turned into refugees. Whole neighborhoods learning to move like prey. And the most obscene part is how normal you’ve tried to make it sound. Like “damage” is just the cost of doing business.

It isn’t.

It’s the cost of your insecurity.

And don’t hide behind the fantasy that this only hits “your enemies.” Your war doesn’t land on the people you claim you’re fighting. It lands on shop owners. Drivers. Mothers. Kids.

Schools forced into remote learning—not because of a storm, not because of a pandemic, but because you turned daily life into a risk calculation.

So tell the city: are you going to provide that education?

Are you going to pay for the lost instruction, the disrupted years, the children who learned to duck before they learned to multiply?

Are you going to compensate the parents who had to choose between feeding their families and keeping their kids alive?

Or is that not part of your “plan”?

And don’t act shocked when people call it what it is. This country already has the missing and the dead stacked into numbers so large they stop sounding real. Ten thousand. Tens of thousands. Pick the figure that helps you sleep. The point is simpler: every time you choose chaos, more names get added—and that blood is on your hands.

Now let’s talk about your online choir—Karla, Crux, Adán, and the rest of the burner-account congregation.

They’re not serious people. They’re not informed. They’re inexperienced loudmouths who have no idea—no history, no understanding—of how cartel wars actually end. They talk like war is a trend. Like violence is content. Like destruction is “control.”

They’ve never watched how these stories close: with prisons, cemeteries, betrayals, and families eating each other alive over scraps. They’ve never seen the bill come due.

So they don’t debate. They don’t confront facts. They swarm.

They go straight to censorship—mass-reporting, takedowns, coordinated whining—anything that doesn’t require thought. It’s almost funny how afraid they are of an argument in daylight. They’d rather try to erase a voice than answer it.

And here’s what they can’t erase:

A few days before Camilo Ochoa was killed in front of his family, he said something that explains the entire obsession—every threat, every troll, every attempt to silence:

They come after you because people are listening to you.

That’s the truth you can’t stand. Not that someone speaks—but that people hear them. Because hearing breaks the spell. Hearing makes people compare your “strength” to the reality on their streets.

So let’s play this out to the end. Let’s say you get what you want. Let’s say you “win” Culiacán.

Then what?

Are you going to rebuild the businesses reduced to ash?

Are you going to pay for the millions in damage you helped create?

Are you going to convince families to come back after you taught them what your presence costs?

Are you going to restore the city’s sense of normal—or are you only capable of governing through terror and interruption?

Because that’s what this looks like: not conquest—compulsion. A man who can’t command respect, so he settles for fear. A man who can’t create loyalty, so he manufactures silence.

History won’t care about your explanations. When the smoke clears, there will be no corrido capable of laundering the record. No online choir left to squeal excuses. There will just be the outcome—what happened to a city while you chased a feeling.

And the line will be simple:

You’ll be remembered as the Zambada who burned his own city.

Not the one who protected it.

Not the one who built it.

The one who set it on fire to feel real.

Culiacán will survive you. Cities always do.

What won’t survive is the story you’re trying to write about yourself.

— Mica Treviño