Criminal Tax is Back: Three Cartels Charge For a Right to Conduct Business in Veracruz

The devil is on the loose here, but he’s been around for a while. In northern Veracruz, people fight over a lot and kill for less. The Totonacapan and Huasteca regions have become a Bermuda triangle overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Here, boats don’t disappear, but people do. Hundreds of them later end up on the coroner’s slab.

From here, residents have reported two large clandestine graves: “La Gallera” and “Totolapa,” in the municipality of Tihuatlán. A criminal dump in the Huasteca, barely four kilometers apart. Thousands of bone fragments were extracted from the former; and from the latter, according to reports from groups of searching families, more than 40 bodies were recovered in April 2023.

Here, in northern Veracruz, there is a lot of fighting. The extortion of illegal trades; extortion and fees for restaurants and businesses; human trafficking, gas theft, and fuel pipeline theft—all of this is a crime. Drug trafficking; kidnapping of politicians and businessmen; extortion of small businesses—poultry farmers, gardeners, hairdressers; forced recruitment of taxi drivers, who pay fees to work, but who are also unwitting spies; cattle rustling and absolute control of bootleg merchandise.

It is an ominous, silent, and intermittent war in a hell called Veracruz waged by cells of the Grupo Sombra Special Forces—also known as the Veracruz Mafia—the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), and Gente Nueva, an organization allied with the Sinaloa Cartel, who are fighting hand-to-hand against the illicit activities in a dozen Veracruz municipalities. Some with access to the sea, and others to the Puebla mountains.

This August more than 30 people were murdered in the municipalities of Tuxpan, Papantla, Poza Rica and Alamo. Inhabitants recall that there has been a silent war for several years for territorial control of a dozen municipalities in the north. It is over drug trafficking, yes, but it is also about fighting tooth and nail for their extortion and right to operate zones, and because in their alliances with local police commanders, there are some who switch sides.

Last Saturday, August 2, a riot with fire erupted in the Tuxpan prison, leaving nine dead and six bodies bearing signs of extreme violence the following day in Papantla; they were thrown onto the Cazones-Poza Rica highway. The message was clear: sow terror on a highly visible and key highway for those traveling in the northern region.

Relatives and inmates at the Tuxpan prison accuse the criminal group “La Sombra” of committing beatings, murders, and extortion with the support of prison authorities.

Of the six executed, one person remains unidentified, along with four civilians and a key figure: Tuxpan municipal traffic officer Juan Carlos Santiago Casco, whom his fellow inmates claim was the link between the CJNG and local police in Tuxpan and Poza Rica.

On social media, inmates affiliated with the Sombra Group were shown in a video recounting how they carried out the right to operate and extortion tactics from prison. They even claim that the order to kill retired teacher Irma Hernández was given from there. She was videotaped giving a message in which she asked to “pay a fee” to the Sombra Group and not to another criminal group. Irma, who was also driving a taxi, would be found dead two days later inside a vacant lot.

A week later, when it was thought that the 300 National Guard troops had helped restore calm, two Molotov cocktails were thrown from drones at the Tuxpan prison.

These are days of tension in Veracruz.

It’s the first Sunday of August, 2025. A sunny day, hellishly hot in the Huasteca region—36 degrees in the shade—I’m riding as a passenger for a retired military officer who now acts as a bodyguard for a businessman. The black pickup truck we’re traveling in is photographed a couple of times, by what clearly look like spies for organized crime.

We travel along the highways of Poza Rica, Tuxpan, Cazones, and Papantla. We have barbacoa for breakfast at a family restaurant. As he starts his pickup, the retired military officer recites this prayer in a low voice:

“If they have eyes, let them not see me, if they have hands, let them not grab me, if they have feet, let them not reach me. Don’t let them surprise me from behind, don’t let my death be violent, don’t let my blood be spilled. You who know everything, you know of my sins, but you also know of my faith, don’t abandon me.”

Puzzled, I swallow my breath, wanting to ask a thousand questions. But the soldier lifts up the right side of his white guayabera and a tattoo of Santa Muerte peeks out. We’ll call the soldier Omar. “Someone has to take care of us around here. Don’t be afraid,” he says. And yes, there is no other way, in this lawless land the only thing left to do is to take care of the Blessed Mother and the Christ of Tihuatlán – the second largest in Latin America. In a worse case scenario it would look sadder to believe in nothing.

In Poza Rica, Tuxpan and Papantla the “right to operate charge” is unsustainable, a “criminal tax” that drug traffickers charge at will to any member of the economically active society who is subject to extortion: businessmen, owners of illegal businesses, cab drivers, transporters, chicken farmers, grocery store owners, hairdressers, not even the owners of a modest bakery escape this extortion by the Mafia Veracruzana, CJNG or the Gente Nueva.

Criminal groups demand that businesses pay a right to operate fee in Veracruz

Raúl is a businessman fed up with the violence. He’s tired of complaining in the municipalities of Poza Rica and Tuxpan and pleading with authorities in Xalapa, the state capital, about the right to operate fee. He opted to pay 34,000 pesos a month. He has to “invest” it so they’ll let him work in peace. He confesses to me that things are really bad:

“One criminal group charges you on Mondays; another on Wednesdays. How do you sustain a business like that? Imagine the trouble with the black market.”

He opens his cell phone and shows a video outside his business of the drug dealer arriving to extort money. Two hooded young men, dressed in black and carrying long guns, arrive and beat his employees. They break a glass vase. They point long guns at them. The video shows them as young hitmen barely older than 20. They don’t steal; they clumsily raise their weapons and throw things on the floor, spreading terror. And they threaten that they’ll be paying the “quota” in a few days.

Raúl shows the video of a fellow restaurateur. Other hitmen in civilian clothes enter, hit the cashier twice, shout obscene words, and leave a “message”—the first warning—that they need the money in the next few days. They grab a flan desert and a cheesecake from the bar. They throw other snacks on the floor and calmly leave. Shortly before, a municipal police patrol had passed by on a routine patrol.

In a video shared from downtown Poza Rica, three hitmen—their faces covered with scarves—get out of a white pickup truck. One of them is seen struggling to load his weapon. They proceed to collect the extortion. A driver is waiting for them with the engine running. The improvisation is such that one of the hitmen makes a mistake and tries to get into the wrong vehicle.

“They’re drug traffickers’ cannon fodder, young people taken from the neighborhoods who offered them money, drugs, and alcohol and then lure them out to commit crimes. The authorities have no intention of messing with them. Those who run the business. There’s a lot of collusion.”

In Tuxpan, at the Héroes del 47 Market, no one is safe from extortion charges. All merchants, grocers, butchers, poultry sellers, even herbalists, must report to the CJNG. The payment is five thousand pesos per month per chicken shop. Miguel, a poultry distributor, got drunk a couple of months ago, from happiness, after seeing on television that a cartel cell had been arrested and dismantled by the Veracruz State Attorney General’s Office. He even told his wife: “Finally, these sons of bitches are going to stop robbing me.”

In a still from a local television newscast, Miguel recognized four of the five arrested hitmen, who were the ones who were visiting the chicken shops he owns: “I said, ‘Fuck it.’ But what the hell! Right on Monday, there were other armed hitmen, just as young as the previous ones, who, on behalf of Jalisco New Generation Cartel, were coming for their share!”

In Poza Rica, extortion has even reached land and home realtors. For every piece of land, house, or apartment sold or rented, real estate agents will have to pay a “tithe” of the total profit.

At a taxi stand in Álamo, the drug trafficker charges 1,200 pesos a month to work in peace. The traffickers collect their pay in broad daylight, caring little if municipal or state patrol cars come across the area. In other oil-producing or port cities, the crime rate rises to 1,600 pesos a month.

A war is raging between relentless criminal groups.

Sixteen people have been arrested, suspected members of the CJNG (Jalisco New Generation Cartel). One of the bodies was identified and handed over, according to the Veracruz Prosecutor’s Office. 

This war isn’t new. It started some time ago, on August 13, 2023, when cut and vacuum-wrapped human remains were found in three industrial freezers in Poza Rica. Prosecutor Verónica Hernández Giadáns admitted that there were approximately 13 bodies and that they would be sent to the Nogales human identification center, she said, to “facilitate” their identification.

But the CJNG, so fond of having spokespersons in the region, confirmed that the remains were actually from 35 people, several of them Central American nationals. It was a way to at least intimidate Grupo Sombra, but the setback would come later.

The systematic denial and concealment of bodies evoked the era of concealment of the dead and violence, as done almost masterfully by former governor Javier Duarte and his security and law enforcement chiefs, Arturo Bermúdez Zurita, Capitán Tormenta, and Luis Ángel Bravo.

In the community of Acontitla, in April 2023, another chapter of this war took place: a family was killed. They were found lined up in the yard of a house, simulating a firing squad. The mother, a drug dealer, managed to escape when she heard the roar of motorcycles climbing up a gravel and sand road. She sent two pots of barbacoa, tamales, and a mariachi band brought from Poza Rica to the wake to honor her family.

Since then, local press, newspapers, and online pages have reported daily on “uprisings,” attacks on businesses, gunfire at bars or businesses that don’t pay extortion, as well as the daily homicides or executions.

Traffic officer Ernesto León Sánchez, 34, left his shift at the Poza Rica police station at 6:25 p.m. on April 21, 2023. He then went into a car wash to use the restroom. Witnesses report that three hooded, armed men intercepted León and forced him into a white vehicle: “They had him handcuffed and with his head down.” A red car was following behind them.

A couple of days before León’s disappearance, 28-year-old bricklayer Ángel Giovanni Vidal Mateo hadn’t returned home for three months. On the day of his disappearance, father and son were going together to a construction site to lay tile in the Tepeyac neighborhood. A couple of blocks away, on Vicente Guerrero Street, the young man asked his father to buy him a beer and a chance to stop by a friend. It was just a few minutes before eight in the morning. Hours and days passed, and Ángel was swallowed up by the earth. Weeks later, neighbors would tell Ángel that his son was seen walking in another nearby town, with other young people, but nothing has been heard from him.

Veracruz continues to rank third in the nation in terms of the number of missing persons, behind only Jalisco (15,528 registered cases) and Tamaulipas (13,545). In Veracruz, the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons lists 6,994 cases, although groups of family members of missing persons surveyed claim there are more than ten thousand in Veracruz.

The wife of the young bricklayer Ángel Giovanni received a phone call demanding a reward of fifteen thousand pesos for the return of the 28-year-old man alive. However, no proof of life was provided. Curiously, that call came after Ángel’s father filed the complaint with the State Attorney General’s Office, where he had left his contact numbers.

His father, now in 2025, still carries a photo gallery of his son on his cell phone. He laments that in the neighborhoods where he lives, Parcela and Tepeyac, silent disappearances have occurred over the past three years.

The criminal organization is linked to the femicide of retired teacher Irma Hernández.

After the Tuxpan riot, in a video filmed in the Veracruz mountains, about twenty hitmen identifying themselves as Grupo Sombra rebuke those who joined the CJNG, the opposing cartel, making it clear that if they want to continue the war, there will be war. The message is delivered by a hooded man who calls himself “Commander Felix.”

The video alludes to fighting in the plaza of Cazones, a coastal municipality where on March 18, 2024, right in the heart of the main square, where the multicolored letters for taking a selfie are located, five hitmen with long guns dumped two male bodies and, to draw the public’s attention, their attackers also fired bursts of gunfire into the air. Any resemblance to Luis Estrada’s film “El Infierno” is purely coincidental. Later, heads and human remains were dumped in coolers at the Oxxo in Poza Rica; long-running shootouts in Tuxpan and surrounding municipalities. Today, history seems to be repeating itself.

From Mexico City, on Friday, August 15, in response to a press question during the morning press conference, the Secretary of Citizen Security, Omar García Harfuch, stated that there is already a security strategy to combat the crime of extortion and, in the case of Veracruz, there is extensive coordination with state authorities to continue the arrests of the Veracruz Mafia of the Sombra Group.

“Following the president’s instructions, we had a Security Cabinet meeting with Governor Rocío Nahle García. There are already arrests in the case of this criminal group. Within the framework of the national strategy against extortion, we currently have a deployment to continue the arrests.” It remains to be seen what the Sombra Group and CJNG will say.

Sources: Milenio, Cartel Insider