La Mayiza Forms Alliance With Los Chuckys to Confront the CJNG

A little over a year after the betrayal of Ismael El Mayo Zambada that landed the powerful kingpin in a prison cell in the United States, the arrangements on the Mexican criminal scene continue. Now, La Mayiza has added an unlikely ally: the old Zetas who survived the extinction of their original group.

MILENIO consulted a report prepared by the federal government’s security cabinet, which shows that the troops of Ismael Zambada, Sicairos, or El Mayito Flaco, began rapprochement in June of this year with Los Chuckys, one of the most bloodthirsty armed wings of the Northeast Cartel, a splinter group of the former paramilitary guard of the Gulf Cartel.

After a couple of months of negotiations, Los Chuckys have agreed to join the mega-cartel formed by the heir to the El Mayo crown—who, incidentally, has never been arrested—the Guasave Cartel, and the Cabrera Sarabia family, according to the official document.

Thus, Mayo Zambada’s loyalists now have allies in strategic states in the north of the country: Sinaloa, Nayarit, Durango, Zacatecas, and Tamaulipas.

The objective of this merger is to halt the advance of the second mega-cartel formed after Mayo Zambada’s surrender to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents: Los Chapitos and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

This common front is worrying to the federal government because it represents a union between Mexico’s most infamous narco-juniors and the national criminal group led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, considered the most widespread in the world.

El Ricky, heir to Los Zetas

The aforementioned official report estimates that the Los Chuckys group has around 200 permanent members. They are joined by occasional collaborators, public officials who provide protection, and a social base numbering in the hundreds, concentrated primarily in the Tamaulipas municipalities bordering Texas.

This group lacks the federal government’s estimate of the number of young people who could be forcibly recruited in the immediate future, as Los Chuckys must increase their firepower if they wish to remain allies of Sinaloa’s drug trafficking heavyweights. The outlook is bleak if they are not stopped in time, the diagnosis warns.

The archives of the Ministry of National Defense (Defense) place the birth of Los Chuckys in late 2022 or early 2023. Its founder is Ricardo González Sauceda, known as El Ricky or Mando R, who held the second-ranking position in the Northeast Cartel until February of this year, when he was arrested in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, by members of the National Defense, the Ministry of the Navy (Marina), and the National Guard (GN).

El Ricky’s importance in the Northeast Cartel was such that only one man could give him orders: Juan Cisneros Treviño, Juanito Treviño, nephew of Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, the fearsome Z40 and Z42, respectively, founders of Los Zetas in 1999. Should Cisneros Treviño fall, El Ricky would be crowned the ruler of the Gulf.

Preparing for this leap to the top of the Northeast Cartel’s criminal structure, El Ricky created his own Praetorian Guard inspired by the protagonist of the Child’s Play horror films (better known in Spanish as Chucky: el muñeco diabólico): a Good Guy doll possessed through black magic by the spirit of the fictional murderer Charles Lee Ray, known as The Lake Shore Strangler.

To give his army an identity, El Ricky distributed badges, patches, t-shirts, pins, and even caps with Chucky’s image. He didn’t choose the seemingly harmless image of the villain from the first three films in the horror series, but rather the more sadistic and sinister version, reconstructed with clumsy mending and open scars all over his face.

Sighting them on walls and street lights was the sign that El Ricky’s men had come to fight for the plaza with the murderous rhythm of the evil dolls.

In September 2023, Los Chuckys made national headlines for the first time: they abandoned human remains in coolers in the municipality of San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León.

Beside it, they placed a narco-banner announcing their incursion into that state. Ricky’s hitmen planned to recapture Monterrey, the city held hostage between 2007 and 2012 by their predecessors, Los Zetas, who carried out one of the worst massacres of the “war on drugs”: the assault on the Casino Royal, which left 52 people dead.

The following year, residents of the Nuevo León municipalities of Juárez, Guadalupe, and Santa Catarina, in the Monterrey metropolitan area, reported the discovery of multiple messages signed with the initials “FEC.” Authorities were quick to link these initials to the Chucky Special Forces.

As Ricky’s armed wing gained territory, it also caused casualties among the official forces: The Chuckys have murdered members of the Nuevo León Civil Force and military personnel, and wounded members of the Navy.

In just three years, they have become a group that has raised red flags with the federal government, even now that they have lost the leadership of their founder, who is imprisoned in the Altiplano prison, fighting extradition or transfer to the United States.

The official document includes images obtained from social media of alleged members of Los Chuckys. The weapons they use are high-caliber: AK-47s, AR-15s, FN 5.7s, and the nightmare of the Mexican armed forces, the .50-caliber sniper rifle, capable of piercing even the most advanced armor.

The Chapitos-CJNG mega-cartel reacts

Red flags were also raised on the side of the mega-cartel formed by Chapitos and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). In May of this year, MILENIO reported that El Mencho had appointed his right-hand man, Audias Flores Silva, known as El Jardinero, as the new head of security for Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar.

In exchange, Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s sons would share with operatives from Jalisco their routes for transporting drugs, weapons and undocumented migrants to the United States.

Although the Oaxaca government reported El Jardinero’s right-hand man, Francisco Jaramillo Valdovinos, known as El Serio or El Seriecito, as dead in 2023, the United States Department of Justice requested the location of this criminal leader operating in the Tierra Caliente region of Guerrero.

In any case, the security cabinet report identifies an armed wing called La Seriesada, a troop that has been deployed across various states in the country.

The federal government has already located Jaramillo Valdovinos’s hitmen in Guerrero, Morelos, Nayarit, Zacatecas, and Aguascalientes, always seeking to infiltrate territories under the control of La Mayiza and its other allies.

Despite being classified as a key player in the new Sinaloa and Jalisco megacartel, federal authorities know little about El Serio: his exact date and place of birth, his appearance, and identifying characteristics are unknown. The few details have been extracted from narco ballads that describe him as a “fine gentleman,” a “good person,” “low-profile,” and splendid when it comes to organizing parties for his family and friends.

El Serio also appears in the National Defense archives as the alleged cousin of Gregorio Portillo Mendoza, former Morena mayor of the municipality of Zirándaro, Guerrero, in the heart of Tierra Caliente.

He is also believed to be the cousin of Rogelio Portillo Camarillo, who, during his campaign as the Morena candidate for mayor of Huetamo, Michoacán, was named by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as responsible for conspiracy to distribute narcotics in the United States.

The megacartels that emerged from the “war in Sinaloa” appear to be preparing a new strategy to annihilate their rivals: the accelerated creation of new armed groups to wage war in already occupied territories. Los Chukys and La Seriesada are examples of the evolution of Mexican organized crime.

Source: Milenio