In late January 2024, the Mexican border city of Reynosa—home to more than 700,000 people and sitting directly across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas—effectively shut down for nearly two weeks. Civilians refused to leave their homes. Businesses locked their doors. Gunfire echoed through residential streets at all hours.

Armored trucks rolled through neighborhoods, and improvised explosive devices were buried in dirt roads on the outskirts of town. Above it all, drones loaded with explosives circled in the sky, piloted not by a military but by drug cartel factions fighting one another for control of the same city. What made the war all the more remarkable was that both sides carried the same name. They both called themselves the Gulf Cartel.

The conflict was not a turf war between rival organizations. It was the final chapter in the collapse of one of the oldest and most powerful criminal empires in Mexican history—an organization that had once controlled billions of dollars in drug routes, built the most feared paramilitary force in Latin America, and survived decades of government pressure. In the end, it destroyed itself from the inside out. The Gulf Cartel’s origins trace back to 1984, when Juan García Abrego took over a relatively small drug trafficking operation in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.

García Abrego understood that the real money lay not merely in moving drugs but in controlling the corridors through which they moved. Tamaulipas, with its crossing points at Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and Miguel Alemán, was the golden corridor. By the early 1990s, the Gulf Cartel had become one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico, moving massive quantities of cocaine north into Texas and beyond. In 1996, García Abrego became the first drug lord ever placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

Shortly afterward, Mexican authorities arrested him and extradited him to the United States—the first Mexican national ever extradited for drug trafficking. The loss of its top boss might have crippled most organizations, but the Gulf Cartel adapted. Waiting in the wings was a man who would take the cartel to heights García Abrego never imagined while planting the seeds of its eventual destruction. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén took control in 1997, and he did it through betrayal and blood, earning the nickname El Mata Amigos, the friend killer.

He had his own associates killed to eliminate rivals. Once in charge, he transformed the Gulf Cartel into something the drug world had never seen. In 1997, Cárdenas Guillén recruited thirty-one deserters from Mexico’s most elite special forces unit, the Grupos Aeromóviles de Fuerzas Especiales, known as the GAFEs, and built them into a private paramilitary army. These were not ordinary street soldiers.

They were expert marksmen trained in rapid deployment, military tactics, communications, and counterintelligence. He called them Los Zetas. For the first time in Mexican cartel history, a drug lord had weaponized actual military-trained operatives for organized crime. Los Zetas brought a new level of violence to the drug trade—beheadings, mass kidnappings, roadblocks that shut down entire cities.

Corrupt federal police joined their ranks. Former Guatemalan special forces were recruited. At their peak, the Zetas made the Gulf Cartel genuinely terrifying across multiple Mexican states. Even the Sinaloa Cartel, led by El Chapo, had to develop its own paramilitary response just to compete.

But the seeds of destruction were being planted. In 2003, the FBI and Mexican authorities moved on Cárdenas Guillén. He was arrested and extradited to the United States in 2007, where he was eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison. Meanwhile, the Zetas had spent years growing in numbers, territory, power, and ambition.

They had started running their own kidnapping operations, extortion rackets, and drug trafficking routes. They were making their own money and building their own loyalty networks. When leadership passed to figures like Osiel’s brother Antonio and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, the new leaders looked at the Zetas and realized the people they relied on for protection had grown too big to control. In 2010, the unthinkable happened.

Los Zetas formally broke away and declared themselves an independent criminal organization. The armed wing had eaten the hand that created it. What followed was among the most violent periods in the history of Mexican organized crime. The Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas went to war across Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Veracruz simultaneously.

These were people who had trained together, bled together, and built operations together. They knew every safe house, every corrupt police contact, every trafficking route. When they turned on each other, the intelligence they held was as lethal as any weapon. Desperate to survive, the Gulf Cartel reached out to its longtime rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, which agreed to a temporary alignment.

But the Gulf Cartel never fully recovered from the split. The loss of its military arm, combined with constant government pressure, fractured its leadership structure in ways that could not be easily repaired. What emerged were factions. Los Metros, originally formed in Matamoros, established dominance in Reynosa and the northern border corridor.

Grupo Escorpión operated primarily out of Matamoros and functioned as the cartel’s armed wing in that plaza. Los Ciclones claimed their own territory, and Los Rojos, an earlier splinter group tied to the original Cárdenas Guillén family, saw their influence reduced through years of fighting. The Gulf Cartel had become less an organization and more a franchise, and the franchisees had stopped paying fees to a central office that no longer existed. In July 2021, the warring factions reportedly signed a truce.

It lasted roughly two months. In September 2021, a leading Metros figure known as Comandante Calamardo was found dead, sending a message across Tamaulipas that the peace was fragile. The ceasefire did not fully collapse immediately. Instead, it created a false sense of stability while tensions built underneath.

Then came 2023, when the fragile equilibrium shattered. Violence spiked across Tamaulipas in a way not seen in years. In October 2023, criminal groups set up blockades at five separate locations across Reynosa, shutting down major thoroughfares while engaging in shootouts with police. It was, for all practical purposes, a military siege carried out against a city of hundreds of thousands.

In March 2023, the conflict reached international radar. Four American citizens, two of whom were later found dead and two kidnapped, were attacked by members of the Escorpiones faction in Matamoros. They had crossed the border for a medical procedure and were involved in nothing criminal. The kidnapping triggered an existential response.

Gulf Cartel figures handed over five alleged members of the Escorpiones faction to Mexican authorities, claiming responsibility for the attack. But the move had zero impact on the underlying war. The conflict also introduced a disturbing escalation in tactics. The Escorpiones began using makeshift landmines and IEDs buried along dirt roads to stop rival incursions.

Then they began attaching explosives to commercially available drones and flying them into targets. At least one confirmed incident involved a drone attack on a convoy of Tamaulipas police armored vehicles. Analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security and the New Lines Institute flagged this drone escalation as one of the most concerning developments in cartel warfare in recent memory, specifically because of how close to American soil it occurred. On January 23, 2024, Reynosa essentially stopped functioning for nearly two weeks.

Sporadic but relentless shootouts, road blockades erected and torn down and erected again, the sound of gunfire at unpredictable hours. Civilians stayed home because stepping outside felt like a genuine risk. For most of those two weeks, life in McAllen, Texas, just across the river, continued more or less normally. Directly across the international bridge, a cartel war raged.

In late 2024, law enforcement sources shared footage filmed in Rio Bravo, a city a short distance from Donna, Texas, showing members of the Escorpiones faction arming a drone for what appeared to be a combat mission, a narcocorrido playing in the background. In February 2025, the US State Department formally designated the Gulf Cartel as a foreign terrorist organization. It was a fundamental reclassification, opening a different set of legal tools for American law enforcement. The March 2023 Matamoros kidnapping, along with years of evidence about drone strikes on police, IED use on public roads, and the terrorizing of civilian populations, had made the political calculus impossible to ignore.

According to the DEA’s 2025 assessment and analysis from groups like Insight Crime, the Gulf Cartel today exists in a state of managed fragmentation. Los Metros and Grupo Escorpión are not actively engaged in the kind of open warfare that shut down Reynosa in January 2024, but the truce is maintained out of mutual exhaustion, not trust. Tamaulipas remains the only Mexican state under the State Department’s highest travel warning, do not travel. The situation is complicated further by an external enemy born from the Gulf Cartel’s own history.

The Northeast Cartel, known as the Cartel del Noreste, or CDN, is the direct descendant of Los Zetas. After the Zetas fragmented following their split from the Gulf Cartel, the CDN emerged as the dominant successor group in the Nuevo Laredo area. The Metros have been engaged in battles with the Northeast Cartel for control of municipalities between Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, and those areas now appear firmly under Northeast Cartel control. The Gulf Cartel created Los Zetas.

Los Zetas became the Northeast Cartel. The Northeast Cartel is now taking Gulf Cartel territory. The Gulf Cartel has not been taken over by another major cartel because everyone else is busy fighting their own civil wars. CJNG is navigating a succession crisis.

The Sinaloa Cartel is in the midst of its own dramatic self-destruction, with over four thousand dead or missing since September 2024. No single organization currently has the capacity to mount a takeover of Gulf territory in Tamaulipas. The human toll of the Gulf Cartel civil war—in lives lost, people displaced, economic activity destroyed, and psychological damage to communities that have lived under this pressure for over a decade—is staggering. The IED buried on a road in San Fernando that killed two people in January 2025 was not aimed at rival cartel members.

It was planted along a road anyone might use. The two-week siege of Reynosa shut down the economy of a city of hundreds of thousands. The Gulf Cartel’s primary business has always been moving product across the Texas border, and the competition between factions is about which gets to charge fees for the smuggling corridors. The American drug market funds both sides of the war.

Osiel Cárdenas Guillén created Los Zetas to protect his empire. Los Zetas destroyed that empire and birthed a Northeast Cartel that is now eating what is left of it. The factions that emerged from the collapse are fighting each other over the ruins.

In Tamaulipas, in Reynosa, and Matamoros, and the towns between them, people wake up every morning in the middle of that story—not as characters, but as survivors.