Five years have passed since Daniel Flores Fernández vanished from his Guadalajara apartment, yet his father Héctor Flores still wells up when he tells the story. It was a Saturday in May 2021 when men linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel stormed the flat, snatching the 19-year-old from his pregnant girlfriend. Half a decade later, he remains missing. Héctor has since learned his son is being held at a cartel safe house somewhere in the city, where unwilling recruits are forced to work for Mexico's most violent drug gang. "All I can do is hope that he comes back to me one day," he says. "The pain is tremendous."
A city under cartel control
Daniel's story is grimly familiar. Roughly a third of Mexico is ruled by cartels like the CJNG, while more than 130,000 people are missing nationwide. What makes Guadalajara different now is that it is welcoming thousands of football fans. The World Cup has begun, and the city's gleaming Akron Stadium is hosting a number of matches. Cartel violence has thrown these plans into doubt, and even if security forces keep order, the scourge of the drug gangs will linger long after the final whistle.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has dominated the state for years. Emerging in 2010 after the Milenio gang fractured, it has since expanded across Mexico and into some 40 countries. Its main revenue comes from drugs: the cartel pulls in billions of dollars annually trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine to the United States. Jalisco's geography is crucial. Chemical precursors arrive through ports such as Manzanillo in neighbouring Colima, then finished narcotics move north to America's southwestern border.
Leadership vacuum sparks reprisals
Wealth has brought brazen violence. The cartel is infamous for attacks on Mexican government officials, and the fact that its leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho", remained at large was a deep embarrassment for President Claudia Sheinbaum ahead of the World Cup. Pressure mounted from Donald Trump, who urged his Mexican counterpart to "go after" the cartels and warned of US boots on the ground if she did not.
In February, Mexican special forces struck. El Mencho was fatally wounded, officials say, following a shootout at a remote mountain property near Tapalpa, about 100 miles southwest of Guadalajara. The operation, aided by US intelligence, soon triggered cartel reprisals across Jalisco. Gunmen torched cars and blocked roads, including at the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta, where tourists cowered in hotel rooms. The violence left 25 National Guards dead in Jalisco alone, with bloodshed occurring within 10 miles of the Akron Stadium.
"We want them to come. But [the government] can't even have security for their own people, let alone people coming from other countries."
With the tournament approaching, Sheinbaum urged calm, insisting Mexico could ensure "no risk" to supporters travelling to Guadalajara. Héctor Flores is unconvinced. Speaking in his home as the smell of gas drifts from a nearby restaurant, he gestures to a picture of his son's smiling face on his T-shirt. The government's promises ring hollow when citizens like his son disappear with impunity.
Silicon Valley and tequila capital
In theory, Guadalajara has much going for it. A booming tech sector has earned it the title "Silicon Valley of Mexico". Intel and Bosch are among the global firms drawn by a steady flow of computer science graduates from the city's universities. In truth, though, it is tequila that puts the city on the map. The eponymous town of Tequila, an hour from the state capital, produces up to 500 million litres each year from rows of blue agave thriving in Jalisco's volcanic lowlands, generating profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet the party town has a sinister side. Extortion is a major problem across Guadalajara. No hard figures exist, but national surveys suggest hundreds of thousands of extortion attempts against Mexican businesses each year. From tortilla shops to car washes, "cobro de piso", floor charge, is just another cost of doing business. Those who cannot or will not pay face brutal consequences. The metropolitan area records roughly 1,500 murders a year, many linked to cartel brutality.
Kidnapping as a revenue stream
The CJNG also raises money through kidnapping, forcing victims to act as lookouts, move drugs or worse. According to a former prisoner who later spoke to Héctor Flores, criminals sometimes compel captives to carry out sicario hits. Daniel is far from alone: 16,000 people are officially "disappeared" across Jalisco's canyons and agave groves.
Signs of resistance are visible. The city's Monument to Boy Heroes, built in 1950 to commemorate a 19th-century battle against the United States, has been rechristened the "Roundabout of the Disappeared" ahead of the World Cup and covered with posters of the missing. One features Jonathan Emmanuel Serratos Virgen, abducted at 31. A caption pleads: "Have you seen him? Help us find him."
Héctor Flores has co-founded a group called Luz de Esperanza (Light of Hope), which campaigns for the disappeared. Activists print flyers, post on social media and lobby the state to invest more in identifying corpses, increasingly found in mass graves across the city.
Construction uncovers a bloody harvest
The grim irony is that this toll has risen with development. As authorities poured money into preparing Mexico's Silicon Valley for the World Cup, widening roads and building new apartment blocks, contractors chanced upon a bloody harvest. Activists say some 22 graves have been found around the Akron Stadium alone in recent years. The most horrifying example emerged in February last year, when construction workers uncovered 260 bodies at a site called Las Agujas on the outskirts of Guadalajara, many reduced to body parts.
A year on, I visited Las Agujas with crime journalist Maria Luisa Estrada Hernández and a colleague from the UK. Héctor Flores had warned that the cartel shooed away other journalists who tried. Hernández had her own reasons to be nervous: in July 2023 she survived an assassination attempt when a gunman on a motorbike opened fire on her car as she travelled with her daughter. He missed, but official statistics show at least 141 journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000, and a 2024 Amnesty report found at least 61 of those deaths were clearly related to their work.
We drove up a dirt track towards the mass-grave site. High walls blocked the view. A security guard in his sixties emerged from a booth, gate firmly shut, and gruffly told us he had no authority to let us pass. To our right, a hooded man paced back and forth. Another raced by on a motorbike. Then a dark blue pickup sped towards us, tyres spinning in the dirt. The driver, a thin, bearded man in his late forties wearing a black baseball cap, leaned out the window. "Guys, you can't be here on this property, you gotta go," he said in perfect American English, another hint of the cartel's reach north of the Rio Grande. When we identified ourselves as journalists, he replied in a menacing voice: "I know, but you gotta get outta here now." We fled, a red pickup matching our speed until we reached the highway.
Fortress stadium
That left the Akron Stadium itself. It rises, a low white oval, from a grassy mound on the city's edge, more spaceship than sports venue. The security presence is heavy. Army pick-up trucks stand guard with officers manning .50-calibre machine guns. Special Forces and National Guard have their own contingents, I counted more than 100 trucks in total. Football's governing body sounds confident. "FIFA is confident that the efforts being made by the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved," the organisation said, noting that the host nations safely welcome thousands of visitors every day. The cartels themselves have been quieter in recent weeks, apparently warning members not to bother visiting fans.
Whether that is enough to protect the throngs of tourists now descending on Jalisco remains to be seen. The US State Department has advised its citizens to "reconsider" travelling to the state, while violence in Guadalajara continues unabated. Just this week, armed men on a motorbike chased down a man near the city centre and shot him in the head. Héctor Flores doubts a show of force makes Guadalajara safer, not least when so many officials are on the CJNG payroll. Remarkably, he says, that includes the same men who kidnapped his son, with members of Jalisco's state prosecutor's office caught on camera that day in 2021. Local police still have not acted, even though a tribunal confirmed in June 2025 that officials were indeed involved in Daniel's disappearance. "In Mexico," Héctor laments, "you don't know when organised crime starts and the prosecutor's office begins."
Leadership fight looms
If the Sheinbaum administration has struck blows against the cartel's leadership, few here believe much will change. Things could soon become worse. A leadership fight for El Mencho's crown could spark an all-out war, a bloodbath and a disaster for Mexico during the World Cup. It hardly helps that the flow of weapons from the US continues unabated. Cartel gunmen boast heavy weapons of the sort wielded by troops at the Akron, with government forces sometimes overwhelmed by superior firepower. Bullet casings have been traced back to the US: one factory, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri, is even government-owned. Once such bullets enter the open market, they soon end up in criminal hands, a neat way to spend American drug money.
Aware, perhaps, of the oddly symbiotic relationship between his country and Mexican gangs, the Trump administration has kept up pressure on Sheinbaum. Last month, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency claimed Mexican officials have been "in bed for years" with drug traffickers. Political point-scoring does nothing to help Héctor Flores, let alone his vanished son.