Estos son los estados de México en los que 148 cárteles operan con más fuerza
Univision Noticias — América Latina
Estos son los estados de México en los que 148 cárteles operan con más fuerza
Univision Noticias — América Latina (International Press / TV) April 2021 · USA / Latin America Photo: Alfredo Estrella / AFP via Getty Images
Crossing the Border in Coverage
Univision’s América Latina desk picked up the 148-groups dataset and translated it for the largest Spanish-language news audience in the United States. The piece reorganized the data by Mexican state, foregrounding the territorial concentration of criminal activity — the question Univision’s audience, including diaspora and policy-watchers, ask first.
Photo: U.S. Navy (public domain)
A Different Reader, the Same Evidence
What makes this citation valuable is reach: the Univision audience is not the same as Reforma’s or El País’s. Bringing the CIDE map to a transnational readership is, in itself, a public-interest outcome of academic research — the data crosses linguistic and political borders the way the phenomena it describes already do.
What the Article Reported
Univision’s América Latina desk anchors the piece on the CIDE Drug Policy Program report and names the largest actors driving the territorial concentration: the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), the Cártel del Pacífico, the Cártel del Golfo, and the Cártel de Sinaloa appear as the dominant organizations across the most-disputed states — Guerrero, Michoacán, Estado de México, and Mexico City. The framing departs from the usual one-cartel-at-a-time treatment by presenting the data as a single comparative map, letting the reader see which states sit under the densest convergence of competing groups.
The article then enumerates the state-by-state breakdown that defines the CIDE finding: Guerrero (24 groups), Michoacán (23), Estado de México (22), Ciudad de México (20), Baja California (16), Guanajuato (14), Quintana Roo (13), dropping to Zacatecas (5) and Jalisco (4), with Nayarit carrying the fewest. The picture this paints is not of a country uniformly contested by a handful of large cartels but of a sharply uneven landscape — some states host two-dozen distinct criminal actors, others a handful, with the dispersion itself a structural feature the official discourse has not absorbed.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A central quote from Roa carries the analytical weight: “El CJNG es el grupo que más confrontaciones tiene con grupos rivales por el control del territorio dada su rápida expansión a partir de 2017 y su presencia en prácticamente casi todo México.” That single sentence captures why the dataset matters beyond the headline count — the CJNG is not merely present in many states; it is the organization most consistently in active conflict with other groups for territorial control, which is the operational mechanism by which violence diffuses across regions. For a Univision audience spanning the US Latino diaspora, the message is direct: the violence is no longer concentrated in a few historically hot states; it is a country-scale dynamic with measurable structure.
Citation
Univision Noticias. (2021). Estos son los estados de México en los que 148 cárteles de la droga operan con más fuerza. Univision — América Latina.