La Fiscalía no habla de estos grupos criminales en las sombras: base de datos revela nombres
emeequis — Investigaciones · Oscar Balderas
La Fiscalía no habla de estos grupos criminales en las sombras
emeequis — Investigaciones · Reportaje de Oscar Balderas 2022 · Mexico Photo: source pending
The Investigation
Oscar Balderas, reporting for emeequis, used my CIDE criminal-groups database to name organizations the FGR omits from its official reports: El Cártel del Fantasma, Los Katas, Los Tegoripeños, and dozens more. The gap between what Fiscal Gertz Manero reports and what my data documents is itself the story.
Photo: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata · Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
What the Article Reported
Balderas opens with a video of two men, barely alive, hanging upside down from trees, then moves to the core argument: the Fiscalía General de la República (FGR) talks about roughly a dozen cartels, while my dataset documents many times that number, most operating in regional shadow.
My Cártel del Fantasma entry is the clearest case: 32 separate appearances in press communiqués, banners, and confirmed field reports, and zero in any FGR bulletin over the same window. No methodological dispute, no contested attribution: a group I document extensively and the federal prosecutor’s office does not acknowledge. Los Katas and Los Tegoripeños follow the same pattern.
Photo: U.S. Navy (public domain)
My role in the piece: naming what the discrepancy means. “A pesar de que ‘oficialmente’ sea difícil conseguir la información con respecto a la presencia de dichas organizaciones, la inseguridad y los actores involucrados en este tema conforman un problema mayúsculo.” Twelve named organizations versus 148 documented ones isn’t a paperwork gap, it’s a policy gap: security strategy calibrated to twelve actors in an environment with many times more.