CARTEL CLICKBAIT
OPINION
I have been studying Mexican drug cartels since 2018, and one of the most persistent issues I’ve seen is the overwhelming amount of misinformation and disinformation that spreads whenever cartels enter the mainstream spotlight. The result is a distorted, often cartoonish understanding of how these organizations actually operate.
A perfect example is a YouTube Short posted by Barstool Chicago—a branch of the Barstool Sports media brand—that has racked up over 9 million views, 300,000 likes, and 19,000 comments. The title? "The Sinaloa Cartel has an army of 100,000 soldiers." The video opens with a shot of the infamous CJNG convoy video, because obviously, and goes on to use Ovidio Guzmán’s release during the first Culiacanazo as its main reference point.
To anyone familiar with the Mexican drug war, the title alone is enough to make you groan.
"The" "Sinaloa Cartel" has an "army" of 100,000 "soldiers."
Every part of that sentence deserves scrutiny.
What Sinaloa Cartel? Certainly they mean the federation, but which faction—Los Chapitos? Los Mayos? Or are they citing some outdated figure from when Chapo, Mayo, and the Beltrán Leyva brothers were still united? Well in the context of Culiacanazo, they must mean Los Chapitos.
But "army"? Are we talking about professionally trained, full-time combatants? 100,000 of them? The Chapitos have an army bigger than Canada's?
I know it may sound pretentious and pedantic, but it’s deserved. It’s not just a YouTube short, this is the kind of content that shapes public perception. And when the narratives are this lazy, the consequences go beyond misinformation. They distort the way people understand a conflict that has already been flattened by years of oversimplification.
Wikipedia cites the same 100,000 figure on its page about the Mexican Drug War—but they attribute it to the combined strength of all cartels in Mexico.
The America First Policy Institute, a think tank stacked with former Trump officials, many of whom are now back in the White House, also uses this number in their 2023 “An America First Approach to Defeat the Cartels.” It’s a policy doc that proposes using severe tariffs as leverage against Mexico, among other things. They claim the Sinaloa Cartel has 100,000 members.
So where is everyone getting this 100,000 figure from?
The 100,000 figure comes from a single anonymous U.S. defense official quoted in The Washington Times, with no report, methodology, or breakdown to back it up. It’s a headline-ready soundbite, not a serious estimate.
What does “foot soldier” even mean in this context? Are we talking about Sicarios? Lookouts? Bodyguards? Just throwing out a round number like that without explaining who counts is deliberately vague and deliberately dramatic.
It also came out in 2009, at the peak of Calderón’s militarized drug war and during a time when the U.S. and Mexico were ramping up cooperation under the Mérida Initiative. Framing cartels as narco-armies with tens of thousands of troops helped justify foreign aid, militarization, and policy decisions. That context matters.
And even if we entertain the number, modern research doesn’t support it. A 2023 peer-reviewed study by Prieto-Curiel et al. estimates that all cartels combined across Mexico have between 160,000 and 185,000 members—including everyone from shooters to accountants. If Sinaloa and the Zetas alone had 100,000 in 2009, you’d expect cartel ranks to be well into the hundreds of thousands today. They’re not.
In 2023, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram testified that the agency estimates the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have over 45,000 members, associates, facilitators, and brokers operating across roughly 100 countries. Again, that number includes far more than just “soldiers". Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pushed back on the claim.
During the 2019 Culiacanazo, Government estimates put the number of armed men deployed by the Chapitos in Culiacán at 700–800. This was in Sinaloa’s capital city, the organization’s heartland.
In February 2024, Nick Sortor, a popular right-wing influencer with 900,000+ followers on X, tweeted (then deleted):
“BREAKING: The Mexican Senate has just APPROVED the entry of U.S. special forces to take on the cartels. FINALLY! Trump has designated the cartels as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ and they’re about to PAY for the American lives they’ve taken.”
https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2025/04/opinion-cartel-clickbait.html?m=1