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and businesses to launder money. Again, such merchant centers mark a similarity between Sinaloa and other criminal hot spots. Sicily developed a mafia that bridged an unruly countryside and the commercial hub of Palermo, a port linking North Africa and Europe. Medellín in Colombia was a buzzing market city surrounded by bandit hills when its infamous son Pablo Escobar rose to be the world’s number one cocaine trafficker. Criminal conspiracies do not spring up in certain regions by pure chance.
    Sinaloa has a history of unruliness going back long before anyone talked about the Sinaloa Cartel. Pronounced see-nah-loh-ah , the name comes from the word for a local spiky plant in the language of the Cahita, one of six indigenous peoples that flourished in the region before the arrival of Europeans. Sinaloan tribes were mostly nomads who hunted and gathered for food, unlike the great empires of the Aztecs (Mexicas) and Mayas to the south. But their resistance to European invaders was more ferocious and effective than that of the vast Aztec legions, who fell before Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1521. When Spanish swashbucklers tried to extend their empire into the northwest, Sinaloan tribes thwarted them, aided by the hostile terrain. One of the tribes’ most noted triumphs was the murder of conquistador Pedro de Montoya in 1584 by Sinaloan indigenous Zuaques. 3
    Scarred Spaniards returned to Mexico City and wrote of ritual cannibalism among the ferocious Sinaloan tribes. Some historians dispute the claims as Spanish horror stories. But whether truth or myth, the idea has been taken on wholeheartedly by modern Sinaloans, who proudly boast that when the Spanish came, they were devoured. Whether they feasted on victims or not, indigenous resistance turned Sinaloa into a bloodstained frontier with only skeleton settlements by the end of the sixteenth century.
    Jesuit missionaries found crucifixes were more effective than cannons at bringing tribesman into the Catholic empire. The conquest of Sinaloa was thus based more on faith than submission to the sword. The effect can be felt today, with Sierra Madre folk holding dear to their spiritual beliefs and folk saints. But the region continued to exist on the fringe of the law, serving as a hotbed for silver and gun contraband during the War of Independence from Spain from 1810 to 1821.
    After banishing the Spanish Crown, Mexico suffered decades of civil strife and upheavals, allowing bandits to flourish in Sinaloa and elsewhere. One of the key issues Mexico has struggled with since independence is security. The inheritors of New Spain suddenly ruled a complicated country of competing fiefdoms and ethnic groups. The Spanish left the legacies of a corrupt bureaucracy, torturous police, and millions of dispossessed. The rulers needed a system to control this mess. But in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they were more concerned with who was top dog. Coup followed coup. Liberals battled with conservatives. Descendants of Spaniards clutched for power while indigenous tribes and bandits raided in frontier territories.
    Internal disorder left Mexico weak against the ambitions of its powerful northern neighbor. Texan militias and then the full U.S. army defeated Mexican troops in two wars, and the United States strong-armed Mexico into selling the entire northern third of its territory. The possessions ceded in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe included huge chunks of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming, the whole of California, Nevada, and Utah, with political recognition of the loss of Texas. 4 In total, the ceded territory measured more than nine hundred thousand square miles, laying the foundations for the USA to become a twentieth-century superpower. Sinaloa lay some 360 miles south of this new line in the sand.
    The Mexican-American War remains a burning-hot bone of contention between the two nations. Mexico annually commemorates a squad of young cadets shot dead