On January 18, President Bernardo Arévalo was besieged by gang-fueled chaos. He wanted to bang his fist on the table in a show of strength, to give the impression that he held —or could hold— the reins of security in Guatemala.
He declared a 30-day state of emergency via a national broadcast, with an insinuation that the entire country understood: “The torres [towers] of corruption and impunity that for decades have sustained the destabilizing structures behind [the security crisis] are falling…”
Arévalo had been in a slump in terms of security: From July to October 2025, there were several prison riots. In October of that year, 20 leaders of the 18th Street gang escaped from the Fraijanes II prison in an operation that could hardly have occurred without the complicity of officials in his government.
2025 ended with a 10 percent increase in homicides, most of which occurred in the capital, Guatemala City. And 2026 did not start any better: On January 17, 18th Street staged a coordinated riot in three prisons, taking nearly 50 hostages. A day later, members of that gang murdered 10 police officers. So that night, with the bodies still unburied, he had to appear strong.
By that point, the president had been hinting at times —without ever daring to mention a specific name— that behind 18th Street’s belligerence were shadowy forces within the political sphere that were fomenting chaos.
That night, through that veiled reference, he made what came closest to a concrete accusation: “The towers of corruption” — which Guatemalans easily translated into a surname: Torres, a family with deep roots in the country’s politics.
In fact, the first to acknowledge the insinuation was Congresswoman Sandra Torres, a former presidential candidate for the UNE party, who was defeated in the runoff by Bernardo Arévalo in 2023. Following the national broadcast, Torres went to the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman to report that her surname was being tarnished and that this put her at risk.
Arévalo Begins Third Year under State of Siege amid Clashes with 18th Street
All this political turmoil set the stage for a series of high-stakes judicial elections in Guatemala concentrated in the first half of the year. Together, the contests will define the political scope of the president or the opposition: At stake are all five seats on the Constitutional Court, all five justices of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the Comptroller General.
Then, the crown jewel: the new attorney general will be selected in May. The incumbent candidate is Consuelo Porras, the Arévalo administration’s foremost nemesis and the target of countless accusations of corruption, arbitrary acts, and the political manipulation of the justice system. El Faro reporting showed her participation decades ago in a network of irregular child adoptions.
Guatemalan politics kicked off the year in flames, and 18th Street found itself in the thick of the fire: violent, strident, a runaway horse, in the image and likeness of its most powerful leader: Aldo Dupié, “Lobo.” All sources consulted on the matter —a former gang member, an anti-narcotics agent, a former anti-gang prosecutor, and a member of the Security Cabinet— associated Lobo with the word “psychopath.”
While 18th Street was being discussed on national television and found itself at the center of political mudslinging, the Mara Salvatrucha-13 was making its moves away from the headlines and as far as possible from the political discourse: forceful, brutal, silent, strategic, permeated by the personality of its leader, Jorge Jair de León, “Diabólico.” From the shadows, the Mara struck a key blow that allowed it to climb several rungs in the urban drug trade and, consequently, in the gang’s criminal power structure.
Las ‘Torres’
A senior official in Arévalo’s government involved in security matters, who spoke with El Faro on condition of anonymity, stated unequivocally that the administration is convinced that behind the recent violence that shook the country —and the government— are political operators, in particular former presidential candidate Sandra Torres.
But those convictions do not appear to be supported by compelling evidence, or at least the source did not present any to this newspaper. Sandra Torres’ only concrete connection to gangs is that she is the aunt of a woman who bridges the two worlds — that of politics and that of 18th Street: María Marta Castañeda Torres.
Sandra Torres is a descendant of a dynasty of influential politicians from the department of Petén, who in the latter half of the last century were linked to right-wing parties openly sympathetic to the military. But she burst onto the political scene through a left-leaning party, the UNE, which she founded alongside her husband, Álvaro Colom — who served as president of Guatemala from 2008 to 2011.
Torres became a highly visible first lady. She attempted to run for president in 2011, but the laws did not allow it due to her marriage to the outgoing president. She then tried in 2015 but lost, and again in 2019 but lost once more, and again in 2023 with the same result. An influential party leader for years, she was secretary general until October 2025, when she passed the baton to her daughter, Congresswoman Teresita De León.
Sandra Torres had four children, all of whom hold public office: two in the Central American Parliament and two in the Guatemalan Congress.
Her sister, Gloria, had three daughters, and while her brother-in-law was president and her sister was first lady, Gloria and two of her daughters —María Marta and Christa— were accused of embezzling funds from municipal governments in the departments of Quiché and Huehuetenango. All three were arrested, though they were released shortly thereafter.
Authorities also linked María Marta’s first husband to these crimes; he was sentenced in 2022 to six years of non-commutable imprisonment, while she was sentenced in 2020 to four years in prison, which were commuted.
Christa was arrested in 2017 for fraud and customs evasion, though her case did not proceed either. María Marta, on the other hand, accumulated over the years a thick —very thick— criminal record of various kinds, including multiple arrests and brief stints in prison.
By 2021, she had accumulated six arrest warrants on charges of fraud and embezzlement, from which she had managed to escape unscathed through legal appeals. María Marta had risen to the big leagues of the criminal underworld in 2016.
The Pavón prison farm was controlled with an iron fist by former Army Captain Byron Lima —imprisoned for the murder of Archbishop Gerardi— until a rival gang, led by a drug trafficker known as El Taquero, killed him in a spectacular attack involving rifles, grenades, and other explosives. Thirteen other people died in the attack.
María Marta was accused by the prosecution of arranging for the weapons used in the massacre to be brought in, including a fanny pack containing a grenade. Several witnesses, some of whom were members of El Taquero’s crew, claimed that she was the contact and logistics coordinator outside the prison.
Her defense does not deny that she smuggled weapons into the prison, but argues that she was unaware of this or did not know the purposes for which they would be used, and therefore proposes that she plead guilty to the crime of concealment. At least one court declared itself incompetent to accept María Marta’s confession for that crime.
Sometime after the attack, María Marta met Lobo and they fell in love, or at least began a relationship.
Aldo Dupié —Lobo— has been in prison since 2003 and has a series of convictions totaling more than 1,500 years in prison for murders, femicides, attempted murders, kidnapping, contract killings, extortion, robberies, and criminal association. He is a member of the Solo Raperos (SR) clique, founded in the El Limón community of Zone 18. He rose to the top of 18th Street’s leadership through violence and fanatical loyalty to his gang.
María Marta and Lobo have made little effort to hide their relationship, and photos of them can be found online socializing within Guatemala’s lax and highly corrupt prison system, where the gang leader enjoyed luxuries such as air conditioning, access to phones, cable TV, and even the ability to order food delivery — that is, to the prison.
It is unclear whether they formalized their relationship by getting married —the Guatemalan media refer to her as “wife,” sometimes “partner,” or a generic “couple”— but one event would legally bind them forever.
On March 27, 2024, at a restaurant in Zone 9 of Guatemala City, prosecutor Miriam Reguero Sosa and her mother were attacked by a group of hitmen dressed as police officers. The prosecutor was wounded, but her mother and a bodyguard were killed.
In the following months, three members of 18th Street were captured in the El Limón community, territory of the SR clique, and therefore Lobo’s turf. A fifth defendant was captured in December and was scheduled to testify in court on January 9, but was murdered in prison five days earlier.
Thirteen days after the attack on the prosecutor, two very high-ranking gang leaders were murdered at the Fraijanes II prison, where Lobo was being held at the time: José Galindo, alias Criminal, and Luis García Díaz, alias Viejo Strong.
The authorities’ hypothesis is that they were executed for failing to carry out the mission to kill the prosecutor. But former anti-gang prosecutor Juan Francisco Foppa, an expert on gang structures, told El Faro that, according to his sources, these gang members were killed for opposing the gang’s use as a political tool to destabilize the Arévalo administration.
The fact is that a judge ordered the arrest of María Marta, charging her with murder, attempted murder, and criminal conspiracy. She was captured near Antigua Guatemala on August 27, 2025. Although the case is under seal, the authorities’ hypothesis is that María Marta planned the attack in coordination with her partner, because the prosecutor was investigating structures linked to 18th Street and its finances.
A month after María Marta’s arrest, Edwin Estuardo Mayén García, the lawyer in charge of her defense and that of her partner, was murdered by a hitman on a motorcycle in Zone 1, right in the heart of the capital. The then-Minister of the Interior, Francisco Jiménez, suggested that the murder might have been ordered by 18th Street.
“Ever since María Marta was captured, we knew trouble was coming,” a Security Cabinet official told El Faro on condition of anonymity, linking the escape of the 20 gang leaders, the riots, and the murders of police officers to this arrest.
Following the mass escape, Minister Jiménez was dismissed and is currently a fugitive from justice, facing charges of complicity. Thus, 18th Street —whether or not in coordination with the Guatemalan opposition— has waded into politics.
Despite the insinuations, the Arévalo administration has been unable to link its political opponents —often referenced as “the pact of the corrupt”— to any of 18th Street’s violent actions, beyond the connection provided by María Marta due to her kinship with her aunt, a congresswoman, and her relationship with Lobo.
For now, the government has managed to quell the emergency. The state of siege —in effect from January 18 to February 17— achieved, according to official figures, a 50 percent reduction in murders compared to the same period in 2025.
Lobo is being held in the newly opened maximum-security prison Renovación I, where he spends his days inside a shipping container converted into a cell and where, according to authorities, he has been stripped of all the privileges he previously enjoyed.
María Marta is detained at the Mariscal Zavala prison, which operates within a military compound and where high-profile inmates are typically held. According to a government source, María Marta is being held in a cell specially built for her, guarded day and night by a member of the army’s special forces, who are known as Kaibiles.
Contacted by El Faro, María Marta’s new lawyer pledged to secure a statement from his client, but as of this writing, there has been no response.
The Arévalo administration achieved mixed results in the first phase of the judicial elections. Its opponents secured significant seats on the Constitutional Court and Supreme Electoral Tribunal, but all signs indicate that Consuelo Porras will not be able to win reelection as attorney general.
Facing the opposition, President Arévalo managed to appear as strong as a president can appear when he points without naming names, lobbing accusations through wordplay.
El Gallito de la Mara
The El Gallito neighborhood, in Zone 3 of Guatemala City, is one of those places where taxi drivers think twice before entering, a place burdened by a heavy stigma as a dangerous area with a long history of violent incidents.
In the late 1980s, a man named Leonel Marroquín lived there; he made a living smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States, earning him the nickname “El Coyote.” Apparently, during his trips through Mexico, Mr. Leonel made the connections needed to get into another business that yielded more profits with less effort: peddling cocaine. Thus, he founded what is known to this day as the Gallito Cartel.
One of the neighborhood’s residents, who grew up on its streets, moving in and out of the criminal world that controlled it, recalls that in those early days of drug trafficking, peace reigned: “Everyone loved Mr. Leonel; he sent medicine to the sick, and when cable TV was a novelty, everyone in El Gallito had free cable. That’s why whenever the police came, anyone would open their home to him so he could hide,” the resident recalls.
In the criminal underworld, stability is short-lived, especially when big profits are at stake. So one day in 1995, someone killed Leonel Marroquín, and his empire-in-the-making was inherited by his nephews Mario García, known as “Marioco,” and Omar Reyes, nicknamed “Marín.”
But times had changed; the myth of the benevolent drug lord protected by the community was a thing of the past, and the cousins had to reclaim their territory at gunpoint. Shootouts and corpses became a daily occurrence.
The first to die was Marín, in 1999, by gunshot, of course. Two years later, on May 1, 2001, Marioco was ambushed very close to his home and riddled with bullets.
Two brothers stepped in to take over: Julio and Francisco Domínguez Higueros, known as the “Caradura” brothers, a nickname meaning someone who is shameless or brazen.
“They were the sons of a man who sold coal; they were very humble and had their little shop where they sold tortillas,” recalls a resident of El Gallito. At first, they were part of Marioco’s distribution network, but their ambition surpassed that of the other dealers.
At this point, it should be said that since the days of El Coyote, the business had grown exponentially. It was no longer a small local distribution network; control had spread to neighboring areas such as Las Calaveras, La Trinidad, and the Bethania neighborhood, multiplying profits and risks alike.
The Day MS-13 Betrayed the Guatemalan Sur
The Caradura brothers rebuilt the business from the ground up: selling doses in their store at first, buying other corners later, unifying all distribution points, establishing a hierarchical structure, and using a great deal of violence, until they rose to the top of the Gallito Cartel.
A former prosecutor, who is part of the newly created Guatemalan Joint Anti-Drug Information Center (CICANG) —an institution that coordinates anti-narcotics efforts between Guatemala and the United States— also asserts that the Caradura brothers secured a steady supply of cocaine through two channels.
The first is the purchase of portions of drug shipments seized by the police, which are stolen from warehouses by corrupt agents. The second mechanism is somewhat less obvious: according to this source, once the cocaine makes its overland journey through Central America and before entering Mexico, the northern cartels “test” the product to ensure its purity and weight.
Packages that fail to meet quality standards are returned to the transporters, who in turn resell them on the local market. According to this expert, a large portion of the Gallito Cartel’s supply comes from the department of Huehuetenango, which borders Mexico.
The Gallito Cartel, under its various leaderships —from El Coyote, through Marioco and Marín, to the Caradura Brothers— managed to stand up to the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs, whose expansion had been gaining momentum since the early 1990s. Although the gangs divided up the city’s urban fabric among themselves, El Gallito remained impregnable.
The Caradura brothers took the operation to another level: They expanded their corners beyond Zone 3, with its reputation as a marginal area, and, according to the Guatemalan police, spread them throughout the capital, from Zone 1, the city’s Historic Center, with its bohemian bars and hipsters, to Zones 9 and 10 —epicenters of nightlife, major hotel chains, bars, nightclubs, brothels, and clients with greater purchasing power— passing through Zones 7, 11, 12, and 14.
Meanwhile, they expanded their catalog of crimes to include contract killings and money laundering.
In 2015, Julio was arrested in an anti-narcotics operation and has remained in prison ever since, without this affecting the cartel’s operations, which fell into the hands of his brother Francisco, “Paco.” The latter roamed freely throughout Guatemala, without any known legal proceedings against him and without spending a single day in prison.
But this story began to change on the night of January 5, 2024, when five young Guatemalans who were hanging out at a nightclub —read: a brothel— in Zone 9 disappeared.
Authorities tracked the phone of one of the missing men to El Gallito and carried out an operation in which they captured nearly ten high-ranking members of the Caradura organization.
Some time later, a protected witness told the Prosecutor’s Office that the young men were kidnapped from the brothel and taken to a safe house in Zone 3, where they were tortured, murdered, and subsequently buried under the floor of the house. When the case became public, the criminals exhumed their victims and dissolved their bodies in acid. The court file on these disappearances is under total seal.
A former gang member familiar with the cartel’s modus operandi assured El Faro that the five missing young men were part of the Caradura structure and that that night they got drunk and consumed some of the drugs they were supposed to sell at the brothel. Their punishment was death.
“The problem is that the Prosecutor’s Office had built a strong case against the people arrested for this, and Paco had a thing: If he saw you were going to be released soon, he’d stick by you, pay for your lawyers… but if he saw you were going to be sentenced to several years, he’d leave you, abandon you, basically.”
According to this account, Paco’s lieutenants, realizing they had been abandoned by his organization and surrounded by enemies with scores to settle, sought the protection of an enemy who had long been trying to seize territory from the cartel: the Mara Salvatrucha-13.
“They handed Paco over to Diabólico —the gang’s most visible leader— because they needed protection and knew that every 15 days Paco would go for a checkup with a doctor in Zone 10 and didn’t bring his bodyguards, and then they handed over all the Caradura warehouses and retail locations to the Mara,” said this source, who spent much of his life in and out of prison.
On June 25, 2025, Paco was visiting the Medika 10 clinic building in the capital’s upscale Zone 10, without bodyguards, when a group of men disguised as police officers fired more than 50 shots at him with long and short firearms.
Just days later, MS-13 gang members showed up one by one at El Gallito’s warehouses and retail outlets and the surrounding areas to claim them as their property. “Nine people tried to resist, and all nine disappeared; they were people I knew, people everyone here knew,” said the source.
As of this writing, all drug corners in El Gallito, Las Calaveras, and La Trinidad in Zone 3 and in the Bethania neighborhood in Zone 7 are operated by “chequeos” — that is, aspiring members of the Mara Salvatrucha.
After more than 30 years of resisting the expansion of the gangs, the Gallito Cartel lost control of the neighborhood that gave it its name.
MS-13 appears to have not only taken over Caradura territory but also their drug supply, and in the coming months it will become clear whether the gang will also take over the business that operated in the rest of the capital’s districts.
Guatemala’s criminal landscape is shifting, and the realignments on the horizon do not bode well for a peaceful future.