‘Like good Mexicans, we laugh’: the cartoonist drawing humour from Sinaloa’s brutal drug cartels
Ricardo Sánchez Bobadilla has spent two decades casting a satirical eye over the region’s escalating narco wars, despite the risks
Spare a thought for the mid-level narco.
What to do with all the bodies? Where to find a corrupt cop worth his salt? And how to catch the eye of that former beauty queen?
Such are the struggles of El Ñacas and El Tacuachi, the two sicarios – cartel gunmen – who are the stars of a cartoon that has been satirising the underworld of Mexico’s Sinaloa state for two decades, even as the reality has darkened by the day.
“Here in Sinaloa we’ve always lived with drug trafficking – you know if you honk your horn at the wrong truck someone with an AK-47 might get out,” said Ricardo Sánchez Bobadilla, the cartoon’s creator. “Still, like good Mexicans, we laugh at the situation we live in.”
The drug trade first took root in Sinaloa more than a century ago, and today its homegrown cartel ranks among the most powerful organised crime groups in the world.
Bobadilla grew up in the state capital, Culiacán, so when he became a cartoonist he had the ideal subject matter to hand: something ripe for social commentary, and a bottomless well of black humour.
Still, in his home studio, with a chihuahua nestled in his lap, Bobadilla seems extraordinarily laid back for someone in his line of work. “My neighbours must think I’m a kept man,” he laughed.
The cartoon debuted almost 20 years ago in an irreverent magazine called La Locha, with El Ñacas, the lanky one with ideas, and El Tacuachi, the stumpy sidekick who admires him, figuring out where to hide a body so no one would find it. They end up wedging it into a seat in Congress with one arm pinned up, voting for every proposal.
When La Locha disappeared after nine issues the cartoon was picked up by Ríodoce, a local newspaper, where it has run every week since.
Over the years Bobadilla has populated his cartoon universe with a cast of narco-archetypes, from kingpins and politicians to alucines and buchonas – wannabe narcos and glamorous girlfriends – all speaking vividly vulgar Sinaloan slang.
There’s the grizzled sicario who can’t stop weeping after the death of Juan Gabriel, the Mexican pop diva. The old man who cheats death again and again as sicarios are seduced by his daughters. The schoolfriend who haunts El Ñacas not for murdering him, but for burying him in a cheap outfit.
Narcos don’t always take kindly to being mocked – but Bobadilla has always avoided naming names. Even so, thinking back to his early work, he winces. “Maybe my frontal lobe was a bit less developed back then,” he said.
El Ñacas was created around the time that Mexico’s then president, Felipe Calderón, declared “war on drugs”, sending the army to engage the cartels and ultimately unleashing a surge of violence across the country. “That’s when decapitated heads started getting left in public,” said Bobadilla.
In Sinaloa, the violence has in some way touched almost everyone – including Bobadilla, whose brother, Miguel, was shot dead outside his home in 2008.
Bobadilla remembers going to the prosecutor’s office. “And the guy there asked me: ‘Are you rich? Do you have powerful friends? No? In that case don’t push this, because they will kill you.’
“But I knew who killed my brother – and not much later they were killed themselves,” he said. “I guess justice arrived another way.”
The death of his brother changed his work – as did the murder of Javier Valdez, his friend and editor at Ríodoce, in 2017.
“When they kill a journalist, it muzzles all of us a bit,” said Bobadilla, leafing through a notebook with sketches of Valdez and Humberto Millán, a Sinaloa radio host who was abducted and murdered in 2011. “In all the newspapers where I’ve worked, someone has been murdered, or at least shot.”
The older generation of the Sinaloa cartel are themselves mostly dead or in US prisons. But for the past two years their sons have been fighting a war that has left more than 6,000 people dead or missing – and then, in April, the US government accused the governor of Sinaloa and nine other current and former high-level officials of ties to the cartel.
Bobadilla says the current war is the most “vicious” he has experienced. Yet Sinaloa’s journalists and cartoonists continue to cover it – and El Ñacas and El Tacuachi have, in their way, been living through it, too.
“When something horrible happens – which is almost every day – I try not to make fun of it soon after,” said Bobadilla. “Like Woody Allen said, tragedy needs a certain distance for us to find it funny.”