Mexico's Cocaine Capital

But the phenomenon is hardly confined to the poor. "Too many affluent Culichis," says Javier Valdez, a columnist for the muckraking newspaper Rio Doce, "complain about the narco problem during the day and then go to bed with it at night." Many are happy to launder the cartels' millions--which account for an economic boom in Culiacán, replete with new Hummer dealerships, and casinos and nightclubs where women sport diamond-encrusted fingernails. Laundering sustains a network of drug-tainted businesses--from cattle ranches to currency-exchange houses to motels--that the feds are finally probing and in some cases have shut down.

Culichis take for granted that many of their politicians are on the cartels' payrolls. The spotlight is currently on Oscar Félix, a state legislator. The military arrested three of his brothers this summer with a whopping 18 kg of cocaine, worth more than $500,000 on the U.S. market; Félix acknowledged that a top druglord is his brother-in-law and that the safe house where the feds were gunned down in May was once one of his campaign headquarters. He denies any wrongdoing and tells Time he's "just a humble representative of farmers who's being demonized by enemies." But colleagues are demanding that he be investigated. Yudit del Rincón, a state legislator who is among Félix's critics, says that in order to defeat the narcos, "we've got to tear down our narco spiderwebs" of gangsters, politicos and business. Because of her efforts to expose them, Del Rincón's car was attacked with baseball bats, and a funeral wreath was sent to her house as a warning. In Culiacán, and in countless other Mexican cities, the spiders have the upper hand.