Fall of Félix Gallardo and the Guadalajara cartel (1989)
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who ran Mexico's dominant trafficking network, was arrested. His organization split among lieutenants who divided up smuggling routes.
The single network fractured into regional groups fighting for territory.
Those pieces became the Sinaloa, Tijuana and Juárez cartels, seeding decades of cartel war.
It shows the pattern now repeating: remove the founder, and the group splinters into rivals who fight over what is left.
