Sinaloa Cartel-aligned factions are running an illegal timber trade worth US$172 million a year across Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara, matching the value of Chihuahua’s entire legal industry. That is according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), whose January 2026 Frontiers of Plunder report names the Sinaloa Cartel’s Los Salgueiro faction and the CJNG-allied La Línea as the dominant operators.
Cartels capture comisariados, the elected committees that govern Indigenous ejidos, then route fraudulent extraction permits through state forestry centres known as Centros de Atención, Wood Central understands. PROFEPA, Mexico’s environmental enforcement agency, opened 176 illegal-logging investigations across 28 states and seized 11,094 cubic metres of timber between January 2024 and February 2026, with a single Chihuahua yard accounting for more than 500 cubic metres alone.
The head of CONAFOR‘s Chihuahua office told GI-TOC investigators that “there is definitely more illegal logging than legal” in the state, where wood production worth MX $3.3 billion (US $172 million) a year accounts for one-third of Mexico’s national total.
GI-TOC investigators documented that Los Salgueiro extracted MX $3 million (US $153,523) from a single Baborigame ejido through forced timber concessions, with 15 trucks daily hauling around 7,000 board feet apiece. The illicit trade now costs Chihuahua’s state government around US$125 million a year, with Bocoyna, Guachochi, Guadalupe y Calvo and Balleza identified as the municipalities running the highest tree-cover loss.
PROFEPA chief Mariana Boy Tamborrell said “impunity for those who destroy forest ecosystems is over” in announcing a February 2026 multi-state operation that closed 25 illegal sawmills and seized 394.95 cubic metres of timber.
It comes as the Department of Justice last week designated additional Mexican criminal organisations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, broadening Lacey Act exposure for any US importer found to have purchased timber from cartel-controlled supply chains.
The designation broadens scrutiny of EU due diligence rules, which still face questions about their reach into criminal supply chains operating outside formal export channels, as Wood Central reported in coverage of Brazil’s deforestation reduction and EUDR enforcement gaps.
Mexican federal records show just 19 arrests and two convictions for illegal logging in Chihuahua across the eleven months to November 2024 — an enforcement record GI-TOC investigators say has not slowed the laundering.
