OTTAWA — In Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Canadians have been dying violently — a pattern pointing to the rise of a global narco-kingpin, born not in Sinaloa, Jalisco, or Cancún, but in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
In January 2022, two men were gunned down in the lobby of the Hotel Xcaret, just south of Playa del Carmen. The victims were Vancouver’s Cong Dinh — long known to police as a money launderer within Chinese networks moving synthetic narcotics into the United States and bringing cocaine from Mexico back to Canada — and Toronto’s Thomas Cherukara, both 34. Six months later, in June 2022, two more Canadians, including one on Interpol’s wanted list for fraud, were found stabbed to death in a Playa del Carmen condominium. In December 2023, Montreal’s Samy Tamouro, connected to the Hells Angels, was shot dead inside a Cancún gym. A year later, another Hells Angels associate, Quebec fugitive Mathieu Bélanger — a high-ranking cocaine trafficker wanted on firearms charges — was sprayed with bullets in broad daylight as he climbed into a new Jeep SUV at a Playa del Carmen shopping plaza, the sicarios tearing off on a motorcycle as bystanders scattered.
