In February of last year, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman - Mexico's most-wanted drug lord and head of the Sinaloa Cartel - was captured in the resort town of Mazatlan in a collaborative US-Mexican law enforcement operation.
The InSight Crime website declared the "dramatic" event the "end of an era for Mexico's underworld", where "the new normal may be an increasingly chaotic criminal terrain".
"Facing a more coordinated Mexican security strategy", the co-director of InSight, Steven Dudley continued, "the next generation of criminal groups may find it impossible to replicate the empire Guzman created."
But while there is no doubt about the chaos of the terrain, with more and more groups vying for a piece of the illicit pie, the era in question may not have been brought to such a definitive end.
This past weekend, Guzman escaped from Mexico's Altiplano maximum-security prison, reportedly via a tunnel measuring 1.5 kilometres. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.