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The US justice department has charged 28 members of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, including sons of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in a sprawling fentanyl-trafficking investigation.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the charges on Friday alongside the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief, Anne Milgram, and other top federal prosecutors. The charges were filed against cartel leaders, as well alleged chemical suppliers, lab managers, fentanyl traffickers, security leaders, financiers and weapons traffickers.
The indictments announced on Friday charge three of Guzmán’s sons – Ovidio Guzmán López, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar – who are known as the Chapitos, or little Chapos, and who have earned a reputation as the more violent and aggressive faction of the cartel.
Only Guzmán López is in custody, in Mexico.
The indictments also charge Chinese and Guatemalan citizens accused of supplying precursor chemicals required to make fentanyl. Others charged in the cases include those accused of running drug labs and providing security and weapons for the drug trafficking operation, prosecutors said.
Nearly 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the US in 2021. The Drug Enforcement Administration says most the fentanyl trafficked in the United States comes from the Sinaloa cartel.
The Sinaloa cartel’s notorious drug lord was convicted in 2019 of running an industrial-scale smuggling operation. At his trial, prosecutors said evidence gathered since the late 1980s showed he and his murderous cartel made billions of dollars by smuggling tons of cocaine, heroin, meth and marijuana into the US.
In outlining the charges, Garland described the violence of the Sinaloa cartel, describing how its members have tortured perceived enemies, including Mexican law enforcement officials. In some cases, cartel members have also fed victims, some still alive, to tigers owned by Guzmán’s sons, Garland said.
Eight of those charged in Friday’s case have been arrested and remain in custody of law enforcement officials outside of the US. The US government is offering rewards for several others charged in the case.
Ovidio Guzmán López, one of Guzmán’s sons, was arrested in January in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacán, by the Mexican army and national guard.
Ovidio Guzmán, nicknamed “the Mouse”, had not been one of El Chapo’s better-known sons until an aborted operation to capture him three years earlier. He was briefly detained in 2019, but authorities released him on the orders of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after cartel gunmen unleashed a wave of violence.
After Guzmán’s rearrest, the cartel launched a similar wave of retaliatory attacks, shutting down the city’s airport, but failing to prevent authorities from taking him from the city. About 30 people died in the violence.
The US government is currently awaiting the younger Guzmán’s extradition.
Ovidio Guzmán López and his brother Joaquín Guzmán López allegedly helped moved the Sinaloa cartel hard into methamphetamines, producing prodigious quantities in large labs. They were previously indicted in 2018 in Washington on drug trafficking charges.
The other two sons Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Sálazar, are believed to have been running cartel operations together with Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. They were previously also charged in the US in Chicago and San Diego.
Zambada had been rumoured to be in poor health and isolated in the mountains leading the sons to try to assert a stronger role to keep the cartel together.
The DEA said it investigated the case in 10 countries: Australia, Austria, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Greece, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and the United States.
“Death and destruction are central to their whole operation,” Milgram said of the cartel.
English (US)