Federal officers introduced a flurry of fees on Friday towards the 4 sons of the infamous Mexican drug lord often called El Chapo, saying the lads had been main their imprisoned father’s empire and had been accountable for transferring huge portions of fentanyl into and all through the United States.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland stated at a news convention in Washington that along with the 4 sons — collectively often called Los Chapitos — federal indictments in Manhattan, Chicago and Washington had charged greater than two dozen different folks in what he described as a worldwide fentanyl manufacturing and distribution operation run by the Sinaloa drug cartel. El Chapo, whose actual title is Joaquín Guzmán Loera, led the group for years and is serving life in jail within the United States.
Mr. Garland stated the defendants included suppliers in China who offered so-called precursor supplies utilized in manufacturing fentanyl; a dealer based mostly in Guatemala who purchased the chemical compounds on behalf of operators of clandestine labs in Mexico; and a weapons provider who supplied the cartel with weapons smuggled into Mexico from the United States.
The 5 indictments, taken collectively, supplied a panoramic view of how fentanyl — which led to tens of hundreds of deaths within the United States final 12 months — was created, transported and finally offered on American streets.
“The Justice Department is attacking every aspect of the cartel’s operations,” Mr. Garland stated.
The fees additionally gave a taste of the violence and terror that has wracked Mexico for years and supported the Sinaloa cartel’s fentanyl business. The indictments famous that assassins working for Mr. Guzmán’s sons murdered authorities officers, tortured rivals with electrocution and even “fed some of their victims, dead and alive, to tigers.”
The new indictments got here at a second of a excessive rigidity between U.S. and Mexican officers over their deteriorating law-enforcement relationship — and over the difficulty, specifically, of who was guilty for the scourge of fentanyl.
Anne Milgram, the top of the Drug Enforcement Administration, lashed out in February on the Mexican authorities, complaining that officers there had supplied no help to U.S. brokers engaged on instances involving fentanyl from Mexico. Within weeks, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico shot again with baseless claims that his nation had nothing to do with the drug.
“Here, we do not produce fentanyl,” he stated.
At his news convention, Mr. Garland stated instantly, “The Sinaloa cartel is largely responsible for the surge of fentanyl into the United States over the last eight years.”
He credited the Mexican authorities for its cooperation within the U.S. effort, saying that Justice Department officers had met in Washington on Thursday with Mexico’s secretaries of protection and inside safety, its lawyer normal and its overseas minister.
The indictments unsealed on Friday weren’t the primary fees introduced towards Mr. Guzmán’s sons. Like their father, who was charged in seven instances in seven cities earlier than his eventual conviction in Federal District Court in Brooklyn in 2019, they’re now dealing with a number of indictments in a number of jurisdictions.
One of the sons, Ovidio Guzmán López, was dealing with fees together with his brother Joaquín Guzmán López, unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington in 2019, days after their father was discovered responsible. Long often called the least achieved of Mr. Guzmán’s youngsters, Ovidio Guzmán López was arrested by the Mexican authorities in January in Culiacán, a northwestern metropolis that has served for many years as the house base of the Sinaloa cartel.
Two of Mr. Guzman’s different sons by a unique spouse — Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar — had been named on Friday in two separate indictments in Chicago and Manhattan. The Chicago case additionally included Joaquín Guzmán López as a defendant.
Iván was already dealing with fees filed in 2014 in San Diego, and Jesús Alfredo had been charged in 2015 in Chicago. Both stay at massive in Mexico, as does Joaquín.
The sons inherited a portion of their father’s fractured empire after his extradition to the United States in 2017, on the day earlier than Donald J. Trump took workplace. Often derided within the Mexican news media as playboys and unworthy successors to the household patriarch, they nonetheless created a thriving commerce in fentanyl, U.S. regulation enforcement officers say, whereas navigating the treacherous relations with different prime cartel figures, together with Mr. Guzmán’s brother, Aurelio, and his longtime business accomplice, Ismael Zambada García.
The trial of Mr. Guzmán, which sprawled over the course of three months, laid naked the depravity on the coronary heart of the Sinaloa cartel as witnesses described how its assassins seared folks with irons and burned them alive in bonfires.
“We take aim at the Sinaloa cartel and the global network of death that feeds it,” Damian Williams, the U.S. lawyer for the Southern District of New York, stated on the news convention on Friday.
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com