Sons of ‘El Chapo’ hit with fentanyl charges; victims fed to tigers, U.S. alleges

U.S. officials announced new indictments on Friday, accusing top leaders of the Sinaloa cartel of pumping copious amounts of the deadly drug fentanyl into the United States and wielding ruthless violence by torturing law enforcement officials to death and feeding some captives to pet tigers.

Federal charges filed in New York, Chicago and Washington target the “Chapitos,” the sons of imprisoned drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo.

“The Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of fentanyl - the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced - and flooded it into the United States for the past eight years,” said Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram, who added that her agents had “obtained unprecedented access to the organization’s highest levels” to bring the new charges.

The indictments appeared to be among the most significant steps taken by the Biden administration to address a drug crisis that U.S. officials increasingly describe as one of the country’s most urgent challenges.

The cartel, authorities said, obtained large quantities of precursor chemicals, principally from China, to make fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin and highly addictive. In 2021, more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, and two-thirds were killed by fentanyl, according to the most recent public health data.

“Families and communities across our country are being devastated by the fentanyl epidemic,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said a day after a meeting between senior U.S. and Mexican officials to discuss joint efforts to battle the cartels.

The charges were filed against four of El Chapo’s sons - Ovidio Guzmán Lopez, 33, a.k.a. “El Ratón,” who was arrested earlier this year in Mexico; and fugitives Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, 40, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, 37, and Joaquín Guzmán Lopez, 36.

The United States is offering a $10 million reward apiece for information leading to the capture of the two older brothers, and $5 million for Jesús Alfredo. The Justice Department has asked Mexico to extradite Ovidio.

In total, 28 cartel operatives were charged in the new indictments, which describe horrific instances of torture and abuse committed by the cartel, including at Iván’s ranch in western Mexico where business rivals and others were tortured into talking. The cartel would test its fentanyl on helpless captives, including a woman the drug bosses decided to kill, according to the charges.

Rather than shooting her, two cartel henchmen allegedly “injected her repeatedly with a lower potency of fentanyl until she ultimately overdosed and died,” one of the indictments states. And after an addict died testing another batch of fentanyl, one of the suspects sent the batch to the United States anyway.

“Once information was obtained from these captives, typically through torture, these individuals were killed - either by or at the direction of the Chapitos themselves - and the bodies disposed of throughout the area. While many of these victims were shot, others were fed dead or alive to tigers belonging to Iván Archivaldo Guzmán-Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar,” according to one of the indictments.

U.S. officials said those sadistic methods helped the cartel intimidate its rivals. “Under the Chapitos’ leadership, the Cartel has achieved near total control over all drug trafficking activity in many parts of Mexico, including the manufacturing and importation of fentanyl from those parts of Mexico into the United States.”

The same indictment also alleges the savage abuse of Mexican law enforcement officials at the hands of the cartel. In 2017, cartel members allegedly captured, tortured and killed two officials in the office of the general prosecutor. One of the officials was kidnapped from an airport and brought to Iván’s ranch, where he was tortured and eventually shot in the head, U.S. authorities charge.

The second official was brought to the same ranch, where cartel members brutalized the man with a corkscrew and inserted hot chiles into the resulting wounds. Eventually, that law enforcement official was also shot dead, and both of the bodies were dumped near a highway, the indictment alleges.

In announcing the charges, Garland and other officials said they were also bringing increased pressure to bear on social media companies, which often act as the “last mile” of the distribution network, putting deadly drugs into the hands of Americans. Many fentanyl deaths, they noted, are caused by people taking what they believed were relatively safe prescription pills that turn out to be counterfeits loaded with a lethal dose of fentanyl.

An in-depth series in The Washington Post in December reported that fentanyl trafficked from Mexico has become the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49, and detailed years of missteps and inaction by multiple U.S. agencies across presidential administrations of both political parties.

The volume of fentanyl seized by U.S. authorities along the border with Mexico has soared more than 400 percent since 2019, U.S. statistics show. Seizures by U.S. Customs and Border Protection are on pace to double this year as the Biden administration races to deploy new vehicle-scanning technology, and more officers and agents to try to stop it.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has responded to growing U.S. pressure by pledging to expand anti-narcotics cooperation with the United States. But López Obrador and his top officials insist that illegal fentanyl is not produced in Mexico, despite ample evidence to the contrary, including frequent raids on cartel laboratories by Mexican security forces.

One senior U.S. official who spoke to reporters during a media briefing Friday said he recently traveled to Sinaloa with Mexican military officials and visited two fentanyl production sites that had been seized.

“It was clear from both of those trips that they know production-synthesizing is going on in Mexico,” said the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House.

“I don’t know what information the president of Mexico has, but our information clearly indicates what we saw on the ground and in our meetings both in Mexico and here in Washington,” the official said. “We don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about that because we understand that the evidence is clear.”

Officials at Mexico’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. officials said they made seven arrests related to the investigation - in Colombia, Greece and Guatemala - underscoring the global reach of Sinaloa operatives. Agents made seizures in eight U.S. cities and conducted operations in 10 countries. The cartel is operating in all 50 U.S. states and 47 countries, officials told reporters.

El Chapo, 66, is serving a life sentence in a supermax federal prison in Colorado. His sons have been running a faction of his former organization, according to U.S. officials, while trying to muscle aside a group led by Chapo’s former partner, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Damaso Lopez Nuñez, a.k.a. “Licenciado.”

The Chapitos partnered with chemical brokers in China and Central America to arrange shipments of the precursor ingredients. They then manufacture large quantities of fentanyl in powder and pill form at clandestine production labs in northern Mexico, the indictments allege. Their transportation networks use aircraft, rail cars, buses as well as “submarines and other submersible and semi-submersible vessels” and other conveyances to smuggle drugs and chemicals into the United States.

Four suspects in China accused of supplying precursor chemicals to the cartel for fentanyl production are named in the indictments. U.S. officials are offering $1 million rewards for their capture.

A large Mexican delegation including the country’s top security officials and military leaders met on Thursday in Washington with White House Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said in a Twitter post that the goal of the meeting was to “drastically reduce the flow of precursor chemicals to Mexico and the United States” used for fentanyl production, and to develop a special task force to combat gun trafficking from the United States to Mexico.