An unsealed indictment from a New York City court accuses the sons of the notorious Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán of responsibility for the ongoing U.S. fentanyl crisis.
The indictment was unsealed in Manhattan on April 14, per the Los Angeles Times. It names Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar as the lead defendants, alongside 23 associates.
While El Chapo is serving a life sentence in Colorado for trafficking cocaine, as The Dallas Express has reported, his sons are facing charges related to fentanyl.
The case detailed in the indictment exposes how the defendants steered the cartel from cocaine “to manufacture the most potent fentanyl and to sell it in the United States at the lowest price,” per the Los Angeles Times.
As covered by The Dallas Express, the U.S. — North Texas included — has been in the midst of a fentanyl crisis. The DEA has named it as the leading cause of death among Americans under age 50.
The synthetic opioid is approximately 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin. It is also much easier to manufacture than other drugs, such as heroin.
Mike Vigil, previously the head of international operations for the DEA, described these labs as “nothing more than metal tubs” in which cooks “use wooden paddles — even shovels — to mix the chemicals,” per the Los Angeles Times.
Just one lab can produce approximately 100,000 fentanyl-laced pills every day. Many are forged to resemble prescription drugs prone to abuse, including Oxycodone, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Most of those who overdose on fentanyl do not realize that they are taking it, claimed Alejandro Hope, a recently deceased security analyst in Mexico, per the Los Angeles Times.
“The problem with fentanyl, as some people at the State Department told me, has to be repositioned. It’s not a drug problem; it’s a poisoning problem,” explained Hope.
Some citizens and politicians, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, have called for military intervention to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and the official labeling of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, as The Dallas Express has reported.
The new indictment noted that the DEA recovered upwards of 57 million fentanyl-laced counterfeit prescription pills last year.
As The Dallas Express recently reported, El Chapo’s sons have also allegedly employed brutal methods of torture on their captive enemies, such as feeding them to pet tigers.
The latest indictment is one of many originating from U.S. courts directed at El Chapo’s sons, including Joaquín Guzmán López and Ovidio Guzmán López. The latter was arrested in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa earlier this year, as The Dallas Express reported.
Between Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador continuing to claim that fentanyl is not being produced in his country and the ease with which fentanyl labs can be set up, recent indictments have targeted the Sinaloa cartel’s supply chain, per the Los Angeles Times.
The latest indictment named not only a person in Guatemala who supposedly helps broker the chemicals needed to produce fentanyl but also four people allegedly connected to a company in China that is said to fabricate them.
The broker, Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea, is said to disguise the chemicals in food containers, per the U.S. Treasury. She was named in another New York indictment on April 4 for the alleged importation of fentanyl and money laundering.
The company, Wuhan Shuokang Biological Technology Co. Ltd, which is purportedly owned by a Chinese citizen named Yao, was also named in that indictment. Wu Yaqin and Wu Yonghao are said to be sales representatives of the company while Wang Hongfei allegedly facilitates the Bitcoin payments related to the sales.
Federal officials are offering rewards amounting to as much as $10 million for information leading to the arrest of these individuals.
