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US prosecutors have unsealed drug charges against 28 defendants, including three sons of former Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán and Chinese chemicals business owners, as Washington intensifies efforts to crack down on the flow of deadly fentanyl.
Prosecutors allege Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar and Ovidio Guzmán López — known as the Chapitos, or “little Chapos” — along with other co-conspirators controlled a sophisticated, violent and vertically integrated trafficking operation designed to “pump staggering quantities of fentanyl into the United States”.
That also meant terrorising communities and torturing and killing victims in Mexico, prosecutors said. They described grisly examples of the violence, accusing two defendants of injecting a woman with fentanyl until she died, and feeding other victims — dead or alive — to tigers belonging to the Chapitos.
The charges come as US officials and lawmakers increase pressure on Mexico to take stronger action against organised crime, and a day after high-level bilateral meetings in Washington on the topic. The indictments name 28 defendants including 23 in Mexico, four in China and one in Guatemala.
“For over a decade, the illicit fentanyl trade has created a plague of addiction, death, and misery for Americans and New Yorkers of all walks of life,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, said in a statement.
Ovidio Guzmán, who was captured in Mexico earlier this year, and six other defendants are in custody, pending extradition hearings, prosecutors said. After the Chapitos’ father, Joaquin Guzmán, was jailed for drug charges in the US, they allegedly took control of the Sinaloa cartel.
Joaquin Guzmán, who escaped maximum security prisons in Mexico twice, is currently serving a life sentence in the US related to cocaine, marijuana and other drugs. But the synthetic opioid fentanyl has been at the centre of a transformation in the illegal drug trade in the Americas in the last decade.
The US government says precursor chemicals are sent from China to Mexico, where they are made into fentanyl and often cross the border in trailers or shipping containers. Cartel members guarded the labs where the drugs were made, and trafficked the drug across the border for sale, prosecutors alleged.
In the US, more than 2mn people have opioid addictions, some of which developed after the use of legal prescription painkillers, creating demand for the drug, which can be added to other drugs without the user knowing.
Mexico has come under intense pressure to take stronger action against organised criminal groups, which control illegal businesses from drugs to extortion in swaths of the country. It has experienced a wave of violence in the last 20 years, with homicides hitting record levels under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
On Thursday after meetings in Washington, the Mexican government committed to a series of measures including increased vigilance at its ports to “drastically reduce” the import of the precursor chemicals from China.
López Obrador wrote a letter to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, this month asking for his help on the issue. The US, China and Mexico have accused each other of not doing enough to stop it.
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