El Chapo's sons face new charges in fentanyl indictments

The charges, in five related cases, offered a panoramic view of how the deadly drug was created, transported and ultimately sold by the drug cartel. Sinaloa on American streets.

Federal officials on Friday announced a series of charges against the four sons of the notorious Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, saying the men ran their imprisoned father's empire and were responsible for moving large amounts of fentanyl into and across the United States.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has told a news conference in Washington that in addition to the four sons - collectively known as Los Chapitos - federal indictments in Manhattan, Chicago and Washington had indicted more than two dozen other people in what he described as a global fentanyl manufacturing and distribution operation run by the Sinaloa drug cartel. El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera, led the organization for years and after his conviction in Brooklyn in 2019, he is serving life in prison in the United States.

Mr. . Garland said the defendants named in the five separate indictments included suppliers in China who sold so-called precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of fentanyl; a Guatemala-based broker who purchased the chemicals on behalf of the Chapitos; operators of clandestine fentanyl laboratories in Mexico; and an arms supplier who supplied the cartel with weapons smuggled into Mexico from the United States.

The indictments, taken together, provided a panoramic view of how fentanyl was created, transported and ultimately sold on the streets in cities ranging from New York to Nashville to Los Angeles. The charges noted that the fentanyl trade earned the cartel millions of dollars while causing up to 200 deaths in the United States each day.

"The Department of Justice attacks every aspect of the cartel's operations,” Mr. Garland said.

The charges also gave an idea of ​​the violence and terror that have ravaged the Mexico for years and supported the Sinaloa Cartel's fentanyl activity.The indictments said assassins working for Mr. Guzmán's sons murdered law enforcement officers, tortured rivals with electrocution, stuffed chillies into the wounds of some of their victims and even fed others – dead and alive – to their pet tigers.

Anne Milgram, Chief Drug Enforcement Administration, said at the press conference that the sons had inherited their father's "global drug-trafficking empire" and transformed it by creating a new product.< /p>

"They made it more ruthless, more violent, more deadly - and they used it to spread a new poison, fentanyl," Ms. Milgram said.

< p class= "css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">An attorney for the four sons declined to comment on the new charges.

The new indictments came at a time of high tension between US and Mexican officials on their deteriorating relationship with law enforcement - and in particular on the question of who was responsible for the fentanyl plague.

Mrs. Milgram lashed out in February at the Mexican government, complaining that officials there had offered no assistance to US agents working on cases involving fentanyl from Mexico. Within weeks, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador fired back with baseless claims that his country had nothing to do with drugs.

"Here we don't produce fentanyl," he said.

At his press conference, Mr. Garland said bluntly, "The Sinaloa Cartel is in great party responsible for the influx of fentanyl into the United States over the past eight years."

He thanked the Mexican government for its cooperation in the effort US, saying Justice Department officials met with Mexico's defense and homeland security secretaries in Washington on Thursday. , his attorney general and his foreign minister.

The indictments uncovered on Friday were not the first charges brought against Mr. Guzmán's sons. Like their father, who was indicted in seven cases in seven cities before his eventual conviction in federal district court...