MEXICO CITY—With Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán serving a life sentence, his sons steered the family business into fentanyl, establishing a network of labs churning out massive quantities of the cheap, deadly drug that they smuggled into the US, prosecutors revealed in a recent indictment.
The groundwork for the US fentanyl epidemic was laid more than 20 years ago, with aggressive over-prescribing of the synthetic opioid oxycodone. As US authorities clamped down on its prescription, users moved to heroin, which the Sinaloa cartel happily supplied. Fentanyl is so cheap to make that the cartel reaps massive profits even wholesaling the drug at 50 cents per pill, prosecutors said.
Enforcers Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar are the lead defendants among 23 associates charged in the New York indictment. Ovidio Guzmán López, alias “the Mouse,” who allegedly pushed the cartel into fentanyl, is charged in another indictment in the same district. Mexico arrested him in January and the US government has requested extradition. Joaquín Guzmán López is charged in the Northern District of Illinois.
“What was really a unique advantage of the Sinaloa cartel and El Chapo was the ability to calibrate violence,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institute.