MEXICO CITY (AP) — 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 U.S., prosecutors revealed in a recent indictment.

Although Guzmán’s trial revolved around cocaine shipments, the case against his sons exposes the inner workings of a cartel undergoing a generational shift as it worked “to manufacture the most potent fentanyl and to sell it in the United States at the lowest price,” according to the indictment unsealed April 14 in Manhattan.

Synthetic opioids — mostly fentanyl — now kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, feeding an argument among some politicians that the cartels should be branded terrorist organizations and prompting once-unthinkable calls for U.S. military intervention across the border.

“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,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst in Mexico, who died Friday. “Very few people go out deliberately looking for fentanyl.”

Hope predicted fentanyl would probably become an issue in next year’s U.S. elections, but he opposed any threat of U.S. intervention, saying “I don’t think that would be a very good way of addressing a public health issue.”

The groundwork for the U.S. fentanyl epidemic was laid more than 20 years ago, with aggressive over-prescribing of the synthetic opioid oxycodone. As U.S. authorities clamped down on its prescription, users moved to heroin, which the Sinaloa cartel happily supplied.

But making its own fentanyl — far more potent and versatile than heroin — in small, easily concealed labs was a game changer. The cartel went from its first makeshift fentanyl lab to a network of labs concentrated in the northern state of Sinaloa in less than a decade.

“These are not super labs, because they give people the illusion that they’re like pharmaceutical labs, you know, very sophisticated,” said Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “These are nothing more than metal tubs and they use wooden paddles — even shovels — to mix the chemicals.”

A single cartel “cook” can press fentanyl into 100,000 counterfeit pills every day to fool Americans into thinking they’re taking Xanax, Percocet or oxycodone. The pills are smuggled over the border to supply what son Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar said are “streets of junkies,” the indictment said.

Fentanyl is so cheap to make that the cartel reaps massive profits even wholesaling the drug at 50 cents per pill, prosecutors said.

The drug’s potency makes it particularly dangerous. The narcotic dose of fentanyl is so close to the lethal dose that a pill meant to ensure a high for a habituated user can easily kill a less experienced person taking something they didn’t know was fentanyl.

Between August 2021 and August of last year, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, most from synthetic opioids. Last year, the DEA seized more than 57 million fentanyl-laced counterfeit prescription pills, according to the New York indictment.

To protect and expand that business, the “Chapitos,” as the sons are known, have turned to grotesque violence, 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 U.S. government has requested extradition. Joaquín Guzmán López is charged in the Northern District of Illinois

According to the Guzmán Salazar indictment, the cartel does some lab testing on its product but conducts more grisly human testing on kidnapped rivals or addicts who are injected until they overdose.

The purity of the cartel’s fentanyl “varies greatly depending on the method and skill of the particular manufacturer,” prosecutors noted. After a user overdosed on one batch, it was still shipped to the U.S.

When the elder Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada led the Sinaloa cartel, it operated with a certain degree of restraint. But with Guzmán serving a life sentence and Zambada believed to be suffering from health issues, the Chapitos moved aggressively to avoid a power vacuum that could fragment the cartel.

“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.

The wide-ranging New York indictment against the Guzmán Salazar brothers details their penchant for feeding enemies to their pet tigers and describes how they tortured two Mexican federal agents, ripping through one’s muscles with a corkscrew then stuffing the holes with chile peppers before shooting him.

The indictment also provides context to some recent violence in Mexico.

In August 2022, gunmen shot up Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas. Two prison inmates and nine civilians in the city were killed. U.S. prosecutors say the Chapitos’ security arm ordered their local gang associates to commit the violence, targeting a rival cartel’s businesses.

“This is not their father’s Sinaloa cartel,” Felbab-Brown said. “These guys just operate in very different mindsets than their father.”

The Guzmán Salazar indictment makes an initial attempt at disrupting the cartel’s supply chain, naming four people tied to a China-based chemical company and a broker in Guatemala who allegedly helped the cartel get the chemicals and even instructed them on the best recipes for fentanyl.

“When they talk about labs and you’re trying to focus in on labs, that’s not going to have an impact unless you get the finished product or the precursor chemicals,” Vigil said.

Mexico’s government has stumbled through the mixed messaging of its security forces playing up their decommissioning of labs even while President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has asserted that fentanyl is not being produced in Mexico.

In congressional testimony Thursday, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram was pressed about whether Mexico and China are doing enough to cooperate with U.S.

“We want the Mexicans to work with us and we want them to do more,” Milgram said, adding that the DEA wouldn’t hesitate to go after public officials in Mexico or elsewhere should it find evidence of ties to the cartels.

Experts say López Obrador is one obstacle to slowing the cartels’ fentanyl production. After U.S. prosecutors announced the concerted effort against the Sinaloa cartel, López Obrador reacted angrily. The president accused the U.S. government of “spying” and “interference,” suggesting that the case had been built on information gathered by U.S. agents in Mexico.

The president had already severely reduced Mexico’s cooperation with the DEA, experts said.

Hope, the security analyst, said a fundamental problem is that López Obrador doesn’t appear to understand fentanyl’s threat. The president rails against a deterioration of family values in the United States and paints addiction as a moral failing.

“He’s trapped in a moral universe from 50 years ago,” Hope said.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican security forces captured Ovidio Guzmán, an alleged drug trafficker wanted by the United States and one of the sons of former Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in a pre-dawn operation Thursday that set off gunfights and roadblocks across the western state’s capital.

Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said Army and National Guard personnel had captured a son of “El Chapo.” Sandoval identified him only as Ovidio, in keeping with government policy.

Ovidio Guzmán, nicknamed “the Mouse,” had not been one of El Chapo’s better-known sons until an aborted operation to capture him three years ago. That attempt similarly set off violence in Culiacan that ultimately led President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to order the military to let him go.

Thursday’s high-profile capture comes just days before López Obrador will host U.S. President Joe Biden for bilateral talks followed by their North American Leaders’ Summit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Drug trafficking, along with immigration, is expected to be a top talking point.

“This is a significant blow to the Sinaloa cartel and major victory for the rule of law. It will not, however, impede the flow of drugs into the U.S. Hopefully, Mexico will extradite him to the U.S.,” Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former Chief of International Operations, said Thursday.

Vigil said that Ovidio Guzmán was involved in all of the cartel’s activities, especially the production of fentanyl. A 2018 federal indictment in Washington, D.C., accused the younger Guzmán of conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana in the United States.

The CDC said last July that more than 107,000 Americans had died from a drug overdose during the year ending January 2022, most of them involving opioids including illegally made fentanyl.

López Obrador’s security approach reversed years of what came to be known as the kingpin strategy of taking down cartel leaders, which led to the fragmentation of large cartels and bloody battles for dominance. López Obrador put all his faith in the military, disbanding the corrupt Federal Police and creating the National Guard under military command.

The capture was the result of six months of reconnaissance and surveillance in the cartel’s territory, and then quick action on Thursday, Sandoval said. National Guard troops spotted SUVs, some with homemade armor, and immediately coordinated with the army as they established a perimeter around the suspicious vehicles and forced the occupants out to be searched.

The security forces then came under fire, but were able to gain control of the situation and identify Guzmán among those present and in possession of firearms, Sandoval said.

Cartel members set up 19 roadblocks including at Culiacan’s airport and outside the local army base, as well as all points of access to the city of Culiacan, Sandoval said, but the Air Force was able to fly Guzmán to Mexico City despite their efforts, and he was taken to offices of the Attorney General’s organized crime special prosecutor.

Sandoval said Guzmán was a leader of a Sinaloa faction he called “los menores” or “the juniors,” who are also known as “los Chapitos,” for the sons of El Chapo.

Other “little Chapos” include two of his brothers — Iván Archivaldo Guzmán and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán — who are believed to have been running cartel operations together with Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

The Chapitos have been taking greater control in the cartel because Zambada was in poor health and isolated in the mountains, Vigil said. “The Chapitos know that if el Mayo dies, (the cartel) is going to break apart if they don’t have control.”

“It’s going to be very important that the U.S. requests Ovidio’s extradition quickly and that Mexico does it,” Vigil said.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard confirmed that Mexico received a request in 2019 from the United States for Guzmán’s arrest for purposes of extradition. He said that request would have to be updated and processed, but he added that Guzmán must first face an open case in Mexico.

U.S. Homeland Security Investigations had posted a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Guzmán early last year.

Alleged cartel members responded to Thursday’s operation by carjacking Culiacan residents and setting vehicles ablaze in the cartel stronghold. Local and state authorities warned everyone to stay inside.

Intermittent gunfire continued into the afternoon Thursday in Culiacan as Mexican security forces continued to clash with cartel gunmen and few people ventured out.

Airline Aeromexico said in a statement that one of its jets was struck by a bullet Thursday morning as it prepared for takeoff. Passenger video posted online showed people cowering on the floor of the plane. The company said passengers and crew were safe.

Later, Mexico’s Civil Aviation Agency said in a statement that an air force plane in Culiacan had also been hit with gunfire. In addition to the Culiacan airport, the agency said airports in Los Mochis and Mazatlan were also ordered closed and all flights cancelled for security reasons.

David Téllez was aboard that flight with his wife and children, preparing to return to Mexico City after visiting his in-laws.

Their plane had been waiting for its chance to take off as two large military planes carrying personnel landed as well as three or four military helicopters. Marines and soldiers deployed along the perimeter of the runway.

When the commercial flight was finally preparing to accelerate, Téllez heard gunshots in the distance. Within 15 seconds the sounds were suddenly more intense. “We heard gunshots and threw ourselves to the floor,” he said.

He did not know the plane had been hit until a flight attendant told them. The plane quickly returned to the terminal and they were hustled into a room. Late Thursday afternoon they were still in the airport, unsure of when they would be able to return to Mexico City.

Elsewhere in Culiacan, local reporter Marcos Vizcarra had sought shelter in a hotel after gunmen stole his car.

Then he explained via Twitter that armed men had entered the hotel where he had sought shelter “and are threatening guests to give them their car keys.”

Later, Vizcarra reported that they had taken his phone, but he had made it home safely.

Such attempts to create chaos often come in response to arrests of important cartel figures in Mexico. One of the most notorious came when federal security forces cornered Ovidio Guzmán in October 2019, only to let him escape after gunmen shot up the city with high-powered weapons.

López Obrador said at the time he had made the decision to avoid the loss of life.

López Obrador entered office highly critical of the toll of his predecessors’ drug war. He embraced the phrase “hugs, not bullets” to describe his approach to Mexico’s chronic violence, which would focus on social programs aimed at weakening the draw of organized crime.

But four years into his six-year term, the death toll remains high.

In July, Mexico captured Rafael Caro Quintero, once one of the godfathers of drug trafficking and the man allegedly responsible for the murder of a DEA agent more than three decades ago, just days after López Obrador met with Biden at the White House.

At the time, the capture was seen as a signal that Mexico could be willing to go after high-profile cartel bosses again, something López Obrador had been loathe to do.

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