Ovidio Guzman Lopez, nicknamed the Mouse, was arrested in January in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan. Photo / Cepropie via AP
Ovidio Guzman Lopez, nicknamed the Mouse, was arrested in January in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan. Photo / Cepropie via AP
WARNING: Graphic content
Prosecutors charged the ‘Chapitos’ with numerous offences including murder, fentanyl trafficking and money laundering
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s drug-lord sons are alleged to have fed rival Mexican traffickers to their pet tigers and poured hot chilli into open wounds during torture sessions, according to an unsealed United States indictment.
Ivan Guzman Salazar, Alfredo Guzman Salazar, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, and Ovidio Guzman Lopez, known as “the Chapitos”, were charged by US prosecutors with numerous offences including murder, fentanyl trafficking, money laundering and firearm charges.
The sheer brutality of their alleged criminal enterprise has been laid bare in charging documents released by the Southern District of New York, which details how the Sinaloa Cartel’s captives - including rival traffickers and officials who threatened its operations - were taken to a ranch belonging to eldest brother Ivan, where they would be tortured.
Torture sessions included waterboarding and electric shock carried out by the cartel’s “ninis”, a “particularly violent group of sicarios”, or hitmen, trained in “urban warfare and sniper proficiency”, the indictment read.
One of the ninis used a corkscrew to rip out a Mexican federal law enforcement officer’s muscle, then “poured hot chillis in his open wounds and nose”. After that, Ivan is alleged to have shot the officer dead.
After being found guilty of 10 drug-related charges in 2019, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years by a judge in New York. Photo / AP
The gang would test their drugs on captives and coax information out of them before ultimately killing them.
Rivals of the cartel and government officials who refused to co-operate would be fed dead or alive to tigers belonging to the Salazar brothers that they kept at their ranch as pets.
The indictment then reads: “Partly as a result of such violence, the cartel increased its power, and the Chapitos’ faction grew. Under the Chapitos’ leadership, the cartel has achieved near total control over all drug-trafficking activity in many parts of Mexico, including the manufacturing and importation of fentanyl from those parts of Mexico into the United States.”
Ovidio Guzman Lopez was arrested in January in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacan. Nicknamed the Mouse, he had not been one of El Chapo’s better-known sons until an aborted operation to capture him three years earlier.
This time Mexico successfully got Guzman out of Culiacan. In 2019 authorities had him, but they released him after his gunmen began shooting up the city.
The wide-ranging case comes as the US remains in the grip of a devastating overdose crisis largely by fentanyl poisonings. Nearly 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the US in 2021, a record-setting number.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican President, this week accused the US of “spying” and “interference”, suggesting the case had been built on information gathered by US agents in Mexico.
He called the Sinaloa investigation “abusive, arrogant interference that should not be accepted under any circumstances”,
Unnamed members of the US drug enforcement agency told US media Lopez Obrador was mistakenly assuming that US agents needed to be in Mexico to collect intelligence for the case. In fact, much of the case appears to have come from trafficking suspects caught on US soil.
After being found guilty of 10 drug-related charges in 2019, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years by a judge in New York.
