Trafficking in cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana.
These are the substances at the center of the accusation against Ovidio Guzmán, alias
El Ratón
, in the United States.
The only known case against the son of Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán, founder and historical leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, is open before a Washington DC court and focuses on a drug trafficking charge, although authorities say Guzmán is also behind several murders.
The capo's capture has unleashed a spiral of chaos and violence in the State of Sinaloa, a stronghold of the criminal organization, and it has occurred just four days after US President Joe Biden landed in Mexico City to attend the North American Leaders Summit.
Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of Foreign Relations, has indicated this Thursday that there has been an extradition request since September 2019, but has ruled out that the arrest is related to Biden's visit next week.
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The last hour of Ovidio Guzmán, live
"It has nothing to do with it, this operation was kept in extreme secrecy by the authorities in charge of doing it and there was no political consultation in the Cabinet," said Ebrard, questioned whether Guzmán's arrest was a "gift" for the White House.
The secretary has commented that it is unlikely that El Chapo's son will be extradited in the next few days because the extradition process takes time and because there are also legal proceedings open in Mexico.
The capture was produced by an order in the country and not by the arrest request issued by Washington, he has pointed out.
"As of today, I would expect a process here in Mexico," he warned.
Ebrard has said that the US authorities were not involved in the operation against Guzmán, at least on the ground.
EL PAÍS announced a few months ago that the United States asked Mexico to increase the number of extraditions each year as part of the bilateral security agreements, until reaching a figure of 60 defendants each year, according to a massive leak of confidential documents from the Mexican Army. .
El Raton joins a wish list of US authorities to try high-profile drug traffickers like Rafael Caro Quintero, arrested last July in the Sinaloa mountains.
Caro Quintero, for example, has not yet been transferred thanks to the fact that his lawyers have managed to delay the process.
El Chapo's son was identified by Mexican authorities as the leader of
Los Chapitos
, a splinter of the Sinaloa Cartel with a large presence in the northwest of the country.
They have not disclosed, however, the crimes they are charged with.
On the other side of the border, the story is different.
The District Attorney for the District of Columbia directly accuses him of trafficking a ton of marijuana and at least five kilograms of cocaine, a felony, according to US justice.
The capo's criminal history spans more than a decade, since April 2018, when he was barely 18 years old.
The accusation in the United States dates precisely from July 2017, but it remained classified until January 2019. It was not until September of that year, however, that Washington submitted the extradition request to Mexico.
Almost a month later, on October 17, 2019, Mexican authorities captured Guzmán for the first time in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa.
The drug blockades, shootings and riots that took place in the city led Andrés Manuel López Obrador to give the order to release him.
The fiasco went down in history as the
Culiacanazo
and it meant one of the lowest points of the current Government.
The US arrest warrant is a mere four-page document and is accompanied by a request to forfeit all of Guzmán's assets in the United States, allegedly financed by his criminal activities.
The aggravating circumstance of "incitement to crime" is a legal figure in that country that punishes when a person convinces others to commit a crime.
Guzmán is not identified with any lawyer who defends him in the brief judicial summary.
Other charges filed in courts in other states may be classified.
The State Department offered a reward of five million dollars for information leading to the capture of El Raton.
US authorities have revealed that they have more information about Guzmán's power than has been made public in court.
Ovidio and his brother Joaquín Guzmán López are designated as the heirs of
El Chapo
and his brother Édgar Guzmán López, assassinated in May 2008 in the middle of a melee of more than 500 shots in a shopping center in Culiacán.
"After Édgar's death, Ovidio and Joaquín inherited a large part of the profits from drug trafficking and began to invest large amounts of cash to buy marijuana in Mexico and cocaine in Colombia," reads a US government profile.
“They also began buying large quantities of ephedrine from Argentina, managed to smuggle the product into Mexico to dabble in methamphetamine production,” the report says.
In the US capital, he is accused of importing at least 500 grams of methamphetamine.
Instead, the State Department claims that the Guzmán brothers supervised 11 clandestine laboratories in Sinaloa, with a production capacity of up to almost 2,500 kilos per month.
"The methamphetamine is sold wholesale to other members of the cartel and to distributors in the United States and Canada," says the White House.
"Other sources indicate that Ovidio Guzmán López has ordered the murder of informants, a drug trafficker and a famous Mexican singer who refused to sing at his wedding," it adds.
The timing of the arrest, on the eve of the first visit by a US president to Mexico in nearly 10 years, has raised questions.
The official version is that it is a coincidence.
The capture occurred, in fact, in a sea of coincidences.
The trial in New York against Genaro García Luna, police chief during the government of Felipe Calderón, is scheduled for January 17.
The former Secretary of Public Security is accused of drug trafficking and of having maintained links with the Sinaloa Cartel.
It is the highest profile case against a former Mexican official in the United States, comparable only to the process against former Secretary of Defense Salvador Cienfuegos in 2020, which did not reach the courts.
More coincidences: former PRI governor César Duarte was arrested for corruption on July 8, 2020 in Miami, just the same day that López Obrador met with Donald Trump in Washington.
Earlier, in February 2017, El Chapo was extradited to the United States, just over a month after Trump's inauguration, in what was read in Mexico as an attempt to appease the Republican politician's anti-Mexican discourse.
The biggest trafficker in the world was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 by Judge Brian Cogan, the same one who will decide the fate of García Luna in the coming weeks.
His son Ovidio was admitted a few hours ago to the maximum security prison in the Altiplano.
It is the same one from which El Chapo escaped in 2015, after escaping in a 1.5-kilometre tunnel, equipped with lighting, ventilation,
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