The DEA, on Los Chapitos: "The Sinaloa Cartel has never been more powerful or made more money"

The Chapitos are richer, more powerful and bloodthirsty than their father.

This was stated by the director of the DEA, Anne Milgram, in a conference this Tuesday.

There were 30 minutes of explosive statements about the firepower of the Sinaloa Cartel, the changes that have taken place under the tutelage of the heirs of Joaquín

Guzmán, the corrosive effect of fentanyl in the United States and the role of Mexico in the global drug business.

"His children took control and the cartel has never been more powerful, it has never made more money," said the head of the US anti-narcotics agency in a talk sponsored by the Milken Institute.

Milgram assured that the White House has identified the presence of the criminal organization in more than 40 countries and questioned the statements of the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador that fentanyl is not produced in the country and that it is only a transit territory in the global supply chain for synthetic drugs.

“There are two cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, which are responsible for virtually all the fentanyl and methamphetamine consumed in the United States,” Milgram said during a conversation with Nick Kristof, a columnist for The New York newspaper

.

The DEA director said that China is the epicenter of the synthetic drug supply chain, but she assured that for years the partners of the criminal groups have stopped sending finished products and have focused on providing them with precursors, the chemicals used to manufacture the doses.

“They buy chemical precursors from China, they send them to Mexico, they mass-produce fentanyl, much of it is used to make fake pills, and then they introduce it to the United States by land, by air, and by sea,” added the official, who took office. in June 2021.

“We believe that Mexico has to do more to stop the damage that this is causing,” Milgram declared in an appearance before the United States Senate last February.

On this occasion, Kristof asked if the pressure on the López Obrador government would bear more fruit in the fight against drug cartels, but the DEA director avoided giving a concrete answer, after months of tensions between the two countries in terms of security.

She did give a diagnosis of how relations with Beijing are: "We know that China is not going to cooperate with us in the fight against drugs."

Anne Milgram, director of the DEA, during a talk in Beverly Hills (California), this Tuesday. MIKE BLAKE (REUTERS)

As for Mexico, Milgram preferred, instead, to send a message between the lines to justify the hunt that the Joe Biden Administration announced against Los Chapitos on April 14.

“When I took office, I wanted to take a step back and ask who was primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans.

The response was the Sinaloa Cartel,” he noted.

The US authorities push to finalize the extradition of Ovidio Guzmán

and offered millions in rewards for the capture of three other sons of El Chapo: 10 million dollars for information on Alfredo and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán and 5 million dollars to arrest Joaquín Guzmán.

“They took command and made the cartel more deadly and ruthless, and they were the first to manufacture fentanyl and transport it in the distribution networks that we see today,” the official insisted.

The four sons of the boss and more than twenty collaborators face a battery of charges ranging from organized crime and drug trafficking to illegal possession of weapons and money laundering.

Milgram called fentanyl "the most urgent crisis we face as a country" and "the biggest threat we've ever had to combat."

“What the indictment against the Chapitos shows is the fentanyl supply chain around the world,” he said.

The official reviewed how the Sinaloa Cartel evolved from 2014 and 2015, even before the recapture of El Chapo in 2016, and she bet on fentanyl as the future of the business.

She added that it was possible to trace who were the Chinese partners that supply them with precursors and that they have also identified their emissaries in the United States.

She also spoke of the criminal group's “enormous” profit margin.

“It costs the cartels between 10 and 20 cents to make one of these fake pills in Mexico, which sell for between five and 30 dollars in the United States,”

At the end of March, the DEA announced in a report that it had created specialized cells to attack the financial and drug trafficking structures of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, which were nourished by the work of the agency's 334 in the world.

Milgram did not say in which countries Los Chapitos operated, but court documents in the case against them reveal a Pan-American corridor stretching from Peru to Canada.

The accusation against Los Chapitos also revealed that anti-narcotics agents infiltrated the leadership of the criminal group and used racketeering, money laundering and torture techniques against rival bosses.

But the findings did not go down well with the López Obrador government, which claimed that these operations were not agreed upon or authorized.

“It is an abusive and arrogant interference,

It should not be accepted for any reason," the president reproached.

In this last act, there was no mention of the friction that has occurred with Mexico.

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