In a small house in a humble neighborhood of Sinaloa: this is how the sons of Chapo Guzmán started their business. Worthy heirs to their father’s criminal empirethe largest drug trafficker in Mexico in this century, arrested for the last time in 2016 and extradited to the US the following year.

They have taken advantage of the network that their father already had: his planes, boats, mules that pass through border checkpoints, and even, the famous underground drug tunnels that connect Mexico and the United States. It was through one of those tunnels, more than a kilometer and a half long and that even had electricity, that Chapo escaped from a maximum security prison in July 2015.

Especially starting in 2019, his children expanded and maximized the family business: where before the Sinaloa cartel manufactured methamphetamine, now makes fentanyl. A synthetic drug 50 times more powerful than heroin, capable of knocking down in seconds a policeman who accidentally exposed himself to it in a raid.

The “Chapitos SA”, as their organization has been colloquially called, are now the target of the United States attorney general’s office because Fentanyl overdose deaths are a huge epidemic in the country. “The network is run by the Sinaloa cartel and supported by Chinese precursor chemicals and medicines,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland explained.

The Department of Justice has launched an indictment against three of El Chapo’s sons and 25 of his henchmen based on a very detailed investigation. They would have achieved it after infiltrating the cartel.

Thus, they have identified as one of the leaders Ovid Guzman, captured earlier this year, and who, according to the US, was in charge of the laboratory network. His two brothers Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar they are the other two strong men of the cartel. Both are wanted and captured, with a reward of up to 10 million dollars.

According to the investigators, Jesús Alfredo is in charge of relations with Chinese traffickers, suppliers of the chemicals needed to make fentanyland his brother Iván Archivaldo, is in charge of operations security.

According to the investigators, the cartel of the chapitos is “more ruthless, more violent and deadlier“than that of his father in his best years. They would have come to experiment with their fentanyl and derivatives on people, causing them to die from an overdose… and when they capture an enemy, they feed it to the tigers they have as pets.