Unbuttoned blue shirt, scapulary of the Holy Child of Atocha around the neck, hands up. “I already gave myself. They stop everything, please. Already calm, no longer … I no longer want there to be rings.” It is Ovid Guzmán on October 17, 2019. Click. “Many citizens were at risk, many human beings. It was decided to protect people’s lives.” It is Andrés Manuel López Obrador the next day when confirming the liberation of the Son of the Chapo. Click. A town of Sinaloa, Jesús María, turned into a carpet of caps and exploded glass; The calcined cars, the bloody uniforms, the remains of a pitched battle. Click. The Secretary of Defense announces the success of a blunt blow to Mexican drug trafficking: the mouse, now, on January 5, 2023, has been captured. Click. Skinny, with prisoner uniform number 5684, Ovid goes destiny to Chicago. Click. Ismael May Zambada lands in Santa Teresa, Texas, in an plane where Joaquín Guzmán López also travels. Click. Ovid Guzmán reaches an agreement with the US Prosecutor’s Office, is going to declare guilty and deliver information from the Sinaloa cartel. After five years and six and a half months in the sight, the criminal journey of the youngest son of Chapo Guzmán is over. Click. End of the reel.
The future of the Empire of the Sinaloa cartel fights within the State, but decides outside. All, founders and heirs, are willing to deliver information to the US justice on which it was the large group of organized crime in Mexico in exchange for improving their legal situation. The criminal family doesn’t matter as much as their own skin. What the Vicentillo or King Zambada (son and brother of May) against El Chapo did, can now do it Ovid and Joaquín Guzmán against May. The first has just confirmed: it will be on July 9 when it is convicted. The story is condemned to repeat.
The boy who wanted to be narco
Ovidos Guzmán went from almost a stranger to exhaust the amulets with his face: Who had the poster had protected in blood and fire? Who was the protagonist of the Culiacanazo? Little was known about the little son that El Chapo had with his second wife, Griselda, before October 2019. The mouse was born in 1990 in Culiacán (Sinaloa) but grew in a rich neighborhood in Mexico City, with a driver who took him daily to a private school.
The student path was truncated quickly: he was a teenager when he saw his father do the incredible, escape from a maximum security prison, and barely of legal age, when he saw his brother Edgar die. It is in 2008 when the State Department points out that he inherited with his brother Joaquin part of the control of the empire. However, Benjamin Smith, historian and author of The drug: the true history of drug trafficking in Mexico, He explained to El País that it was never clear what was the true role of Ovid for the business during the next decade.
Whatever it was, the brutal response of the Sinaloa cartel forced the army to return it once stopped. López Obrador assumed a decision that was aligned with his hug strategy, not bullets. The president broke out three years later when the authorities managed to stop him in the early hours of January 5, 2023. They had been following him for six months, waiting for “the right time,” said the Secretary of Defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval. The Mexican Armed Forces took him from a house by Jesús María by helicopter to take him to Mexico City. The balance of the operation was lethal: 29 dead, including 10 military. The tone of the Government of Morena remained, even so, triumph.
An extradition and a betrayal
The mouse was a juicy trophy for the United States. For nine months, their lawyers tried to avoid extradition, without success. In September 2023 he was on a plane to Chicago, where he is accused of five positions. In addition, Guzmán accumulates another six crimes in New York and one in the district of Columbia. Most are for drug trafficking – cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl – but also for homicides, use of firearms and money laundering. Penalties threatened to take him to the same destiny as his father: a life in jail. At his first audience, the son of Chapo declared himself innocent of all the positions.
The accusations against the little boy of the Guzmán brothers also committed the three elders: Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo and Joaquín. All became priority objectives for the United States, which was especially looking for them to flood the streets of Fentanilo, an opioid that is behind 100,000 deaths a year in the country.
The months passed and little progress was made in the judicial destination of Ovid Guzmán until the bomb exploded. On July 25, the Great Narco, the founder of the Sinaloa cartel, who had never stepped on a prison, that of the low profile, which lived hidden in the mountains that saw him grow, May Zambada was arrested on American soil. In a film operation, the 76 -year -old capo had been called to a meeting by his godson, Joaquín Guzmán Loera. In the meeting he was beaten, kidnapped and mounted on an plane towards the United States. Thus ended the leadership of what was the most wanted criminal in the US.
The betrayal unleashed a fratricidal war in Sinaloa, between the two features of the poster, Los Chapitos – and led only by Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo – and the followers of May. A struggle for the control that bleeds the State week by week. The Attorney General’s Office linked Ovid Guzmán with this May delivery, because it came to appear in the prison system as released. He was not, but he had already started another parallel path: a negotiation.
This Tuesday, rumors with the confirmation of an agreement were ended, but everything else is missing: how much has the delivery of May to the agreement that the mouse has achieved? What does the deal include? How is the process of Ovid Guzmán intersect with that of Zambada, who is trying to avoid the death penalty? The future of the poster continues to be written in the Estaodunidense courts.
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
