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Published : 10 Sep 2025, 06:33 PM
In January 2023, the Mexican government deployed helicopter gunships and hundreds of soldiers into rural Sinaloa to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of the imprisoned cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In the hunt for the young capo, the mission’s architects worked hand-in-glove with a powerful American backer: the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ahead of the raid, America’s premier spy agency leveraged its vast eavesdropping apparatus to surveil the communications of Guzmán’s associates to locate him in his mother’s hometown in the western Sierra Madre mountains, according to four former US intelligence and law enforcement sources. CIA analysts assembled a detailed dossier, known as a “targeting package,” on El Chapo’s flashy son. The CIA was helped by intel from a member of Ovidio’s circle who had secretly flipped, three of the sources added.
Finally, to carry out the arrest itself, the Mexican Army deployed an elite unit that was trained, equipped and vetted by the CIA, a dozen current and former US and Mexican officials said.
A Reuters investigation has found that the CIA has been running covert operations in Mexico for years to track down the country’s most-wanted drug traffickers. The secret: The US spy agency works closely with special narco-hunting units inside the Mexican military.
With the permission of the Mexican government, the CIA gives training and equipment to these outfits, as well as financial backing for activities like travel. The US spy agency also screens their members with US-administered polygraph tests, which is why the groups are often called “CIA vetted units.”
Today, there are at least two such CIA vetted military units operating in Mexico. In addition to the Mexican Army group that nabbed Ovidio, there’s a special Mexican Navy intelligence outfit, according to eight current and former Mexican and US officials.
FILE PHOTO: The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency is shown at the entrance of the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, U.S., Sept 24, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
In the past, the CIA also had vetted units within Mexico’s now-defunct federal police, a state-level police force, and the federal attorney general’s office, according to two former senior US and Mexican officials.
These CIA vetted units, the details of which Reuters is reporting for the first time, fall under the agency’s covert operations. Such activities are generally classified, and their budgets and staffing are kept secret.
To detail the CIA’s activities in Mexico, Reuters spoke to more than 60 current and former US and Mexican security sources, including former CIA officers, diplomats from both countries, US anti-narcotics agents, and Mexican military leaders who worked closely with the US spy agency. The majority spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence agency’s activities.
The CIA has a long history of operations in Latin America, particularly during the Cold War, when the agency worked with military juntas and dictators to counter leftist governments and guerrillas. The agency also helped topple South America’s cocaine trafficking empires at the end of the 20th century.
But the US spy agency’s secret fight against Mexico’s cartel leaders has gone largely unreported.
The CIA vetted Mexican army and navy units have played key roles in planning or executing the majority of captures of high-profile narcos in recent years. The army outfit is comprised of hundreds of CIA-trained special forces and is seen as the military force in Mexico most capable of nabbing heavily armed drug lords holed up in fortified mountain hideouts, security sources say.
That has turned the CIA into the gatekeeper of American anti-narcotics operations in Mexico, according to current and former US security sources.
“The CIA is the facilitator and the coordinator on some of the most important anti-narcotics issues in Mexico,” said a recently departed senior official in the US Embassy in Mexico City. “Those units are extremely important.”
For decades the US Drug Enforcement Administration has been the face of US anti-narcotics efforts in Mexico. The DEA and other US law enforcement agencies, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), lead the US effort to investigate suspected drug traffickers and gather evidence that is admissible in US courtrooms. These agencies also work with Mexican counterparts to execute complex capture operations.
But inside the US embassy, the CIA spearheads the high-level coordination between the myriad US agencies working on anti-narcotics, the American security sources said. To some, the embassy’s seating arrangement symbolises the power dynamic: CIA analysts – and those of other US intel agencies – sit on the same floor as the ambassador. DEA, HSI and other law enforcement agents have their desks on the floor below.
In response to detailed questions from Reuters, the White House said in a statement: “The United States and Mexico are working as sovereign partners to successfully stop the illegal flow of deadly narcotics across the border and eliminate the cartel networks responsible.”
“Thanks to the leadership and partnership” of US President Donald Trump and Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, "the threat posed by transnational terrorist organisations armed with illicit narcotics diminishes by the day and efforts will not cease until American communities are safe from the scourge of drugs and cartels,” the statement said.
CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons said in a statement that Mexico’s cartels have become a significant focus for the agency.
“From day one, Director (John) Ratcliffe made securing our southern border and countering drug cartels in Mexico and regionally a top Agency priority to support President Trump’s directive to end narco-trafficking,” she said.
The Mexican government did not respond to detailed questions for this report.
The new insights into the CIA vetted units and the US spy agency’s extensive anti-narcotics activities come as the Trump administration is weighing a dramatic escalation of the US drug war in Mexico, one that could strain the bilateral relationship.
The CIA and US law enforcement have long operated south of the border solely at the discretion of Mexico’s government, which greenlights all capture operations and uses Mexican forces to execute them.
But Trump has said publicly that Washington may take unilateral military action in Mexico if the Mexican government failed to dismantle drug cartels. His administration has designated several Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organisations, which former national security officials say lays the groundwork for military action inside the country.
Case in point: Last week, the US military killed 11 people in a strike on a vessel in the southern Caribbean that allegedly departed Venezuela carrying illegal narcotics. Without publicly offering evidence, US officials said that those killed were members of a Venezuelan cartel that the Trump administration has also designated as a foreign terrorist group.
As for Mexico, US military and intelligence officials have in recent months discussed options for carrying out deadly strikes against drug cartels inside the country, according to two US officials involved in the talks. What role the CIA could play in such a campaign is unclear. The CIA and US special operations forces often work side-by-side on complex operations, particularly since the US war on terror began a generation ago, former CIA and elite military officers said.
Inside its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA is moving resources and personnel to amp up counter-cartel efforts, including through the creation of a new Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center, its leadership has said. Top counterterrorism officials have been reassigned to work on Mexican cartels, according to three intelligence sources. The agency has increased its drone surveillance flights south of the border, other former intelligence officials say.
CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis has said the agency is applying lessons learned from the global war on terror to the Mexican cartels.
“We have built a finely tuned machine at the CIA over the past 20 years since 9/11 to find, fix, and finish terrorist targets, and now we are going to be taking that machine and turning to the cartels,” he said in a May episode of the podcast of Tudor Dixon, a US conservative commentator.
The phrase “find, fix, finish” is used in national security circles to refer to the process of locating a target and then capturing or killing that person. The CIA declined to elaborate on Ellis’ comments.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum looks on as she delivers her first State of the Union address at National Palace, in Mexico City, Mexico, Sept 1, 2025. REUTERS/Henry Romero
The Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive approach to fighting the region’s drug traffickers has created a high-stakes balancing act for President Sheinbaum of Mexico's ruling leftist Morena party.
With Mexico facing economic pressure from Washington over tariffs and the prospect of US military intervention, Sheinbaum has increased her government’s efforts to combat organised crime. She has presided over a nearly year-long offensive against the Sinaloa Cartel. And she has approved two, unprecedented mass expulsions of more than 50 suspected drug traffickers to the US
These measures have won her praise from top US officials. But Sheinbaum has stated repeatedly that unilateral US action in Mexico is a red line.
“We will not accept any violation of our territory,” she said in a news conference last week. “We do not accept subordination, but simply collaboration between nations on equal terms."
Some CIA veterans of the US war on terror are likewise wary of the prospect of Washington taking a more militaristic approach to fighting drug trafficking in Mexico, a US ally, neighbour and top trading partner.
Ralph Goff, a former CIA operations officer with extensive experience in covert and paramilitary operations, cited the potential of civilian casualties, cartel retaliation and diplomatic fallout.
“Sicario is a good movie, but bad US policy,” he said, referring to a 2015 thriller about a CIA-led paramilitary operation inside Mexico. “Drugs are a consumption problem, not a production problem. We can’t just kill our way out of this.”
The US track record in Mexico thus far has cast doubt on whether a more muscular role will yield the desired results.
The CIA’s vetted military units have become Mexico’s most successful forces for hunting down suspected traffickers. But the capture of drug kingpins has fractured cartels and sparked bloody power struggles. Some 30,000 Mexicans are murdered each year, according to Mexico’s national statistics agency. Many of those killings stem from cartel-related violence.
Meanwhile, narco-hunting did little to stop the flood of fentanyl on American streets and Mexico’s ascension as the world’s top producer of the synthetic opioid. Over the last five years, some 50,000 to 75,000 Americans have died annually from synthetic opioid overdoses, almost exclusively from Mexican-made illicit fentanyl.
To be sure, the CIA is just one of several anti-narcotics actors. The Mexican government sets its own national security strategy, decides on the top targets, and approves capture operations. US law enforcement – including the DEA – has for decades followed the so-called kingpin strategy of tracking and taking down cartel leaders. But by acting in secret, the CIA has largely escaped scrutiny for its role in the troubled drug war.
FILE PHOTO: A member of a collective searching for missing persons pastes images of the disappeared, during a protest outside the Senate in Mexico City, Mexico Apr 10, 2025. REUTERS/Raquel Cunha/File Photo
ON THE CIA’S DIME
In the mid-1990s, Roberto Aguilera Olivera was the leader of a virtually unknown Mexican Army unit called “Special Intelligence Issues.” Its main adversary was the Zapatistas, a leftist indigenous group that staged an uprising in 1994. Then the CIA arrived, looking for a local partner to help it hunt down drug traffickers.
The Mexican Army repurposed the group as the Anti-Narcotics Intelligence Center in 1995. The CIA gave the team hack-proof computers and a portable eavesdropping machine, said Aguilera, who helped set up the unit before being posted to London as Mexico’s military attaché. The CIA flew the unit’s officers to the US for training in espionage and surveillance. CIA specialists designed prosthetic moustaches, wigs and fake scars for the Mexican soldiers to use as undercover disguises.
Jack Devine headed the CIA’s then-recently created counternarcotics centre in Langley in the early 1990s. He helped build out the CIA’s network of vetted anti-narcotics units in key Latin American countries.
“The decision was made to create units where we’re really going to give them state-of-the-art technical equipment and we’re going to give them state-of-the-art intelligence collection capabilities,” Devine said.
In Mexico, the Anti-Narcotics Intelligence Center quickly emerged as Mexico’s premier narco-hunting outfit. Aguilera returned to Mexico and led the unit from 2000 to 2006. Now retired, he recounted how its soldiers, traveling in disguise on the CIA’s dime, fanned out across Mexico to surveil, film and wiretap drug lords and their confidants. In 2000, the outfit was renamed the Drug Trafficking Information Analysis Group (or GAIN, for its acronym in Spanish).
“The CIA helped massively,” Aguilera said.
Mexico’s Army did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the history of GAIN and its relationship with the CIA.
Still, Aguilera said that he and his men – not the US spy agency – were in charge of the unit and its operations, and that they were responsible for the intel it collected. While the CIA provided support, the unit was Mexican-led, and Aguilera reported to his Army superiors. Other CIA vetted units that emerged in the coming years followed the same playbook.
“I’m very proud that all the success that I had in my era was intelligence which we produced,” said Aguilera, who retired at the rank of brigadier general.
In 2001, GAIN’s soldiers got their first view of a young Ovidio Guzmán, as they were hunting for his notorious father, El Chapo. By that point, the CIA had already had El Chapo on its radar for about a decade. In 1993, a CIA vetted Guatemalan military unit arrested El Chapo near the Mexican border, according to a former longtime CIA officer in Latin America. El Chapo was then imprisoned in Mexico, and the CIA set up a mobile listening platform outside the facility, hoping to ward off a possible escape, the officer said. But El Chapo was transferred to a different jail and broke out in 2001.
That’s when Aguilera’s men discovered that El Chapo’s second wife, Griselda, was living in an upscale Mexico City neighbourhood. Aguilera’s agents rented a house nearby to set up an eavesdropping station. The soldiers trailed Ovidio, who was then about 10 years old, to the prestigious private school where he and his siblings were enrolled. In mid-2001, Griselda and Ovidio unwittingly led Aguilera’s agents to El Chapo’s hideout in the western state of Nayarit, but the soldiers missed the cartel chief after someone tipped him off, Aguilera said.
A few months later, Al Qaeda hijackers flew planes into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. The CIA’s mission pivoted sharply to terrorism. The US spy agency diverted resources from Latin America to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The CIA took top analysts from the CIA’s counternarcotics centre and tasked them with fighting terrorism, according to former agency officials.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, the opposite is occurring, as top-tier counterterrorism analysts are being reassigned to Mexico, former US intelligence sources say.
’THEY’RE INVISIBLE’
But even in the post-9/11 years, the agency still devoted resources to the narcotics fight, which was about to heat up in Mexico. In 2006, newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on Mexico’s drug cartels and turned to Washington for backup. The following year, Calderón and US President George W. Bush met to discuss a sweeping new security agreement that became known as the Mérida Initiative.
As the two countries increased collaboration, the CIA helped set up joint US-Mexico intelligence centres in Mexico City and in Monterrey, less than a three-hour drive from Laredo, Texas. The centres targeted senior cartel leaders, and were modelled on the intel hubs that the CIA and the US military operated in Iraq, said Guillermo Valdés, the head of Mexico’s civilian spy agency from 2007 to 2011.
FILE PHOTO: Mexico's Secretary of Defence Luis Sandoval and Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador show video footage when Mexican military forces briefly captured Ovidio Guzman, son of kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, during a news conference at National palace in Mexico City, Mexico Oct 30, 2019. REUTERS
“The Mexicans who worked at the centres went to Iraq to train, to see it live,” Valdés said.
While continuing to work with the army unit, the US spy agency also partnered with a special Mexican Navy intelligence group, according to current and former US and Mexican officials.
The CIA gave the naval officers analysis training and technical assistance and screened and polygraphed the group's members, according to a senior Mexican government official with knowledge of the unit’s operations. Reuters is withholding the secretive group’s name at the request of Mexican and US officials, who said that disclosing it could imperil its members.
The Mexican Navy said in a statement that it “maintains knowledge exchange and cooperation with navies, maritime forces, and other agencies from various countries,” to strengthen operational capabilities and collaboration on regional security.
At the time, the US spy agency also had vetted units scattered across some of Mexico’s most important civilian institutions. There were units inside the federal police, the attorney general’s office, and a state-level police force in the northeastern state of Nuevo León, former US and Mexican officials said.
Mexico’s federal police force was disbanded in 2019. Nuevo León’s state police force did not answer Reuters’ questions about whether the CIA vetted unit still exists; a spokesperson said that all coordination with foreign governments is handled by federal authorities. The federal attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Several US law enforcement agencies also operated anti-narcotics vetted units in Mexico. In addition, the DEA developed a tight partnership with Mexican Navy special forces.
The DEA said in a statement that its mission overseas is “to work in partnership with host-nation and regional counterparts,” including through information sharing, capacity building and training initiatives.
Asked whether US law enforcement’s focus on taking down cartel kingpins led to increased bloodshed in Mexico, the DEA said that trafficking organisations are the ones driving the violence. “Attributing it to any single enforcement approach oversimplifies a complex challenge,” the statement said.
By the mid-2010s, all eyes were on one of the biggest kingpins of all: El Chapo.
Since his 2001 escape, he’d risen to become one of the world’s most successful drug traffickers. Mexican authorities recaptured him in February 2014, but he escaped anew in July 2015. The hunt was on again.
The US spy agency furnished the CIA vetted navy unit with information gathered from telecommunications intercepts, according to the senior Mexican official with knowledge of the unit’s operations. This intel helped Mexican authorities track El Chapo to Los Mochis, Sinaloa. The CIA vetted navy unit then launched an undercover operation to confirm El Chapo’s location, the official said.
In January 2016, Mexican Navy special forces arrested him. It was heralded as a victory for the Mexican government and for US law enforcement agencies, which played crucial roles in supporting the Mexican-led capture operation.
But behind the scenes, US and Mexican officials say the CIA was an important but silent actor. The senior Mexican official said: “They’re focused on the mission, but they’re invisible.”
FILE PHOTO: Recaptured drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by soldiers during a presentation in Mexico City, Jan 8, 2016. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
El Chapo’s lawyer Mariel Colón did not respond to requests for comment.
The CIA vets the Mexicans it works with in efforts to prevent corruption. In addition to a US-administered polygraph test, the agency in the past has used drug tests, screening interviews, background checks, and, at times, surveillance of soldiers’ phones and bank accounts. GAIN’s members also assume fake identities to prevent narcos from using threats against the soldiers or their families in order to extract information.
“In the six years I was in charge of the unit, even my name wasn’t known. I was a ghost,” said Aguilera, the former Mexican leader of the CIA vetted army unit.
Three soldiers from the vetted unit were jailed for allegedly leaking information to the cartels during the early 2000s, Aguilera said.
But cartel infiltration wasn’t unique to Langley’s units. For decades, the US government has found that some of its closest partners in Mexico are entangled with the very cartels they are supposedly fighting.
Case in point: Genaro García Luna. From 2006 to 2012, as Mexico’s security minister, García Luna was a close ally to Washington. He worked with not only the CIA but also with US law enforcement and US diplomats. He oversaw the federal police, where the CIA had a small vetted unit. In 2011, Leon Panetta, then chief of the CIA, wrote García Luna personally to thank him for the “professionalism and hospitality that you have shown to me and the CIA.”
The Americans later turned on him. In 2019, US authorities arrested him in Texas. US prosecutors accused him of accepting millions in bribes from none other than the Sinaloa Cartel. In 2023, García Luna was convicted of cocaine trafficking-related charges. He is imprisoned in a so-called “Supermax” facility in Colorado serving a 38-year sentence.
García Luna’s defence lawyer, César de Castro, contacted last week for comment, said it would be impossible to reach his client on short notice.
FENTANYL FAILURE
In 2017, Trump began his first term as president and wanted to get tough on Mexico. He had big ideas, like dropping bombs on traffickers or sending in US special forces. “He was throwing things at the wall to see what stuck,” recalled a former senior White House official.
In the end, the task largely fell to the CIA. The spy agency’s Mexico station received a $200 million funding boost, according to two former DEA agents who worked on Mexico. The US spy agency ramped up drug operations and used the extra cash to fund new equipment and training for its units and to pay sources, said one of the former DEA agents. Reuters was not able to independently confirm that funding increase.
The CIA received another, and far more surprising, windfall in 2018.
That’s when leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office promising to scale back the drug war and instead address the poverty that drives people to join cartels in the first place. Some 13 million Mexicans rose out of poverty during his six years in office, according to government data.
Meanwhile, he publicly iced out the DEA and sidelined the Mexican Navy and its special forces unit, which had been the DEA’s main Mexican counterpart, according to former US and Mexican officials.
But anti-narcotics cooperation with Washington didn’t cease entirely. Instead, the CIA’s role in such operations grew after López Obrador put the Mexican Army at the forefront of the nation’s security efforts. The vetted CIA unit inside the army once again came to the forefront of the joint Mexican-US anti-narcotics efforts, according to current and former security sources.
That partnership offered a convenient way for the Mexican leader to appease the Americans without appearing to renege on his campaign promises, said a former US diplomat stationed in Mexico at the time. “If you work with the CIA, presumably nobody’s ever going to know what you did,” the diplomat said.
López Obrador did not respond to a detailed list of questions about his drug war strategy.
Inside the US Embassy in Mexico City, a turf war broke out between the DEA and the CIA amid the shifting power balance, according to a half-dozen American officials. Meanwhile, outside the US compound, the rise of fentanyl was upending the international drug market.
The powerful synthetic opioid is about 50 times stronger than heroin, cheap and relatively easy to produce. At the beginning of Trump’s first term, street fentanyl largely arrived on US shores directly from China. But Mexican cartels had already begun to import fentanyl-making chemicals and were learning how to cook up the drug.
Leading this effort were Ovidio Guzmán and his brothers, according to US authorities. After their father’s 2016 arrest, the brothers fought off rivals to emerge as serious players inside the cartel. They were dubbed Los Chapitos, or little Chapos, and they made an early bet on the synthetic opioid. Within a few years, their foresight would turn them into the world’s largest fentanyl producers, according to US authorities.
But the CIA had its eyes elsewhere. As traffickers were laying the groundwork for Mexico’s fentanyl industry, some of Langley’s drug analysts were convinced that the cartels planned to ratchet up heroin production instead, according to a half-dozen former US intelligence and diplomatic sources. US officials leaned on the Mexican government to step up eradication of poppies cultivated in rural Mexico. Others inside the CIA were focused on stopping South American cocaine – then a priority of the Trump administration – flowing north.
There was little time to chase potential new drug threats. “We missed it,” said the former longtime CIA officer in Latin America.
Langley wasn’t alone. US law enforcement and health agencies were also caught by surprise by the rapid rise and staggering body count of fentanyl. Over Trump’s first term in office, synthetic opioid deaths surged to more than 56,000 fatalities in 2020, double the figure from 2017, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All told, about 450,000 Americans have died from synthetic opioids over the last decade.
THE HUNT CONTINUES
In late 2019, the CIA vetted army unit, GAIN, spearheaded the Mexican government’s first attempt to capture Ovidio Guzmán. For months, its soldiers had trailed Ovidio and built a vast file on his cars, homes and schedule, according to a source familiar with the operation. Finally, on Oct 17, the Mexican Army launched a last-minute operation that was led by GAIN. The soldiers captured Ovidio. But the situation quickly descended into chaos.
Hundreds of cartel gunmen descended on Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. The Mexican soldiers in the CIA vetted unit found themselves trapped. The Sinaloa Cartel’s men set cars ablaze and threatened to storm the military building that housed the families of soldiers stationed locally. López Obrador ordered the army to release Ovidio to prevent civilian deaths. The fiasco caused a scandal in Mexico.
López Obrador publicly chastised the raid’s architects and had his army chief release the name of GAIN’s leader during a news conference. It was an unprecedented disclosure, given the danger of cartel retaliation for soldiers in such a position. But neither the president nor the army revealed GAIN’s relationship to the CIA.
In the US, the overdose death toll soared as Mexico’s cartels ramped up fentanyl production. Ovidio and his brothers built an industrial-scale operation in Sinaloa. At Langley, the CIA transformed its counternarcotics centre to tackle fentanyl’s entire supply chain, according to 2023 testimony by then-director William Burns to a US Senate committee. The leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, specifically Los Chapitos, were some of the top targets, according to two former senior US officials briefed on the counternarcotic centre’s efforts.
In August 2022, American surveillance planes flying over Culiacán picked up encrypted cartel communications and the CIA stepped in to decode the chatter, according to a former US law enforcement agent who worked on the case. Reuters is withholding certain details about the intercept at the request of US officials, who said disclosure could jeopardise Mexican and US sources and methods.
The decrypted communications helped lead US authorities to a heavily guarded compound in the mountain village of Jesús María. On Jan 5, 2023, the CIA vetted army unit, GAIN, and hundreds of soldiers were deployed in Sinaloa to encircle Ovidio’s hideout. Learning from the mistakes of the last operation, the military struck in the dead of night and deployed attack helicopters that strafed cartel hitmen from the air. In total, 29 people, including 10 Mexican soldiers, were killed in the operation.
Mexico extradited Ovidio to the US later that year. In July, he pleaded guilty to four charges related to drug distribution and participating in a criminal enterprise. He faces a possible life sentence. His lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, did not respond to requests for comment.
In the US, overdose fatalities due to synthetic opioids began declining sharply in late 2023, due in large part to initiatives to distribute the overdose-reversal drug naloxone. Since Trump returned to power this year, his health-care funding cuts have hit drug treatment programs, initiatives to distribute naloxone and studies that track drug consumption nationwide. US overdose data is available only through March 2025, when the funding cuts began, making it too soon to tell if there has been an impact on deaths.
Since Trump returned to office, fentanyl seizures at the US border are down more than 50 percent compared to the same period last year, according to data from US Customs and Border Protection. The administration has said that’s thanks to its crackdown. But determining the cause for that drop is difficult, according to a US official, who said cartels could be using new smuggling routes to evade detection or stockpiling the synthetic opioid in hopes that border enforcement will eventually cool off.
In Mexico, homicides are also trending downward nationwide since Sheinbaum took office. Still, a year-long civil war within the Sinaloa Cartel has left thousands dead or missing in Sinaloa. Los Chapitos are battling another faction led by the son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel with El Chapo. The El Mayo wing is poised to take over Los Chapitos’ fentanyl production, although it faces competition from the rival Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a US official said.
The CIA’s decades-long hunt for the Guzmán clan isn’t over yet. One of the agency’s principal targets is Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, another one of El Chapo’s sons who remains at large and could not be reached for comment.
In February, elite Mexican commandos working with the CIA vetted army unit nearly nabbed him in Culiacán, according to a Mexican security source.
Iván escaped, like his father often did, through a secret tunnel.
