Blue shirt unbuttoned, scapular of the Holy Child of Atocha around his neck, hands raised. “I’ve already surrendered. Please stop everything. Calm down, there’s no other way… I don’t want any more chaos.” Ovidio Guzmán on October 17, 2019. Click. “Many citizens, many human beings, were at risk. The decision was made to protect people’s lives.” Andrés Manuel López Obrador the next day, confirming the release of El Chapo’s son, with his brothers the leader of the Los Chapitos faction of his father’s organized crime empire. Click. A town in Sinaloa, Jesús María, turned into a carpet of shell casings and exploded glass; charred cars, bloody uniforms, the remains of a pitched battle. Click. The Secretary of Defense announces the success of a resounding blow to Mexican drug trafficking: Ovidio Guzmán, “El Ratón,” now yes, on January 5, 2023, has been captured. Click. Skinny, wearing jail fatigues with the number 5684, Ovidio heads to Chicago. Click. Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada lands in Santa Teresa, Texas, on a plane also carrying Joaquín Guzmán López. Click. Ovidio Guzmán reaches a deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office; he will plead guilty and provide information about the Sinaloa Cartel. After five years and six and a half months in the spotlight, the criminal journey of El Chapo Guzmán’s youngest son has ended. Click. End of reel.
The future of the Sinaloa Cartel is being fought over within the Mexican state, but decided elsewhere. Everyone, founders and heirs, is willing to provide information to the U.S. justice system about what was once Mexico’s largest organized crime group, in exchange for improved legal status. The crime family doesn’t matter as much as one’s own skin. What Vicentillo and “El Rey” Zambada (the son and brother of El Mayo) did against El Chapo, Ovidio and Joaquín Guzmán can now do against El Mayo. The former has just confirmed it: he will plead guilty on July 9. History is doomed to repeat itself.
The boy who wanted to be a drug dealer
Ovidio Guzmán went from being virtually unknown to selling out amulets bearing his likeness: Who had the cartel protected with blood and fire? Who was the protagonist of the Culiacanazo? Little was known about the young son El Chapo had had with his second wife, Griselda, before October 2019. El Ratón was born in 1990 in Culiacán (Sinaloa) but grew up in a wealthy neighborhood of Mexico City, with a driver who took him to a private school every day.
His academic career quickly ended: he was a teenager when he witnessed his father do the incredible — escape from a maximum-security prison — and barely of age when he saw his brother Edgar die. In 2008, the U.S. State Department alleged that he, along with his brother Joaquín, inherited part of the empire. However, Benjamin T. Smith, historian and author of The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, explained to EL PAÍS that it was never clear what Ovidio’s true role in the business would be over the next decade.
Whatever the outcome, the Sinaloa Cartel’s brutal response forced the army to release him after he was detained in 2019. López Obrador made a decision that was in line with his strategy of “hugs, not bullets.” The former president got his revenge three years later when authorities managed to arrest Ovidio in the early hours of January 5, 2023. They had been tracking him for six months, waiting for “the right moment,” said then-defense secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval. The Mexican military took him from a property in Jesús María to Mexico City in a helicopter. The outcome of the operation was costly: 29 dead, including 10 soldiers. The government’s tone, however, remained triumphant.
An extradition and a betrayal
El Ratón was a succulent prize for the United States. For nine months, his lawyers tried unsuccessfully to avoid his extradition. In September 2023, he was on a plane bound for Chicago, where he is charged with five counts. In addition, Ovidio Guzmán has been indicted for six other crimes in New York and one in the District of Columbia. Most of them are for drug trafficking — cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl — but also for homicide, firearms use, and money laundering. The charges threatened to lead him to the same fate as his father: life in prison. At his first hearing, El Chapo’s son pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The accusations against the youngest of the Guzmán brothers also implicated the three older siblings: Iván Archivaldo, Jesús Alfredo, and Joaquín. All became priority targets for the United States, which was specifically seeking them out for flooding the streets with fentanyl, an opioid responsible for 100,000 deaths each year in the country.
Months passed, and little progress was made in the judicial fate of Ovidio Guzmán until the bombshell landed: on July 25, 2024, the great drug lord, the founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, who had never set foot in prison, the low-profile capo who lived hidden in the mountains where he grew up, El Mayo Zambada, was arrested on U.S. soil. In a picture-perfect operation, the 76-year-old kingpin had been summoned to a meeting by his godson, Joaquín Guzmán. At the meeting, he was beaten, kidnapped, and put on a plane to the United States. Thus ended the leadership of El Mayo, who was once the most wanted criminal in the U.S.
The betrayal unleashed a fratricidal war in Sinaloa between the two factions of the cartel, Los Chapitos — now led solely by Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo — and those loyal to El Mayo. A struggle for control that drains the state week after week. The Mexico Attorney General’s Office linked Ovidio Guzmán to El Mayo’s capture because he appeared in the U.S. prison system as having been released. He hadn’t been, but another parallel path had already been opened: a negotiation.
Last Tuesday, the rumors were put to rest with the confirmation of an agreement, but everything else remains to be seen: How much has El Mayo’s arrest contributed to the agreement El Ratón reached? What does the deal include? How does Ovidio Guzmán’s case intersect with Zambada’s, who is racing against time to avoid the death penalty? The future of the Sinaloa Cartel continues to be written in the U.S. courts.
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