- El Chapo's sons were charged with a string of offenses on Friday about their drug trafficking cartel.
- An indictment shows that the sons would torture captives and sometimes feed them to their pet tigers.
- The DEA is offering up to $10 million for information about the whereabouts of the sons.
Members of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa cartel were charged on Friday in a crackdown on their international drug trafficking operation.
This includes the sons of kingpin Joaquín Guzmán, better known as El Chapo.
Indictments against the drug lords detail a criminal empire built on drug trafficking and torture, which included feeding rivals to their pet tigers.
The sons, Ivan Guzman Salazar, 40, Alfredo Guzman Salazar, 37, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, 36, and Ovidio Guzman Lopez, 33, known as "the Chaptios," have been charged with numerous offenses from a range of different courts, including fentanyl trafficking, money laundering, firearm charges, and murder.
Three of the Chapitos remain at large. Ovidio Guzman Lopez was arrested on January 5, 2023, by Mexican authorities in Sinaloa, Mexico.
They helped lead the most powerful element of the Sinaloa cartel and were the most important traffickers of fentanyl into the US. The powerful synthetic opioid was responsible for the "majority" of the 107,345 lethal overdoses between August 2021 and August 2021, according to an indictment filed in New York.
According to the indictment from the Southern District of New York, captives — including rival traffickers and officials who threatened the Cartel's operations — were taken to a ranch belonging to Ivan Salazear.
There, these captives would be tortured. The gang would test their drugs on captives and coax information out of them before ultimately killing them.
Shockingly, rivals of the cartel and government officials who refused to cooperate would be fed dead or alive to tigers belonging to the Salazar brothers that they kept at their ranch as pets.
The indictment also details the military-grade armory the alleged gangsters possessed. It included armored trucks, bazookas, machine guns, and grenade launchers.
The indictment then reads, "partly as a result of such violence, the Cartel increased its power, and the Chapitos' faction grew. Under the Chapitos' leadership, the Cartel has achieved near total control over all drug trafficking activity in many parts of Mexico, including the manufacturing and importation of fentanyl from those parts of Mexico into the United States."
Speaking on Friday about the mass arrests, US Attorney Randy Grossman said this is the "most crushing blow to the Sinaloa Cartel since the conviction of Chapo Guzman."
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration is currently offering up to $10 million for anyone who can give information as to the whereabouts of Alfredo Guzman-Salazar.