Four days before President Joe Biden flies south to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, authorities in the northwest state of Sinaloa arrested the son of the infamous drug cartel leader known as “El Chapo,” who is wanted by U.S. officials for contributing to the fentanyl epidemic that killed as many as 70,000 Americans last year.
At least 29 people, including 10 Mexican soldiers, were killed in shootouts with Sinaloa Cartel members during the operation to nab Ovidio Guzman on Thursday and fly him to Mexico City on a military plane.
Publicly, Mexican officials denied that the raid was timed to show Washington that its southern neighbor is an active partner in the politically fraught bilateral effort to stanch the cross-border flow of the lethal synthetic opioid.
But some current and former American counternarcotics officials are suspicious, noting that another “most wanted” drug cartel leader, Rafael Caro Quintero, was arrested in Sinaloa just days after Biden and Lopez Obrador met in Washington last July to discuss a range of issues, including a drug war that has tested the two countries’ security alliance for the past half a century.
“It certainly seems like politics. There’s a lot of speculation now that it’s all about the timing,” former Drug Enforcement Administration official Derek Maltz told USA TODAY. “Biden announces he’s going down to Mexico, so now they’re going to go out and grab Ovidio,” who has been facing U.S. criminal drug trafficking charges since his indictment in New York in 2018.
Based on his conversations with current DEA leaders, some senior U.S. counternarcotics officials believe Mexico also has been inflating the amount of fentanyl and other drugs it has seized at cartel “superlabs” where vast quantities of fentanyl and methamphetamine are produced just south of the border for easy smuggling into the United States, according to Maltz, the special agent in charge of DEA’s Special Operations Division for almost 10 years before his retirement in 2014.
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