On Jan. 20, the day he took office, President Donald Trump declared Mexican drug cartels are terrorist organizations, launching a U.S. offensive that’s resulted in dozens of people being brought to the United States to face charges, including reputed drug kingpins.
THE BACKGROUND
Recently, a reputed Beltran Leyva cartel member who was charged in federal court in Chicago was among 26 suspected cartel members extradited to the United States. In February, 29 other cartel suspects were extradited.
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Chicago were instrumental in the 2016 capture of Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, one of the most-wanted criminals in U.S. history. The agency’s Chicago office plays a major role in efforts to combat Mexico’s drug cartels.
Last month, El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzmán López — one of the highest-level cartel figures extradited from Mexico — pleaded guilty in Chicago to federal drug-trafficking charges and agreed to cooperate with federal authorities. He and three brothers, known as Los Chapitos, are accused of taking over their father’s international drug business and flooding the United States with fentanyl, which has been blamed for at least 1,000 deaths last year in Chicago.
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum is cooperating with the Trump administration’s demands to send wanted cartel suspects to the United States and clamp down on fentanyl coming across the border. But her help comes with Trump’s threat to impose massive tariffs on Mexico if her government doesn’t comply.
THE Q-&-A
Ilan Katz, a criminal defense lawyer in Mexico City who is president of the Mexican Bar Foundation, spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times about Mexico’s anti-cartel efforts and how Chicago fits into the fight against cartels by Trump and Sheinbaum, whom he sees as an antidote to Mexico’s rampant past government corruption.
Question: President Sheinbaum has been criticized by Ovidio Guzmán’s attorney, who offended her when he made negative comments about her like this one on X: “She acts more as the public relations arm of a drug-trafficking organization than as the honest leader that the Mexican people deserve.” What do you think about that?
Katz: “We’re in the middle of a seismic shift in law enforcement against cartels in Mexico during the Sheinbaum administration in the best possible sense. She’s not covering s— up. She’s not wealthy. She doesn’t have any side hustles. You have seen an incredible wave of arrests and seizures, and that had not happened before. So you are seeing real, tangible results on the Mexican end in fighting organized crime.
“The top cop is actually a cop, Omar Garcia Harfuch, who was the head of the police in Mexico City. Sheinbaum was mayor of Mexico City.
“Mexico City became a very safe city when Garcia Harfuch was the head of police in Mexico, so they know each other and trust each other very well.”
[Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s top law enforcement official more than a decade ago, was sentenced last year to 38 years in prison on U.S. charges of taking bribes to do the bidding of the Sinaloa cartel. He’d served under two previous Mexican presidents.]
Q: Do you think the Chapitos’ decision to ramp up fentanyl sales in the U.S. was a misstep because of the resulting overdose deaths? It’s one of the reasons they’re in jail on the charges in Chicago.
Katz: “The fentanyl trade would have grown regardless because the demand is so big. They’ve seen where this ends. They’re seeing their father rot in jail. It’s not something that they can just walk away from. They have to make a deal.”
[To date, Ovidio Guzmán is the only one of the Chapitos to plead guilty to U.S. charges. Two of the four brothers remain fugitives.]
Q: Why should anybody in Chicago care about any of this stuff? That’s obviously a tongue-in-cheek question, but do you have a perspective on Chicago and its relative importance in the cartel world?
Katz: “First of all, Mexico and the States are not neighbors — they’re lovers. And Chicago is one of our love nests.
“Chicago has been one of the cradles of the drug trade way back to ‘70s and ‘80s. There has been a huge uptick of Mexican drug lords that have been moving to Chicago. There’s a lot of Durango people, a lot of Michoacán people that have been selling in Chicago,
“Chicago, like any major U.S. city and Illinois, has a huge fentanyl problem.
“And here’s the rub: The United States invented the opioid crisis. But Mexico has been the main supplier of fentanyl in the United States.
“If you want to preserve your community, you have to stop the fentanyl trade.”
Q: It sounds as though you’re not somebody who says the “War on Drugs” failed, and we should do something else. It sounds like you think that we need to continue to battle against the supply of drugs coming to the United States. But when you prosecute these cartels, the leadership vacuum creates even more violence. And the competition means even more drugs come across the border, no?
Katz: “Containment is the name of the game.
“There are things that are built within criminal enterprises, which, once you destroy them, have to be rebuilt.
“One example: There’s a bunch of tunnels that go into the United States from the border. Once you take care of a tunnel, they can’t use that tunnel anymore. They have to make a new tunnel or find some other way to get things across. I’m sure Ovidio has been telling [U.S. authorities] where those tunnels are, right?
“Management is very important. If you hit management, you have to change human resources. You hit them very, very hard.
“Then, once you take out financial support or logistics support, they have to rebuild it. You make it very hard for them to continue operating.
“You’re never going to eliminate the drug trade completely. But what you can do is make it as small as possible. And, you know, contain it.”
Q: Is the Ayotzinapa tragedy still top of mind politically in Mexico?
[Guerreros Unidos, a Mexican cartel whose leaders had extensive Chicago ties, shipped heroin to Illinois in hidden compartments in passenger buses. The cartel was implicated in the 2014 disappearance of 43 college students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College. Past Mexican governments have been accused of covering up the military’s involvement in the atrocity.]
Katz: “Ayotzinapa has become a calling card of how the state is broken. It’s a symbol that we live in a country where the system belongs to the bad guys — and that has been the defining moment.
“You have activists, including the families of people who have disappeared, who are still waiting, who every day are looking for their dead.”